From Mes Confitures by Christine Ferber

Every so often, I’ll pick up this book and thumb through the pages, reading titles. Then I put it back on the shelf and go bake some cookies. Or a cake. I started feeling a little guilty about neglecting it, so when I ended up with a gallon of frozen huckleberries, I decided to give jam making another go with the idea that I’d follow the recipe exactly. Even if it meant using the full amount of sugar called for and cooking the bejeezus out of the fruit.

It was very hard pouring cup after cup of sugar into those berries. I might have cried a bit.

The recipe calls for 3 3/4 cup sugar to 2 1/4 pounds of berries, with the juice of one lemon thrown in. Then you cook the berries until they’ve thickened up enough to hold their shape when placed on a frozen plate. This took me about 40 minutes. Then I spooned the hot jam into jars and let them cool. Because I don’t process my preserves, I usually keep one jar in the fridge and freeze the rest.

The finished jam set beautifully (hooray!). It is a deep, deep reddish purple, nearly black, and quite chunky. The jam is very sweet, but the natural tartness of the huckleberries still comes through.

From Mes Confitures by Christine Ferber

It’s been a couple of months since I last tried my hand at preserves. The other day, as I was flipping through Mes Confitures, I came across this recipe and recalled seeing the huge Washington nectarines and pears that have just started hitting the stores. Nectarines are one of my favorite fruits, and I thought that pairing them with pears was interesting. Also, this recipe calls for vanilla beans. How could I go wrong?

The recipe starts out by  simmering nectarine and pear slices in sugar, along with two split vanilla beans. After a few minutes, the mixture is turned into a bowl and left in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, the fruit, vanilla beans and all the liquid is boiled for about 10 minutes. The vanilla beans are removed and the mixture continues to boil until it reaches the set point and is jarred.

Hurray for me! I actually got the jam to set correctly. I even used almost the full amount of sugar that the recipe called for (I think I used 3 1/2 cups instead of the 3 3/4 cups called for). Unfortunately, the jam is almost too sweet. It is a lovely pale orange color with little black specks from the vanilla beans. The nectarines and pears are lovely together and the vanilla flavor is wonderful. It is just sooooo sweet.

From Mes Confitures by Christine Ferber.

When I decided to move to north Idaho, my dad was really, really happy. At first I thought it was because he was happy for me. Then I found out that north Idaho is huckleberry central, and now, his visits seem to coincide with huckleberry season. I suspect I’m only the secondary attraction here.

So, I’ve had this bag of huckleberries in the freezer for almost a year, and I finally decided to do something with them. Enter Ferber and her darned book. The recipe is easy enough. You cook the berries with water until they soften, then you strain the juice. To the juice you add sugar and lemon juice and boil the stuff until it sets.

Yeah. Right. I boiled until the jelly passed the set test AND it reached the right temperature on the thermometer, but, once again, I ended up with huckleberry syrup instead of jelly. It’s good, it’s just a bit runny.

From Mes Confitures by Christine Ferber.

What does one do, when one buys waaayyyy too many strawberries at the local Costco? Well, after eating myself sick, I decided that now was as good a time as any to try one of the strawberry jams in Mes Confitures.

This was a two-day jam. On the first day, you let the strawberries macerate in the sugar. On the second day, you cook down the raspberries and strain them, cook the raspberry juice and the strawberry juice until concentrated, and then add in the strawberries and the vinegar and cook until set.

I scaled back on the sugar from 4 1/4 cups to 3 cups. That just seemed too excessive, and my berries were pretty sweet. I ended up not missing the extra sugar at all. Unlike previous jam/jelly making attempts, I actually cooked this jam until it set properly, even though my berries were mush by that time.

In the finished product, you can’t taste the vinegar. Instead, you get all the strawberry and raspberry flavor with just a bit of tang to it. Bryan was eating the jam by the spoonful, so I figure this one was a success.

From Mes Confitures by Christine Ferber.

Coming off the previous jam attempt (rhubarb, orange and apple) which was a little too sweet, I was still looking for a jam or jelly that might be on the tart side. I thought for sure, with both rhubarb and grapefruit as ingredients, this jelly was it.

I have a lot to learn.

The recipe starts off by cooking rhubarb and apples until soft, then straining the juice. The next day, this juice is cooked with sugar and grapefruit sections until set. My first problem was with the apples. Ferber doesn’t specify what kind of apples to use. Still stuck on my tarter-is-better mode, I used Granny Smith apples. My second problem was with the grapefruit. Ferber tells you to peel the grapefruit and section it, making sure to collect the juice. This confused me. I figured if I peeled the grapefruit, there wouldn’t be any juice to collect and the membranes on the grapefruit sections would be pretty tough to eat. So, I supremed the grapefruit instead.

On the second day, as I started to cook the juice with the grapefruit sections, I was feeling optimistic. Things quickly went downhill. The first thing you do is cook part of the juice, the grapefruit juice and the sugar until it reaches 230 degrees (Farenheit). Then you add the rest of the juice and the grapefruit sections and boil until set. Almost immediately, the grapefruit sections disintegrated. I continued to boil and boil. As I tested the set and tasted the jelly, it started to get an almost caramelly taste from cooking so long. Wanting to avoid this, I went ahead and jarred the jelly before it was completely set. Bad move. I now have rhubarb and grapefruit syrup.

And the taste? Well, it is still too sweet by itself, but the jelly has a sweet/tart taste that went well drizzled over toast. I can taste the carmelized sugar, but Bryan didn’t seem to mind it. In fact, he requested pancakes so he could use this jelly as a syrup.

From Mes Confitures by Christine Ferber.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been hearing about French Pastry Chef Christine Ferber and her preserves made from local ingredients. They are supposed to be out-of-this-world good, with unique flavor combinations.

Mes Confitures was originally published in French and then translated into English. Some of the directions are a bit vague, and sometimes you just have to guess at what the author meant. This ought to be interesting.

My plan with Mes Confitures is to try a recipe here or there while I’m concentrating on other cookbooks. I just can’t get excited about making batch after batch of jam or jelly, no matter how unique the flavor combinations may be. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t really like jams or jellies. I think it has something to do with losing the fresh fruit flavor. And I find many preserves to be far too sweet. Maybe this book will turn me around.

The first recipe I tried was a rhubarb, orange and apple jam. It starts off by poaching thin orange slices. Then you add rhubarb and apples. At first, I had a whole lot of fruit and not much liquid, but as the rhubarb broke down and the sugar melted, it started to look more like jam. Ferber’s instruction say to boil until the jam is set, which happens around 221 degrees (F). I boiled for almost an hour and didn’t get higher than about 210 degrees. I decided to go ahead and jar the jam, knowing that it would probably be pretty loose.

The finished product ain’t bad. You get a big hit of orange and apple flavor, but not much rhubarb. It is far too sweet for me on it’s own, but the sweetness is tempered by toast (or kamut biscuits in the above picture). I was really hoping that the rhubarb would give the jam a sour edge, but I guess 4 cups of sugar might make anything sweet. The texture, while loose, set up better than I thought it would. I didn’t bother to sterilize my jars but just kept them in the refrigerator.