Blackberry Picking and Blackberry Jam

Well, since I am NOT packing up and driving to Edmonton to start another semester of school this fall, I have time to do what I have wistfully thought of each year, the past three years, at the end of August– go pick blackberries.

I have been picking twice the past few days: once last Saturday. I picked enough for making jam, making Bill Granger’s coconut-blackberry bars, and freezing two litre bags full of berries. I also scraped up my hands and arms quite badly. After a couple of days to heal, I went back again this afternoon and picked again, more for the freezer, and enough to make more jam tomorrow.

We would have made jam today, except that we canned dill and garlic cucumber pickles today, and made mango chutney (my great-great Aunt Nora’s recipe, really good). So it was too much canning for one day. But I am really looking forward to making more blackberry jam tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, as I walked around the neighborhood, all the blackberry flowers were out. You could tell summer was moving on because instead of smelling lilacs, or virburnums, or roses, you could smell hot sun baking blackberry, fir, and cedar scents out of the earth. –If I haven’t mentioned it before, the Pacific Northwest frequently smells like heaven, but that’s an aside. Now I am picking blackberries that are sagging off the brambles, looking like they are going to burst with purple-black juice, and batting away wasps who are eager to get their scaly selves in on the sugar produced by this fruit.

I feel sorry for anyone whose only contact with blackberries is through the ridiculously overpriced, sour little bullets you can buy at the grocery store. Ripe blackberries are soft, with a winelike smell and a distinctive taste that only develops when they are completely ripe. But of course, when they are completely ripe they crush easily and drip juice. They are not transportable at all, which is why you can’t get really ripe fruit at the store. Oh, and the taste can be refrigerated out of them, too.

Anyway, enough of that. Here is the recipe we are using for blackberry jam.

Blackberry Jam

9 cups of ripe berries

6 cups of sugar

1 cooking apple, peeled, cored, and grated (to provide the pectin, or setting agent, the berries lack)

Put everything in a large (very large) pot. Like a stockpot. Mix it together and leave it to sit for a few minutes until the berries produce juice. You want the juice, to make sure the berries don’t burn on the bottom of the pot. Bring to the boil on the stove on high, then turn down to medium high and watch. Don’t stir too often, as this causes the jam to lose heat, and you want to build as much heat as you can in the jam. You’re looking to get the jam up to 220 Farenheit, if you have a thermometer. After it comes to the boil, scum will develop on the surface. Skim the scum off and get rid of it. In a while the jam will start to look “jammy” around the edges of the pot and not watery. At this point, if you don’t have a thermometer, do a jam test: take a very cold cold plate (put one in the freezer when you start the jam) and drop a teaspoonful on the plate. Wait a moment. Then push your finger into it. If the the jam holds the mark of your finger, then the jam is done, and you are ready to seal it into sterilized jars. Another jam test is to hold a large spoon horizontal to the pot, after dipping it into the jam, and watching to see if you get strands starting to form as the jam drips off. Be careful at this stage not to let the jam catch and burn on the bottom of the pan. You need to stir it occasionally, but not much so you don’t lose heat. Once the jam is ready, take of the heat and stir for a couple of minutes to make sure the berry pieces still intact stay evenly distributed through the jam.

I’m not going to explain about how to can– an excellent resource on how to can all kinds of foods is the cookbook “Joy of Cooking”. Please do not be tempted to use an artificial setting agent. There is no need for it, since the apple provides all the natural pectin necessary. This apple means that the jam has a firm set, like American jam, rather than the runny set the French jams have.

If you have never been blackberrying yourself and want to try it out, here are some helpful tips:

1. Abandon your fashion sense. Dress to cover as much of yourself as you possibly can as protection against the brambles, which have very large thorns. Be resigned to coming home liberally spattered with purple juice, stained hands, and large scratches.

2. Always pick higher than a dog can pee. I was given this advice as a child and have never regretted following it.

3. Make sure your blackberry patch is not on a highway or busy road. The fruit will pick up poisons from car fumes that make the fruit tasteless and unpleasant, and, incidentally, unhealthy for you.

4. Take a bent wire hanger or a cane for hauling down the hard to reach brambles. The most tempting berries are always the ones that are just out of reach (in this, as in life).

I’m sorry, but there are no pictures of the blackberry jam. Jam sitting in a Mason jar isn’t that interesting. And I didn’t take any pictures while jam making, because, frankly, taking pictures while jam making is a sure way to get a really nasty burn. If you live somewhere that you can pick ripe berries and you are able to make jam I really encourage you to do so. In three days we have already finished one jar of this jam. It is really quite amazingly good.

Educational moment: Did you know that the blackberries we see growing in empty lots and alongside roads are actually an European import? It’s the Himalayan blackberry. There is an indigenous wild blackberry (indigenous to North America, I mean) but I have not yet encountered it. My sister has though and she says the berries are wonderful.