Jammin' with Tomatoes

One of my stronger childhood memories is of visiting my paternal grandparents for the weekend, waking up earlier than mum and dad, going upstairs to where my grandparents were already up and about and being given a couple of pieces of bread with butter and tomato jam. Yummo.

Since we have a reasonable crop of tomatoes coming on at the moment I thought I’d turn some into tomato jam.

I did make tomato jam around 10 years ago but didn’t have the recipe accessible so went searching online…

All I’m after is tomato jam, but I found recipes for tomato and bacon jam¹, tomato and chilli jam, tomato and ginger jam, tomato and basil jam and just about everything else added to tomatoes. It seems that tomato and whatever jam can be used as a condiment for savoury meals, but I’m after jam to put on bread or toast.

I eventually did find a recipe that contains only tomatoes, sugar and lemon juice. Eureka! The recipe can be found here. It has a 1:1 ratio of tomatoes to sugar.

I wound back that sugar-to-fruit ratio a little (to around 75%) and eventually made a batch comprising:

• 850 grams tomatoes
• 650 grams white sugar
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice

I roughly chopped the tomatoes, left the skins on but removed the stem connection. Most of the tomatoes were ripe, a few were much riper, and a few were on the yellow-red end. I threw them into a pot with the sugar, mixed this and left it for around half an hour. I then added the lemon juice and placed it over a high to medium heat for around 30 minutes. My recommendation would be to use a saucepan with plenty of height because the mix does boil and rise up two or three times the height of the cold mixture.

To begin the mix foams up and you wonder if it will ever reduce and set. But it does. After something like 20 minutes (I didn’t time it) the mixture begins to look glossy and candied with strong, small bubbles on the surface instead of the foaming demon of earlier on. I think this is probably the point to remove and bottle the jam. I left mine to boil for another 10-or-so minutes and there were some slightly burnt bits on the bottom where it caught on the saucepan. When mine was bottled and set it was super thick so I’ll loosen it up with a couple of teaspoons of boiled water when each jar is opened. My quantities filled 2 and a half jars so the half is in the fridge and the two will be put away for a short time.

I have sampled the jam and it’s got good flavour and more than enough sweetness. It is too thick, but I will add a little water to each jar and mix when opened.