question about making jam

July 7, 2015 8:20 AM

I don't have the equipment to make a hot water bath (specifically, I have nothing to pick up the hot jars with). Can I just skip it if I am planning on eating the jam in the next two months anyway?

I have never made jam, but my boyfriend's dad had a bumper crop of redcurrants this year, so I'm thinking about making redcurrant jam, because we got handed a pound of berries (maybe 2) on Sunday. But I don't have anything that I can use to pick up the jars from the hot water bath, and I don't really want to buy extra stuff if I don't have to.

So, can I skip the hot water bath if I am planning on eating the jam in the next two months? Will the jam go bad in that amount of time? And if I can't skip it, what sort of stores sell jam-jar-picker-up-thingies?

posted by colfax to Home & Garden (39 answers total)

If you want to store it at room temperature, you'll want to properly can it. You can just freeze it instead, though.
posted by okayokayigive at 8:22 AM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

You can make freezer jam. There are a ton of recipes out there, but the idea is that you make a jam and freeze everything you won't use in a month. You can take out new jars from the freezer and keep them in the fridge for around a month. Super easy, works fine.
posted by advicepig at 8:23 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Do you have room in your freezer? You don't have to sterilize if you're going to put it in the freezer (just note that some jars are freezer-safe and some aren't, but my mother just lets hers cool and puts it up in Gladware for freezer jam).

Places I have seen canning tongs in the past month: most of my regular grocery stores (ie not Trader Joe's, Costco etc), and at least 2 hardware stores (Lowes and Orchard Supply - Lowes only had the Ball Starter Kit, which is the tongs, funnel, magnetic lid grabber/air reliever, and the silicone lifter for the pot). Target seems to put them out and take them away again randomly. Walmart always has them.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:24 AM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Do you have plain old metal tongs? I think I used those once and it was fine. However, totally agrees with the freezer jam suggestion.
posted by chocotaco at 8:24 AM on July 7, 2015 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Please forgive me if this sounds like I'm making fun of you, because I swear I am not, but do you not have a pair of regular old kitchen tongs? Because if you do, just wrap some rubber bands around the ends and you've got your tool. That's what I do, and I make jam twice a year.

BUT! If you don't have tongs, freezer jam is totally doable, and you absolutely can do everything up until the hot water bath and just stick the jars in the fridge after they've cooled off and you'll be fine to eat the jam in the next two months.
posted by cooker girl at 8:26 AM on July 7, 2015 [4 favorites]

You don't have to use a freezer jam recipe in order to freeze jam -- just make whatever recipe you like and freeze. NOTE: You do need to use straight-sided jars and underfill a bit, otherwise the jars may crack when the frozen jam expands. Or use plastic straight-sided containers designed for regular food storage, which I've done before with no issues.

If you do decide you want to try processing, Wal-Mart and Target and hardware stores usually have intro-level canning packs for around $10-20 or so this time of year. Make sure you don't let jars rest directly on the bottom of the hot water bath (they can crack -- a small cooling rack works to keep them elevated, or the plastic basket they sell in canning kits) and make sure you use new lids (as previously-used ones are not re-usable for canning).
posted by pie ninja at 8:28 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, and it may also be worth pointing out that a pound or two of redcurrants will not make a huge volume of jam. I think I got a little under two pints last year from a similar weight of red currants (to be fair I was making jelly, but making jam instead would not have increased the yield that much). It would have easily fit in the fridge and freezer.

David Lebowitz's recipe suggests a yield of 24 ounces per pound of berries which would be somewhere around 2-3 pints depending on how many berries you have.
posted by pie ninja at 8:35 AM on July 7, 2015

Response by poster: Getting a pair of kitchen tongs sounds like a good idea, since they're less specialized. I'm living with my boyfriend, and all of our kitchen equipment is from his bachelor days (my stuff is currently stored far away). So we have several different complicated contraptions related to making mixed drinks, but there are some gaps in the normal kitchen stuff...
posted by colfax at 8:37 AM on July 7, 2015 [3 favorites]

I use silicon kitchen tongs to do my canning. I do canning only sporadically/small scale (maybe 2x per year, batches of around 8 small jars) and it works fine. I just avoid trying to carry the jars far distances using the kitchen tongs.
posted by urbanlenny at 8:41 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

What do you use to get a hot dish out of the oven? Use that. For me it's generally tea towels, and they get wet and covered in jam so I end up using all of them and sometimes moving on to random towels. But I don't get burnt (and I usually get burnt doing everything in the kitchen, seriously, so many finger scars). Whereas using tongs has a weird habit of sending hot water gushing up my sleeve as the jar tips up unexpectedly.

