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Oct 22
2009
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I still had a bowlful of sloes standing in the kitchen, and since there is only so much sloe gin you can make (or drink), have looked around for another recipe using the hard little fruits.
Pamela Michael's Edible Wild Plants & Herbs, is the ideal book for this sort of thing as it goes into great detail about the many uses of various wild plants.
One concern with using sloes to make preserves is how to deal with the stones, having had several messy experiences picking plum stones out of stewed plums I wasn't keen to repeat this with the smaller sloe stones. The basis of this jam is a pulp of apples and sloes, which means you conveniently sieve out the troublesome stones.
A word of warning, this is one time that apron hanging behind the kitchen door really should be worn as sloe juice makes a good indelible ink if you ever need to write your name inside your clothes.
See here for the sloe and apple jam recipe.
Recipe Costs
£2.75 500g sloes (equivalent cost on ebay, mine were free)
£1.34 1kg cooking apples (equivalent cost, mine were free)
£ 1.40 1.5kg granulated sugar
£5.49 Total (£1.40 without buying the sloes and apples )
£2.74 per kg of jam(£0.70 per kg without buying the sloes and apples- 10% of the cost of equivalent at qualitypreserves.com)
The fruit is very quick to prepare as the apples are chopped roughly leaving the skin and core to add to the flavour. After 20 minutes of simmering the pulp is ready to be sieved.
This is the messy bit, I ended up forcing the remainder of the fruit through a colander with my hands in an attempt to extract as much pulp as possible. This took a surprising amount of time, partly as care needs to be taken when dealing with quantities of hot fruit pulp.
The resulting pulp was returned to the preserving pan..
..and sugar added..
..resulting in a rich dark jam a few minutes later.
Recipe Timings
15 mins preparation
30 mins simmering
30 mins pulping
15 mins boiling
15 mins potting
Taste Test
This jam still has a slight bitterness from the sloes, but has a nice smooth texture.
Comments (6)
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Glad to hear it..
I'm glad the recipe worked for you, I've just looked at your blog post and liked the idea about the tea infuser!
Removing stones is always a pain, and I hate having to pick them all out of hot jam. When making damson jam I've removed the stones beforehand by heating them I the oven. I've written a post about it here:
http://www.pickleandpreserve.c...msons.html.
I can't see why it wouldn't work with sloes.
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Apples
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Cooking Apples / Eating Apples
Cooking apples tend to break down quicker than eating apples and also contain more pectin, which helps the jam set.
I'd avoid using eaters if possible, but in this recipe you could use them, but stew them first before adding the sloes and water. Then continue to cook for another 20 minutes.
Also try adding a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice at the same time as this will help extract more pectin from the fruit.
Hope that helps.
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have just bottled sloe gin.anything i can do with left over sloe berries? maybe make jam?
li
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Left over sloes
I've not actually tried any of these ideas, but will do in the future..
Sloe port & sloe chocolate http://www.permaculture.co.uk/...-chocolate
Sloe sherry http://www.cottagesmallholder....recipe-104
Sloe flapjacks http://www.genre.fsnet.co.uk/k...index.html
Let me know if you try any of them!
Ben
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