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2009 Apricot Harvest

{Update: For a printer-friendly version of the recipe, click here.}

My family was blessed with an abundance of apricots this year…again! I used to bottle apricots and make jam, but now I like to freeze them to keep them raw for smoothies and to eat later. I wash and halve them, lay them in gallon size bags in one layer, and then stack the bags in the freezer. Once frozen I sometimes combine bags, but they store better in a flat layer.

Since my family and I love apricot jam, I couldn’t help making an alternative to the super-sugary type I used to make. So, my husband and I came up with a new recipe and made 23 quarts of Apricot Jam made with Honey. (I won’t eat the refined sugar.) I think we may have overdone the amount, but we love apricot jam around our house, so we’ll see if it’s too much.

Apricot Honey Jam
42 cups crushed Apricots
6 cups Honey (add to taste, this amount makes a semi-tart jam)
7/8 cup Lemon Juice

Makes approx. 12 quarts of jam.

First we had to pick all the apricots. My next door neighbor’s tree wasn’t quite ripe enough, but a lady in my ward had 8 trees or so. Aurora and Lightning came and picked with me. We picked a bunch and brought them all home. I have to say that a wagon is a life saver when you have to transport heavy buckets/boxes back to the van!

When we were ready to make the jam, we sorted, washed, halved, and pitted the apricots. Apricots are really easy to open when they are ripe. Just put your finger in the natural split and it opens right up. My kids could help with that task. Of course we threw away all the pits. I’m not personally interested in sprouting and planting my own apricot trees when there are so many in my neighborhood whose fruit would go to waste.

Next we used my Vitamix blender to crush the apricots instead of using the hand-crank food grinder we used to use. We wrote down how much we put into the giant 32-quart stock pot since we’re making this recipe up based on other apricot recipes we’ve used. We added the lemon juice and honey (add to taste) and stirred it well.

We turned the heat on the stove and waited for it to boil, while stirring it frequently. Once it was boiling, we continued to stir it frequently for about 45 minutes while it thickened up a bit. If you don’t want to wait that long, just buy boxes of pectin to add. The no-sugar kind I have says 1 box per 6 cups of fruit. The reason why we boil it for so long is that apricots naturally have pectin in them, you just have to heat it long enough to thicken it. Just an FYI: the greener apricots have the most pectin, but the jam has less flavor if you use a lot of them.

Once the jam was thicker, we ladled it into hot jars, wiped off the tops, put a hot lid on, and tightened the ring (not too tight). Next we put them in the canner. I have a steam canner, but a water-bath canner works well too. Since I’m around 4300 ft above sea level, I steamed the bottles for 33 minutes, then removed them to the counter where they could sit for 24 hours and cool down. If you’d like to know how to adjust for altitude and processing time, here is a great resource! All of the jars sealed within the first couple of hours, although if they hadn’t after they were cool, I would have refrigerated them or re-processed them.

I could tell the jam wasn’t “set” yet, but I understand that it can take apricot jam 2 weeks to set completely. Also, since I didn’t add any additional pectin other than what was in the fruit itself, it likely won’t set like the store-bought jams. Actually, I don’t think I’ve had any of my jams set like store-bought jams, even when I used pectin, unless I used a ton of sugar in the recipe.

The batches of jam we did this year are not runny or super-sweet. So if you want a very sweet and completely set jam, you’ll need to add pectin and regular sugar instead of following my recipe above. There is great information and recipes on this site if you want to learn more about canning. Why reinvent the wheel, right?