You can also do a dry steralise in a hot hot oven, but look up the details because you want to get it right. And then you still need whatever you would normally use for getting hot things out of the oven.

But no, you can't skip the jar-boiling step but also no, you don't need to buy anything special for it.
posted by shelleycat at 8:43 AM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I made jam last weekend and just used a pair of tongs and a rubber ended spatula to lift jars in and out of the hot water bath. It takes a bit of practice, but I too am leery of buying single-use items for the kitchen.
posted by Elly Vortex at 8:44 AM on July 7, 2015

(I wouldn't use the dry steralise system for anything stored longer term, but I've used it for short term thing, so for two months should OK as long as you get the time and temperature right and actually eat all the jam)
posted by shelleycat at 8:45 AM on July 7, 2015

We always dry-sterilise our jars in the oven, after washing them thoroughly. You only need a cloth to take them out. It's just as good as boiling in my experience, and we have jam that's been fine after a couple of years. 130°C/ 275°F is the right temperature.
posted by pipeski at 8:50 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Regular tongs are fine. Put a dish towel in the bottom of the pot (under the jars in the water) instead of a canning rack.

Or yes,
Freeze it!
posted by amaire at 8:51 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Seconding that you don't have to sterilize the jars in boiling water: 20 mins at 200 in the oven is all we have ever done and we've never had a batch go off. Also, we put the lids in a bowl of boiling water and only fish out just before use, as you can't bake them.

If you're referring to a water bath after canning: as long as you've properly sterilized the jars, this step is unnecessary.
posted by Specklet at 8:59 AM on July 7, 2015

My mother always stood her jars upside down in a pan containing perhaps four inches of boiling water and used oven mitts to pick up the jars and move them to the counter, and I do the same.
posted by orange swan at 9:06 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Seconding oven sterilizing.

I've made a lot of jam, and don't always water bath after filling the jars, especially if jam will be eaten in short order. For longer storage, I've taken to processing the filled jars in the oven, which is, I know, somewhat controversial, but has always worked fine for me.
posted by MeghanC at 9:09 AM on July 7, 2015

Best answer: Here's the USDA site on home canning - lots of useful information about what's safe and how. I've made jam and just kept it in the fridge if I was going to use it within 2 months. If you want to store it longer or gift it you should process it but lots of ways to fish stuff out of a water bath.
posted by leslies at 9:09 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: My mother always stood her jars upside down in a pan containing perhaps four inches of boiling water and used oven mitts to pick up the jars and move them to the counter, and I do the same.

Actually this is a good point, the steam is hotter than water and better at sterilising. So your jars don't have to by fully submerged. I put mine on their sides with the water to about half way, then give them a poke with a spoon or something to spin them (for good luck really), then leave them to boil. Then, when they're ready, I pull them out with a tea towel or tongs or fork or whatever I have around. This is why you don't need fancy equipment, you're not fishing jars out of deep hot water, you just need to grab them fast enough so you're not be cooked by the steam. Just make sure that anything that ends up touching inside or around the lip of the jar is also sterile, no point putting dirty fingers in there after it was clean.

I think that part for why I've been warned off dry sterilising a bit is that ovens can have hot and cold spots, so you need to be really sure every jar really is getting hot enough for long enough. I have had ovens I wouldn't trust at all and ovens that would be totally fine, so keep that in mind if you do go that way.
posted by shelleycat at 9:17 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

You do not need to sterilize the jars beforehand if the processing time is at least ten minutes (which should be fine for any jam).

Afterward, use potholders or just wait until the water is cool enough to remove (again, extra processing time shouldn't affect how the jam turns out).

That said, a pound of fruit is not very much, certainly not more than a jar or two. You don't really need to can at all if you are going to keep it in the fridge and use within the next few months.
posted by veery at 9:25 AM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I've made a lot of jam, and don't always water bath after filling the jars, especially if jam will be eaten in short order. For longer storage, I've taken to processing the filled jars in the oven, which is, I know, somewhat controversial, but has always worked fine for me.

If your jars are sterile and your lids are sterile and your jam is freshly cooked (and therefore sterile) and you didn't put anything dirty in to the jars or into the jam while bottling it and the lid seals as it should, then you're done. There is no more processing necessary. So I do not understand this talk of water baths or oven cooking of filled jars at all.

