The warm spring and early summer has meant that everything’s cropping madly in the garden a bit early.

So to get a match on jam making I’m making a batch of pectin from the wind for apples. If you’ve made jam before you will know that pectin helps soft fruit jam set. I’ve made it before and then forgot about it as we didn’t have any windfalls  from our two apples trees worth speaking of, so I bought commercial pectin. However, after we moved here with lots of fruit trees and seeing all the wind falls and the piles of blackcurrants and mulberries saying, “make me into jam”,  reminded me that I can make my own.  Hence there is a large pot smelling very ‘appley’ bubbling on the stove right now.

If you’ve never made your own pectin it’s very, very simple. You just chop up the little windfall apples into  chunks about two, two and a half centimeters size.  Core, peel, all goes in, then put them in a big saucepan and cover with water. Bring to the boil and simmer for about two hours, until mushy.  Then strain the whole lot through a muslin bag overnight or for about 6 hours. Give the muslin bag a good squeeze to get all the liquid out.

The liquid that you’ve strained out is the pectin and the apple pulp in the bag can be put in the compost bin. Return the pectin to the pan and reduce it until a bit thicker. There is a test with alcohol to check if it is strong enough, but I boil it with a little sugar and test the set as if it were jam and that has worked fine for me. I store the pectin in sterilised jam jars in the fridge and use within two or three weeks, but you can also freeze it, in which case it lasts about four to five months.

Just got to make all that jam now.