Sugar-free, pectin-free jam and 'oxymel'

And a few words about what we're not.

By Lisa Brunette

There are many things that I am not.

I’m not a star homesteader, with a gregarious gaggle of geese, a couple of adorable kids in dungarees, and Instagram-worthy fields of cows and wildflowers serving as my photo backdrops. I couldn’t even tell you what dungarees are, and I’m not even on Instagag. While I enjoy learning from those who truly live the rural life, I often find the models set by farm celebrities—not to mention all that envious acreage—as difficult for the average person to attain.

Nor am I an elite food writer with a pedigree from a fancy French cooking school and a gazillion followers from my years at the editing helm of fill-in-the-blank mainstream magazine. I couldn’t name a single cooking school, though I’m vaguely aware they exist in places like France and maybe New York. While I enjoy reading those publications, their ingredients and concerns often feel far removed from my own life, especially when they serve up a plate of what looks like a pile of foam next to a couple of twigs.

What I am is a woman obsessed. With food: What we’ve done to destroy it with overcomplexity and chemical substances and way too much processing. With plants: How they once served both our own needs and the needs of wildlife and pollinators and how we’ve managed to betray all that. With the future: I’m facing a time when fossil fuels slowly peter out, this stunning, beautiful globe reaches the limits of its carrying capacity, and we overshoot the mark, wildly.

Welcome to the slowpocalypse

I’ve also been a writer for 30 years. I’ve written about gardening and food before, including the history of a 100-year-old family dairy farm in Washington state, and a stint at the helm of Fishermen’s News, which covers the fleet that catches the wild fish you eat. I got to know the farmers and fishermen well through that work, and I understand their perspectives.

I now live in an inner-ring suburb town of a city whose glory days are far behind it. I cannot boast of vast acreage but merely a quarter-acre. Cows are not allowed here; neither are geese or ducks or goats. They cap our chicken allotment at six; our five were killed by predators this spring.

So when I tell you I’ve figured out how to make sugar-free, pectin-free jams from fruit and flowers, you should know it’s very personal for me. Food is a big deal.

And hopefully, you’re here because you can relate to that.

Like you, I’m gardening and preparing whole foods on the margins of a busy life. Up until this spring, when I had to lay off the whole team, I’d been running a small but successful boutique studio of writers who designed and wrote the stories in some of the app games you’ve likely played. Now I’m trying to figure out what’s next.

Losing the lucky frog

Like you, I’ve dealt with health issues. If I hadn’t been forced to when my body began to treat food like a foreign invader, I might not have radically changed my diet—and my way of life along with it.

Like you, I’ve long sensed that our modern society has sacrificed too much to convenience. I ache for a return to something simpler, less artificial, more time-tested. Over the past few years especially, I’ve grown both weary and leery of so-called experts and am driven to forge my own expertise.

This week, I’ll share what I’ve discovered about ditching both sugar and pectin in the making of jam and other canned products for long-term storage¹. While fresh fruit is wonderful, our ancestors in climates with true winters learned by necessity to preserve foods using honey, vinegar, and older canning techniques. I’ve been on a mission to recover these lost practices, and I’m excited to share them with you.

My secret across the recipes? Taking a cue from oxymels. Oxymels call for a blend of honey and vinegar for a taste that dances between sweet and sour in just the way I love. Last year, I made a huge batch of elderberry oxymel using the recipe in Kate Downham’s book, A Year in the Off-Grid Kitchen, which was the subject of our winter giveaway.

After I experimented with traditional British marmalade recipes, which do not call for commercial pectin, I got to thinking about sugar, too, and how to avoid it.

When jam's your jam, but recipes fail you

I remembered that our elderberry oxymel didn’t call for sugar. I’d also read up on the superior preservative qualities of honey, as it can last literally thousands of years and still be edible. Finally, vinegar itself is a fine preservative. My results? Fruit-flower-honey-vinegar combinations that can give you jam, sauce, chutney, or oxymel, depending on how you work with these ingredients.

On Thursday, I’ll tout two easy-to-grow plants: elderberries and gooseberries. I’ll also share two recipes, one free and one for paid subscribers. To kick off the process, the first is an elderflower oxymel. If you prefer your elderflower drink less tangy, you can skip the vinegar and use only honey, but I wouldn’t, especially if you like shrubs, which is essentially an oxymel made with sugar instead of honey.

The other recipe is a gooseberry-elderflower jam, and contrary to most other recipes out there, I’m not only not using commercial pectin, but I’m also skipping the sugar and leaving the petals in, as the flowers are fully edible and provide additional health benefits, so there’s no reason to filter them out.

On Saturday, the focus shifts to the easy-to-grow sand cherry, AKA Hansen’s bush cherry. I’ll share how to grow this shrub, along with a jam recipe with several variations for our paid subscribers.

A word about jelly: I haven’t mentioned it because as I understand it, the difference between jelly and jam is that the fruit matter gets filtered out in jelly. I don’t believe you can make a jelly without adding commercial pectin, as the fruit matter is where the pectin resides (for example, the white pith on citrus), but go ahead and tell me if I’m wrong.

Jelly is really not my thing, and I have a story about that.

I grew up in a large, lower-middle class family that was all grape jelly all the time—not even Smucker’s but whatever was the generic label. My parents thought dainty little jam jars were for rich snobs. While they might have laughed at the slam on American rubes in those 1980s Polaner All-Fruit commercials, the slam seemed only to reinforce their dislike of anything too fancy, as it was obviously directed at people like us.

During one college summer, I took an internship in DC and went to live with an activist friend who’d grown up wealthy. Her father owned a company that made toxic waste barrels, and that might have at least partially explained her decision to become an environmental activist, as I was in DC lobbying against defense funding after growing up as a military brat, both of us rebels with a cause.

I’ll never forget: We went shopping together for the first time, and out of habit, I reached for the economy-sized grape jelly. She stopped my hand, put that mega jar back on the shelf, and picked up… what else? Polaner All-Fruit.

It was delicious, I have to say. Life-changing. I’ve never gone back to jelly.

The chunkiness of jam is far more pleasing to my palate, and it’s healthier, too, as you’re getting the fiber in the fruit and the vitamins and minerals that inhabit the peel and pulp. It’s too bad my childhood was devoid of that kind of richness.

As is usually the case, the newer preservation methods are more needlessly complicated than the original ones they replaced. It’s actually easier not to filter out the fruit matter. And it’s easier not to put in commercial pectin and sugar, if you know how. I’ll teach you all that this week.

1. Please see our medical disclaimer.