I know it used to be a thing to cook the fruit in the jar or can in the oven rather than boil it first then bottle it with everything sterile, but that's a different thing and also a pathway to potential botulism. This is why I said not to skip the sterilising step, that's accepted and settled food science by now.
posted by shelleycat at 9:26 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Here's a secondary question: is the point of putting the jam-filled jars in a hot water bath just to seal them better?
posted by colfax at 9:29 AM on July 7, 2015

Regular tongs work great, but specialized can tongs aren't even really that expensive…they cost as much as like, two cans of jam at the grocery store. I'm sure your local thrift store has like, eight or nine of them for sale…probably for far less than amazon does. I think I picked my last pair up for a couple bucks?

Here's a secondary question: is the point of putting the jam-filled jars in a hot water bath just to seal them better?

Yes and no. Its primary purpose is to heat them, and the air inside the jars up enough to kill all the nasties. A hermetic seal forming is quite the bonus to this process, and a proper hermetic seal does not really form without heat.

Canning isn't something to mess around with. You should read up on safe canning practices at your local extension office. Mine is here at OSU, and I find it a bit better than some other states. They have an extensive guide to safe canning and food preservation practices.

Don't fuck around with this stuff. Botulism is nasty, nasty stuff and very easily avoided.
posted by furnace.heart at 9:39 AM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: *pulls up chair and sits down*

I'll start with your second question - yes, the hot water bath is meant to seal them better; or, rather, it's meant to seal them so they are shelf-stable. The way it works is: okay, you know how the jar on a canning lid is in two parts, right? The flat bit and the ring bit? When you give it the hot water bath, what's happening is that you're driving any remaining air out of the jar, which slips out between the crack between the flat bit and the ring bit. And when it cools down, that makes a vacuum seal, which makes it safe to put the jar on your shelf or whatever. The extra heat also helps kill off any microbes which may be lingering as well.

If you're going to be eating it within two months and you don't mind keeping it in the freezer or even just in the fridge, that's totally fine - just make the jam, pour it into a freezer container if you're freezing it or a plain old jar if you're keeping it in the fridge, and then just stick it in the freezer or fridge and you're done. You HAVE to keep it in the freezer or fridge, though; treat it like it's a jar you've already opened, the way you do with the "refrigerate after opening" stuff you get.

If you want to go the full monty, though, the specialized can-lifter tongs are cheap, but I've also just used regular plain tongs and been just fine. Another tip: one canning book I have suggests leaving things in the pot of hot water for another five minutes or so after you've finished the hot water bath (meaning: if it says to process them in a hot water bath for 20 minutes, you let that happen, then turn the stove off but leave everything sitting there for another five minutes). That tends to make the fishing-jars-out-of-the-water process a tiny bit more manageable for me.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:49 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: You don't need to process the jam in boiling water if you are just going to store it in the fridge, as you would any other open jar of jam, and eat it within a reasonable time frame (i.e. before it goes moldy, probably significantly longer than a month). Just make the jam, pour it in the jars, allow to cool, and put them straight in the fridge. The higher the sugar content of your jam recipe, the longer the jam will last in the fridge. Canning would be too much bother for a pound or two of fruit anyways. If you want, put all but one jar in the freezer.
posted by ssg at 9:51 AM on July 7, 2015

To address another of your questions, you can use any pot that allows two to three inches above your jars. So, if you are filling 4oz or 8oz jars, most regular 6 quart soup pots will work. You don't need a bigger pot unless you're doing quart jars.

Otherwise, please don't skip any steps: "I do it and I've never had a problem" is not sufficient evidence to be sure it won't happen to you.
posted by epanalepsis at 10:29 AM on July 7, 2015 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Echoing the other folks - fruit cooks down quite a bit, so a couple of pounds of redcurrants may not make as much jam as you think.

You can buy the jar-grabbing-tongs anyplace that sells canning supplies. Around here, that means places like Wal-Mart, Tractor Supply Company, the local feed/seed co-ops, and the local-ish hardware stores (think Ace and True Value, not Home Depot or Lowes). Publix carries jars, rings, lids, pectin, and pickling mixes, but I'm not sure if they have the tongs (or funnel, which can also be super-useful).

We can 3-4 times a year around here and have done pickles, blueberry preserves, strawberry jam, orange marmalade, spiced peaches, apple butter and pear butter. Basically whatever's in season, cheaply available, or in abundance via the garden. Here's a tip: you can sometimes buy inexpensive "Grade B" fruit in bulk through CSAs or buying co-ops. They'll be blemished, a little bruised or misshapen, but who cares if it's all going into preserves? We've done this with stone fruit and apples in the past.
posted by jquinby at 10:44 AM on July 7, 2015

Seconding oven sterilizing.

