Wild bilberry jam: dark, thick, with half the sugar
Jam from bilberries brought home from the forest: an hour in sugar with lemon, twenty minutes of hard boiling in a wide pot, the saucer test. Bilberries have little pectin of their own, so the jam sets more slowly than blackcurrant; lemon and a slightly longer boil sort it out without a setting packet. Four jars from a kilo, the colour almost black.
Your own work in that: 50 min.
- Berries releasing juice 60 min
- Cooking 25 min
- Jars 25 min
Step by step
0 / 6 donePick over the berries
Tip the berries onto a tray and pick them over: remove leaves, stems and crushed fruit. Rinse briefly in a sieve and drain. Don't soak them in water: they absorb it and the jam takes longer to boil down.
Ingredients: 1000 g wild bilberries · 500 g sugar · 1 pcs lemon, juice · 100 g jam sugar (3:1)
TipWild bilberries are small, dark all the way through and intense: they make the real bilberry jam. Cultivated blueberries are paler inside and milder; jam from them is good, but more pink than black.
No leaves, briefly rinsedCover with sugar
In a large bowl mix the berries with the sugar and lemon juice. Cover and leave an hour. The berries release juice and the sugar partly dissolves. Put a saucer in the freezer for the test.
Sugar, lemon, an hourBoil hard
Transfer to a wide pot and bring to the boil over high heat. Boil 20–25 minutes, stirring every few minutes and skimming the foam. A wide pot means fast evaporation, and berries low in pectin need that concentration. Careful: bilberry jam spits and stains everything purple.
TipLemon adds the acid without which even the pectin that is there won't set. Don't skip it, even if the berries taste tart.
A hard boil, foam skimmedThe saucer test
A drop on the cold saucer, 30 seconds, then a finger: if it wrinkles, it's ready. If after 25 minutes it still runs like syrup, stir in 100 g of 3:1 jam sugar, bring back to the boil, boil 3 minutes and test again.
Wrinkles: ready; runs: jam sugarInto jars
Pour the hot jam into scalded hot jars to 0.5 cm from the rim, wipe the threads and screw the lids on tightly. With only half a kilo of sugar per kilo of fruit, pasteurise the jars for 10 minutes in a pot of hot water reaching three-quarters of their height. Lift out, stand upside down for 10 minutes and turn upright.
Hot into hot, upside downStore
Pasteurised jars keep a year in a cool pantry. Keep an opened jar in the fridge for up to 3 weeks. For crepes, on buttered bread, in yogurt, with cheese pierogi.
Four jars of forest
Before you start
Whole-berry preserve
Boil only 10 minutes and stop: looser, with whole berries, for crepes and ice cream. Keep it in the fridge or pasteurise 15 minutes.
With vanilla
The seeds of half a vanilla pod in the pot: bilberries and vanilla smell like a pastry shop.
Too runny once cold
Pour back into the pot, add the juice of a second lemon and boil hard 5 minutes. Or keep it as a sauce and don't worry.