Friday, March 23, 2012

Apricot and cardamom jam/ Wellington Jam-Off



The Great Wellington Jam-Off is being held on Sunday at the City Market.  I've seen a lot of comments coming through Facebook and Twitter about the Jam-Off and I'm happy to be a jam-petitor.  It is so hard to know which one jam to submit though.  I think that my best jam of the season is Blackberry and Apple - I got the recipe off the Jam-Off website though so thought it poor form to submit that! I really wanted to submit the Apple Butter I made last winter but thought that it wouldn't meet the definition of jam.

I had been wanting to make preserved apricots with cardamon for a while.  I figured a cardamon pod in every jar of preserved apricots would be delicious, making them a little bit more special when we came to open them in winter (if they lasted that long).  But then the jam-off came and I figured that it would make an equally delicious flavour of jam.

It is pretty good - so long as you are very economical with the cardamon.  I made a batch of apricot jam largely following the recipe in the Edmond's cookbook.  For that recipe (which makes ten jars from 2.75kgs of apricots) I added six cardamon pods.  I tied them into a muslin, along with the apricot kernels and removed after ten minutes of boiling.

The result is pretty good actually.  The star of the show is the apricot - quite an aggressively apricot flavour and the cardamon just adds a warmth to the apricot, almost a depth to the flavour rather than a change to it, that lingers long after the jam has been eaten!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

2 comments:

  1. I didn't know about the jam off, fun! And your jam sounds good, how do you use it? For toasts?

    I put my name with the followers too :-)

    Happy Weekend
    Alessandra

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