This will sterilize the jars but won't work for sealing them after they're filled, so it's not really a complete answer.

If you put them directly in the fridge you're probably fine. However, as others have said, you can totally just use regular tongs (try to pick the jars up by the rings, though, rather than the hot glass, if you do that) and a regular, if tall, pot.

FWIW I regularly make jam with 1kg of fruit—a little more than 2lb—and end up filling, on average, five 8oz jars.
posted by kenko at 10:53 AM on July 7, 2015

Best answer: > Here's a secondary question: is the point of putting the jam-filled jars in a hot water bath just to seal them better?

Basically, yes. Which translates to storage at room temperature without the contents going moldy or spoiled.

You can use tongs or whatever to pick up jars out of the hot water. You really don't need any specialized equipment to can in small amounts like this, except for proper canning jars with lids and rings.

Though, I gotta say that the $12 for a canning tool set like this is worth it for the jar lifter and the funnel, which is a godsend for avoiding mess and aggravation. You can find this in any kitchen store -- or, at this time of year, probably at your local grocery store, as well as places like Target.
posted by desuetude at 11:03 AM on July 7, 2015

Random ad hoc idea: Securely tie a piece of twine around the neck of the jar after you've put the lid and ring on. Let the end of the twine hang over the side of the pot like the string on a tea bag. Use the twine to carefully lift out the jar when it's done.
posted by contemporarySlob at 11:10 AM on July 7, 2015

But, to answer your question more simply:

- Make your jam. Stick it in the refrigerator. Freeze anything you're not going to eat within a couple of weeks.
- If you want to water-bath can it, it's NBD to do safely and doesn't require special kitchen equipment.
- If you like this food-preserving thing, there are a couple of basic tools that are totally worth it for ease of use.
posted by desuetude at 11:16 AM on July 7, 2015

I'm surprised by all of the answers saying that you need to water bath. If you are pouring hot/boiling jam into sterilised jars, you do not need to 'can' them afterwards. A perfect seal will form as it cools.

To sterilise the jars, either run them through the dishwasher or pop them in the oven.

I repeat, you absolutely do not need to 'can' jars of jam.
posted by Youremyworld at 5:57 PM on July 7, 2015

Best answer: Seconding shellycat and Youremyworld. Canning is absolutely not necessary if you're working with sterilised jars and boiling jam. I state this with absolute certainty (with a chef's degree and as a cookbook author).

This might be a culturally defined USA thing? I had never even heard of canning jam until this thread.
posted by lioness at 12:00 AM on July 8, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks so much for your answers everyone! I really appreciate it. No one in my family knows anything about these sorts of things, so it's a relief to have MeFi as a resource.

And actually, it's good to hear that I probably won't be able to make a whole lot of jam with these redcurrants, because my thought process here was basically, "What on god's green earth am I going to do with several pounds of redcurrants? I don't even like them that much, and my boyfriend can only eat so many before they go bad. Maybe I can try making jam?"
posted by colfax at 1:01 AM on July 8, 2015

Best answer: This might be a culturally defined USA thing? I had never even heard of canning jam until this thread.

I guess it must be a US thing, but I wouldn't call it culturally defined. Every bible of preserving we have requires processing, usually 5 or 10 minutes, adjusted for altitude.

USDA's home canning guide: Equipment and Methods Not Recommended
Open-kettle canning and the processing of freshly filled jars in conventional ovens, microwave ovens, and dishwashers are not recommended, because these practices do not prevent all risks of spoilage. Steam canners are not recommended because processing times for use with current models have not been adequately researched. Because steam canners do not heat foods in the same manner as boiling-water canners, their use with boiling-water process times may result in spoilage.

I believe "open kettle canning" is what you guys are talking about, with putting boiling jam in jars and sealing from the jam heat.

My mom and grandmother come from the old school of "only vetted recipes from a trusted source (Ball, county or university extension service), performed exactly to instructions" lest the processing time be off or the acid levels screwed up so c. botulinum can grow. But they also couldn't afford to throw out 20 jars of food if they screwed up. My mom now makes such small batches that she just freezes them instead of dealing with canning, but when she makes preserves for gifts or to send to me or basically for anybody but her and my dad to eat, they get canned.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:43 AM on July 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I'm surprised by all of the answers saying that you need to water bath. If you are pouring hot/boiling jam into sterilised jars, you do not need to 'can' them afterwards. A perfect seal will form as it cools.

Let me clarify things for the OP.

