A New Experience Canning with Clear Jel

I promised to move on to vegetables, but some how jam keeps coming up.

Anyway, blogging has led me to decide that I am too much of a creature of habit. After I wrote the post about Clear Jel, I started thinking about the options available to me. On the one hand, I like the fact jam recipes that rely on the natural pectin in the fruit usually use less sugar then recipes that call for added pectin. On the other hand I definitely like the shorter cooking time of recipes with added pectin. In fact, I like the shorter cooking time so much, that I almost exclusively use those recipes.

I wrote that I had read that you can use clear jel in jam but that I had never tried it. It occurred to me that clear jel could represent the best of both worlds. Since it doesn't depend on sugar to set, you could have the low sugar recipe with short cooking time.


I got my favorite cherry jam recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. I cut the amount of sugar in half, stirred 7 tablespoons of clear jel in with the sugar, and ignored the pectin. I combined all of the ingredients, brought it to a boil, and started canning.

I had to try some to see how it turned out. I admit that I would have liked it to be thicker, but I can still work on figuring out the right amount of clear jel to get it thick. It did have the taste of fresh fruit (not fruit that had been cooked to death) and it wasn't over sweetened. My first attempt at canning jam with clear jel, has lead me to decide to try it some more.