Messy and Picky

So I'm pretty crazy about figs. Fortunately, or unfortunately, Messy is not a big fan of raw figs. BUT, we've reached a common ground on fig jam. Now that stuff is just delicious and everyone agrees. I foraged for figs all over Philly (Center City, Queen Village, South Philly, Old City, West Philly) and I enlisted the help of friend, Philly's own canning expert and now newly married Marisa McClellan of FoodInJars.com. If you're unfamiliar with jarring/canning and want to learn more about it, I implore you to head on over to FoodInJars.com and take a good read, you'll thank me later (but probably not now as I'm about to show you the behind the scenes of making something that's currently just out of season).

I headed over to ForkYou HQ with just under 4 lbs of figs. Yeah, that's right – I foraged 4lbs of delicious brown figs right off the streets of The City of Brotherly Love. I probably ate a dozen or so between the foraging and the 2 days before I went over to Marisa's house to make the jam. Unfortunately, fig season is done. Kaput. Bye bye. Sure you may find some errant figs here and there, but the big production is over and it's just too cold and not sunny to make the delicious orbs. The agonizing wait until next September begins, but we'll have a few pints of fig jam to lessen the pain.

Step one (after marveling at the mound of freshly picked and rinsed figs before us) was to cut the figs into eighths. Each of us took a knife and a cutting board and went to work.

Into the big orange pot it went and half the weight of the figs in sugar was added to the mix. Marisa dove right into it with a wooden spoon, mixing over some good heat.

The juice of 1.5 lemons were squeezed in.

And then everything was brought up to a boil. You can see some of the figs already starting to come apart here with seeds lining the sides of the pot.

After a burner mishap, a roiling boil was achieved. At some point, Marisa added one packet of pectin gel. Why? Because it cuts down the time to make jam. And no, Marisa didn't do all the work; I chipped in too. She had me stir the pot o' figs at various points so that I could feel the difference in viscosity as the figs became jammy.

Half-pint jars were sanitized in the jarring pot to kill two birds with one stone.

Marisa got out her widemouth funnel and poured in the slurry. There was actually more jam than she anticipated!

The bottom of the pot.

I took home 5 half-pints of fig jam and Marisa kept 4 or 5 herself. In addition, she gave me a jar of pear butter and plum jam (at bottom right). We ripped through the first jar of fig jam in a week. One jar went to a locavore friend as a birthday present. Another will go to Messy's mom, another lover of all things fig. That leaves us 2 half-pints of delicious, sweet, homemade fig jam to bring us through to next September. They will obviously not last the whole way, but it'll make the wait that much less painful.

Thank you, Marisa for the private jarring lesson. It was pretty sweet to take in all that geeky information.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 9:41 am and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.