* The above is technically correct, in the sense that you can get your jars to seal to a shelf-stable state this way - sometimes.
* However - the safest way to do things is the water-bath method.

Lemme back up a little more and clarify yet again -If you are just going to put it in a jar and then leave it in the fridge, then you can just go ahead and do that and you don't need to worry about any of this. Or, if you are going to make jam and then freeze it, then you do not have to worry about this.

But if you want to make jam and then put it in a jar and stick that jar in the cupboard or the closet or something, then you need to worry about making the jar air tight enough to microbes do not get in and spoil your food.

Now - there are a bunch of ways that people have done this over the years. The kind of method youremyworld is talking about above, where you just pour the hot jam into a sterilized jar and just let it cool, is indeed one way. I also have used a method where you pour the jam in the jar, screw the lid on, and then turn it upside down and let it cool that way. Your grandma (or someone's grandma) may have also poured a layer of wax on top of the jam inside the jar before sealing it. People have also used steam canning (where you put the jars in a big closed pot and steam the crap out of them), or pressure canning, and then there's the water bath method we're talking about.

Now - is it possible to safely can your jars by just leaving them to cool down, or using the wax, or the steam canning? Yes - you can certainly find people who have safely done this. But - it's not as safe as the water-bath method. There are just more chances for things to go wrong with the other methods.

In a weird way, it's like contraception: you have super-effective contraceptive methods like the pill, but then you also have sort-of-effective contraceptive methods like "the guy pulls out right before he comes". You'll certainly be able to find examples of people who used the pull-out method and been just fine - but that doesn't mean it is equally as effective as the pill, right?

This is kind of the same thing; you may be able to get away with the letting-the-jar-sit-on-the-counter method, sure, but if you're gonna be putting any of those jars of jam on the counter, it's easy enough to water-bath can it, and it is much more effective at making sure you're doing it safely.

Again, though, since you're working with a small batch, you're also fine just pouring into a jar and leaving it in the fridge all the time, and ignoring all of this inside-baseball about sterilizing jars vs. water bath.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:51 AM on July 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Oh, and to completely stick the landing:

The reason why leaving it in the fridge is okay, and why you don't have to mess around with the sealing-the-jars thing if you're putting it in the fridge, is because the microbes you're trying to avoid can only survive in a relatively narrow temperature range. So the fridge would be too cold for them, so it doesn't matter.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:09 PM on July 8, 2015

Best answer: then you need to worry about making the jar air tight enough to microbes do not get in and spoil your food.

And this is not just about holding the lid down, though you certainly get a harder seal (hardly guaranteed "perfect" but certainly more so than using the cooling jam to seal) when you process in a waterbath. You're sterilizing the *contents* of the jar when you can, that's why the processing time varies depending on ingredient (and altitude), and that's why the preparation process of the empty jars is called pre-sterilizing and why the oven and dishwasher aren't considered sufficient unless you have a sterilizing dishwasher.

(You're also squeezing out most of the remaining air inside the jar, which is why headspace is important - if you don't leave enough, your vacuum will suck the hot contents up and then out of the seal, sometimes violently, which is one of the reasons you want to make sure you have enough water on top. If you leave too much, you've got too much potentially bacteria-feeding air in the jar.)

But. Most fruit preserves are acidic enough (below pH 4.6) to have very low botulinum risk, and pretty much every trusted-source recipe you find will use lemon juice or citric acid or vinegar as a failsafe, so you can blow off a bunch of food safety rules and still luck out most of the time, even storing at room temperature. And while botulinum colonies are invisible, mold isn't, and that's your biggest contamination risk for fruit preserves. It's generally pretty obvious.

(For any future searchers coming across this thread, the final note to monitoring the safety of your canned goods is this: if you are storing your preserves at room temperature, do not put the rings on your jar lids and do not stack jars or stack things on top of jars. Should one of your jars go feral on you, you want your lid dent to pop up and/or the entire lid to blow off, so that you know for sure not to eat it.)


In short, this is why everyone said "freezer jam."
posted by Lyn Never at 2:57 PM on July 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Hi everyone! I just wanted to post a quick update: I bought a pair of kitchen tongs, and they worked perfectly. The first batch I tried to make was way too sweet and didn't gel correctly. So I threw it out and tried again. I re-sterilized all my jars and made a second batch, and it ended up being really tasty! I ended up with two jars of jam and I stored them in the fridge because I didn't want to take any chances. I just finished the last one today, which made me think of you all. So I just wanted to say again: thank you so much for all of your advice! I'm really grateful for it!
posted by colfax at 1:02 AM on August 7, 2015