Our neighbours have had a really good crop of apricots this year and have been donating us their surplus in instalments. They also offered us their tried and tested apricot jam recipe. It is pretty much the standard a pound of sugar per pound of fruit recipe, but they were quite specific on how to process the kernels, and how many to use.

We love jam in our house. The children particularly love it. Thinking about it from a child’s point of view, what’s not to love? It’s fruit and sugar, probably their favourite ingredients in the world aside from chocolate. As it’s the summer holidays we decided to let a couple of little helpers stay up late to get a behind the scenes view of the jam making process.
We decided to use 3lb (1.4kg) of apricots for this first batch.

We used 3lb (1.4kg) of apricots for this recipe.

Ingredients:

3lb (1.4kg) Apricots
3lb (1.4kg) Sugar (our neighbour said preserving sugar, but we just used granulated)
1 pint (568ml) water for the jam, and a small amount to blanch the kernels in

Equipment:

Jam jars (recycled of course)
A preserving pan or large saucepan
A wooden spoon for stirring
Some saucers for testing the setting point
Some nutcrackers or a rolling pin for extracting the kernels
A ladle for transporting the jam to the jars

Method:

Firstly prepare the equipment. Make sure the jars are visibly clean and then sterilise them. This is traditionally done in the oven, but we were a little lazy and just used a sterilising solution. We have quite a supply of sterilising powder for our homebrewing. Place a few saucers in the fridge or freezer. These will be used later to check when the jam has reached the stage that it will set. Putting a teaspoon or so of the hot mixture on to a cold saucer will cause it to cool rapidly, allowing you to get an idea of the consistency.

Next prepare the kernels. Our neighbour’s advice was one kernel per pound of fruit, so we used three kernels. Halve three apricots and remove the stones. Crack each stone open and remove the kernel, which looks like something crossed between an almond and a hazelnut. We cracked the stones with nutcrackers, our neighbour said she uses a rolling pin.

An apricot kernel (left) extracted from its shell (right).

Place the kernels in a small container that can hold boiling water (a mug will do), and pour in enough boiling water to cover them. Leave for a minute and drain the water out. The husks should now come off of the kernels very easily. Remove the husks and put the kernels to one side.

After being blanched in hot water for a minute, the husks were easy to remove.

Halve the rest of the apricots, discarding the stones (unless you have another use for them of course). Place all of the halved apricots into a preserving pan/large saucepan along with the three kernels, and pour over the pint (568ml) of water. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until the fruit softens.

Pour the pint of water over the apricots and bring to the boil.

Boil the apricots until they soften.

Once the fruit is soft, add the sugar and bring to a rapid boil. Boil for about 10 minutes or so, stirring occasionally to ensure none sticks to the bottom of the pan. Test your mixture to see whether the setting point has been reached. Retrieve a saucer from your fridge/freezer, and put a drop of the hot jam onto it. Leave it for a minute to cool and then press the now cool jam on the saucer with your finger tip. If the jam crinkles then the jam is ready to be jarred. If not then keep boiling and testing every few minutes with a fresh cold saucer until the test is passed.

The mixture boiling after the addition of the sugar.

Once the setting point has been reached, spoon the jam into the jars and affix the lids. Leave to cool and enjoy. We’ve certainly enjoyed ours. And just like the veg we have grown ourselves, the jam is very popular with the children, more so than anything we could buy, as they’ve seen the effort that goes into it. So there it is, our neighbours’ apricot jam recipe, tried and tested by us for your (and our) enjoyment.

The final product (or at least a small sample of it) – homemade apricot jam.