Montmorency Cherry Jam

The Montmorency cherry is a pie, or tart cherry which has a distinctive rich flavor. It is a bit low on the tartness scale but it does still make a delicious pie and, as it turns out, a delicious jam. You might be able to find it in your local supermarket in the dried form if you would like to sample it before using it. Recommendation: if you are a black coffee drinker try placing a layer of dried cherries in your mug before pouring your coffee. It adds an interesting but not obtrusively sweet flavor to your coffee and when the coffee is gone you can continue enjoying the flavor by eating the left over cherries. The resultant rich coffee flavor added to the cherries is delightful.

For cooking, we buy our Montmorency cherries pitted and frozen through our local fruit farm which ships them in from Michigan. For those in the Indianapolis area the fruit farm we use is Tuttle Orchards.

Leftovers

Before you pour the drained off juice down the drain or throw away the excess chopped cherries or the cooked jam that won’t fit in a jar, consider saving it all to produce a wonderful cherry syrup. We do this after making pies, too. We add a little flour for thickness and some cane sugar to taste and perhaps some almond extract to brighten the flavor and then we refrigerate the mixture to use on vanilla ice cream. It is particularly good on ice cream that leans away from the sweet side. It might even work well on chocolate ice cream to produce that chocolate covered cherry effect.

Output

This recipe will produce four half pint jars of jam and so it is a recipe geared toward experimentation. Work with it and adjust it to your taste and then increase the batch size to make enough to last you for a while. After about ten days I am well into the second jar so I expect to need to make more soon. I will also be making larger batches at some point to offer at the Rush County farmers market to go with the bread that my wife will be making and selling there.

Ingredients

  • 2 cups raw cane sugar

  • 2 1/4 teaspoons Pomona Universal Pectin

  • 2 pints, after draining, of pitted cherries

  • 1 oz. freshly squeezed lemon juice

  • 3 teaspoons calcium water

  • 1 tablespoon almond extract

  • 1/4 teaspoon butter

Directions

  1. Combine the sugar and pectin in a bowl.

  2. Place the cherries in a food processor and pulse them about 10 times until they are coarsely chopped.

  3. Transfer 4 cups of the chopped cherries to a large, heavy bottomed pot.

  4. Add the lemon juice and almond extract.

  5. Bring to a simmer. Simmer and occasionally stir the mixture until the cherry pieces have softened; about 10 minutes.

  6. Stir the calcium water and the butter into the cherries and bring the mixture to a boil.

  7. Add the sugar and pectin mixture and return the mixture to a boil, stirring constantly. Boil hard for 1 minute.

  8. Remove the pot from the heat and skim any foam from the surface of the jam with a cold metal spoon.

  9. Keep the mixture stirred and ladle the jam into hot, sterilized jars.

  10. Process the jars in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.