Door County's Finest

My coworker, PK, came in today and set down a giant (seriously) tupperware on the lunch table.

Inner Voice: Cherries?

PK: My friend went to Door County this weekend and gave us a bunch of cherries.

Inner voice: Cherries!

PK: But they are not really good for eating...

Inner voice: Jam?

PK: they are really sour, not sweet like regular cherries.

Inner voice: Jam!!!

PK: I was wondering if you wanted to do anything with them, like make a pie or something.

Outer voice: I will bring you jam tomorrow!

After a quick consultation with the almighty Google, I found a man after my own heart. The link is David Lebovitz's non-recipe for cherry jam. I think I may follow his example of non-recipes, because frankly, I seldom really cook by them. Writing up the hummus I felt like I was focusing so much on trying to figure out how much of whatever I was using, I couldn't replicate my standard hummus because I was using too much of my engineer-brain and not enough of my food-brain. I'm thinking future posts will be more in the vein of knitting recipes, where the focus is getting the end product by trying on as you go and making any necessary alterations, than chemistry experiments, which tend to be explicit about the steps while strictly prohibiting putting things in your mouth.

Ingredients:
Bucket 'o Door County's Finest
Lemons
Sugar
Almond Extract

I started by pitting the roughly 10-12 cups of cherries , and then chopped them into bits, ending up with roughly 5-6 cups of this:



(I highly recommend putting your phone on hands free and catching up with your calls for this part. I also highly recommend a cherry pitter. It is a unitasker, but it does its job very, very well.)

To the cherry bits, I added the zest and juice of two lemons and then threw the whole mess into an enameled cast-iron pot, brought it slowly up to a simmer, and then cooked it, stirring, for about 25 minutes (in an un-air-conditioned apartment, in July, no less. This has been killing my desire to cook of late. A donkey cart full of cherries solves all of life's problems).

After everything was nice and soft, I measured out my cherry mush (in my case, 3 cups) and added 3/4 as much sugar as there was mush (which was 2 1/4 cups). Usually I don't put in nearly as much sugar as recommended because I don't like super-sweet jams, but these puppies were sour and two lemons sure didn't help. After stirring in the sugar, I put everything back on the heat, this time cranking it as high as it would go. I brought the now-rather-sticky goop back to boiling, stirring the whole time, and kept it going strong until it was jelling on the my frozen spoons (I put all of my tablespoons in my beer-mug in the freezer before starting this bit). After pulling everything off the heat, I added a tiny splash of almond extract, because cherries and almonds were meant to be together (now I want scones).



I canned two using a water bath, and the half-jar is in the fridge, silently willing me to make bread tomorrow.

I seem to have a tendency to over-thicken my jam. This doesn't bother me texturally, but I am somewhat disappointed to get 1 1/4 pints of jam from a metric arse-ton of cherries, awesome though that jam may be. I consulted my sister, and she recommended actually using pectin next time, or at least using my candy thermometer to make sure I'm not boiling past jelly, i.e. 220 deg. F.

In conclusion, JAM!!!