Recipe: Cherry Jam

It is cherry season! The branches of trees all throughout the village are sagging under the weight of their luscious, ruby fruits and kilo bags can be bought from at least one house on every street.
On saturday we spent the whole afternoon helping friends with re-landscaping their garden and I was lucky enough to get an hour or two away from the heavy labour to go cherry picking in their meadow. They have 3 big trees, all of which were absolutely covered! I was handed a 10L bucket and told not to come back until it was full and that I did.
I spent that evening coming up with a few cherry recipes that I was confident would use up most of the haul.
Today, we were doing yard work for Arjan's Oma and among our tasks? You guessed it. Cherry picking!
We filled another couple of tubs, one with dark sour cherries and another with a similar/same variety as those from Saturday. The sour cherries were so ripe that a few burst like water bombs when they were dropped in the tub.

Cherries on cherries on cherries!

Beautiful, dark, glossy sour cherries

Cheerful, ruby-red sweet cherries

 Determined not to waste any of these delicious morsels, Arjan and I dashed to the shop to grab some ingredients then headed straight back to Oma's to get cracking.

First on the list: Cherry Jam!

Having made strawberry jam a couple of months ago and been incredibly impressed with the results, I was excited to try this with the tart, juicy sour cherries. But first came the hard part, if only I'd known what a torturous job cherry pitting was....

This was a little less than half way through and already the stickiness was unbearable. 

We sterilised some jars by simmering them in a large pan of water for a while. We actually only needed 3 of these 440ml jars, the recipe said 4-5 400ml, so I would suggest you should expect to be at the lower end and be pleasantly surprised if you exceed that.

After macerating the kilo of  pitted cherries with 500g of pectin sugar, I brought it to the boil then simmered it for a little over 5 minutes (the recipe states 5 but these were especially juicy cherries so I wanted to get rid of a little more of the water. This bubbling pot of jammy goodness was the result.

I left it to cool slightly for 15 minutes before filling the jars. As I type said jars are sitting on the windowsill, lids slightly ajar, cooling completely. The urge to dive in is almost overwhelming, but I'm being good. I did sneak a taste when I was cleaning up afterwards and oh boy, I am looking forward to breakfast tomorrow! The jam is sweet, but not overly and has a wonderfully tart aftertaste that lifts the whole thing to a new level. With nothing but sugar and fruit, I can guarantee you that this will be the purest, freshest and fruitiest cherry jam you will ever have, so go on, try it!

Tomorrow we're back in the kitchen for more cherry madness, hint: one of the recipes is for adults only...