How to Make Homemade Jam Without Pectin

Here's how to make your own homemade jam
without having to use commercial pectin products

When I was raising my sons, we were on a very tight budget.

Grape jelly was about all we could afford. Although grape jelly is good, if that's the only type of jelly you're eating, you're bound to get tired of it rather quickly.

To give us more variety, I made homemade jam, which was actually a fruit-butter. I used marked-down, overly-ripe fruit such as plums and apricots. I was able to purchase the fruit at drastically reduced rates.

But I don't see stores doing this anymore.

Occasionally, there will be marked-down bananas that you can purchase for making banana bread or banana cake, but never the kind of fruit that would work well for jam or a nice fruit-butter.

What I did when hubby and I lived in Utah was turn to the neighbors with fruit trees who were begging for people to help them out by taking some of the fruit off their hands.

Depending on who was having a bumper crop in any given year, the type of jam I made might be apricots, plums, apples, or cherries. We also had our own pear and apple trees in the back yard.

I have always made homemade jams, whenever the fruit was made available to us, and then canned the jam in pint-sized jars using a pressure canner.

Store-purchased jams and jellys cannot compare to what you can do at home for yourself.

What is the Difference Between Jelly, Jam, and Fruit-Butter?

Jam can be made in a variety of ways.

Most people just call everything jelly or jam, but there are subtle differences between the various methods and finished product.

Jelly - Made from just the juice, with added sugar, jelly contains no pulp or peel and is quite firm, similar to chilled gelatin. It's a bit transparent and more difficult to spread, due to its firmness,  but the flavor is more intense than jams and butters.

My experience with making jelly is limited to pomegranate jelly. I blended up the seeds in the blender and then used several layers of cheesecloth to squeeze out the juice. Since pomegranate juice is red, it stained everything it touched, including my hands, so I have never made it again.

It tasted fabulous, though.

Jam - Made from crushing up the fruit, and adding sugar and lemon juice, jam is thick, but not as firm as jelly is. It's easier to spread. There are no pieces of fruit in jam, but it might contain seeds from berries.

Preserves - Similar to jam, but the fruit is not crushed as finely, so chunks are left in the finished product.

Conserves - Similar to jam or preserves, this type of jam comes with a few extra goodies, such as raisins, dried cranberries, nuts, and coconut.

Butter - Not really a butter, it's made by blending the entire fruit in the blender or processor. Sugar is added, and then it's cooked down until it's spreadable. A crockpot is often used to make the lengthy cooking process easier. Spices are also added to improve the flavor.

Our favorite butters are apple, pear, and pumpkin.

Marmalade - Made from citrus fruits, such as orange or lemon, the peel is added to the crushed fruit, along with sugar, to enhance the gel and the flavor.

What is Pectin?

Pectin comes naturally in produce, but is made commercially from citrus fruits. Available as a liquid or powder, these two types of products are not interchangeable, as they behave differently in recipes.

Pectin, when coupled with sugar, works to help fruits gel into jam or preserves.

A soluble fiber, pectin binds the cell walls of the fruit together, but it breaks down as fruit ripens, so getting it to work well in recipes means you need the fruit to be at a certain degree of ripeness.

Overly ripe fruit won't work very well, even when using commercial pectin products.

Pectin thickens and turn into a gel when cool, especially when heated along with cane sugar. Sugar works to increase the strength of the gel by attracting water away from the pectin, so it can stick together better.

Sugar also works as a preservative in jams and jelly, so they will last for a long time in just the refrigerator.

Lemon juice is often used in connection with pectin because its acid also helps to make the fruit turn into a gel.

My Cherry Jam Fiasco

Cherries are low in pectin, so you don't want to
use pectin in recipes if your fruit is overly ripe

One year, a neighbor asked if we wanted some sour cherries, so hubby helped me pick the fruit off the tree. The cherries were so ripe, they were falling all over the ground, so we came home with a huge batch.

I washed the cherries, pitted them with a small paring knife, separated them into recipe-sized zip-lock bags, and froze them.

For cherries, 6 cups of cherries will smash down into 4 cups of crushed fruit, the perfect size for a recipe of jam.

When offered, I generally take as much fruit as I have room to store, so this process actually took me several days to do.

Since I was planning on using the cherries for jam, cherry sauces, or pies throughout the year, I didn't care if the cherries got a bit wilted. I was going to freeze them anyway.

I decided to use the recipe that came in the box of pectin, but I couldn't get the jam to gel, no matter how long I cooked it. Not knowing about the problem with overly ripe fruit, I didn't want to keep adding more and more pectin, so I gave up and we used that first batch as syrup for gluten-free pancakes instead.

The next batch went better, because I made it just like I used to make jam, preserves, and butters when I was raising my kids.

To make jam without pectin, you don't have to use cherries. Cherries are actually very low in pectin, and since the cherries were overly ripe when I tried to make jam out of them, they had even less pectin, so the boxed variety didn't work at all.

There's probably a trick to using packaged pectin with overly ripe fruit, but I just gave it up. I don't see the usefulness since butter is as good as jam.

How Much Pectin is in Fruit?

You can use absolutely any type of fresh or frozen fruit to make jam, preserves, and butters. You can even use sweetened or unsweetened applesauce for a nice apple-butter. Canned pumpkin works amazingly well.

Traditionally, pectin was made from apple peels and cores, since sour cooking apples are high in pectin, but you can use any high-pectin containing fruit to boost the thickening of the final product:

High-Pectin Fruits 

Add high-pectin fruits and peels to lower pectin fruits
to help turn them into jam, preserves, or butter

Citrus fruits are especially high in pectin, but it is concentrated in the skin, so you'll want to use the peel of the following:

• oranges 
• tangerines 
• grapefruit
• lemons
• limes

Surprisingly, the pulp is low in pectin, but there are other fruits that can help:

• tart apples
• lemon juice or pulp
• cranberries
• boysenberries
• blackberries
• currants
• most types of plums

The above fruits are all high in natural pectin, so think about adding them to any of the following fruits:

Medium-Pectin Fruits

Medium-pectin fruits need the addition of lemon juice or commercial pectin:

• ripe apples
• very ripe blackberries
• grapefruit
• bottled grape juice
• grapes
• loquats
• kumquats
• oranges
• rhubard

Adding plenty of lemon juice or something from the high-pectin list will help to boost the thickening power of the above fruits.

Low-Pectin Fruits

These fruits need both lemon juice and commercial pectin to transform them into jams and preserves, but you can make butter by simmering them for an extended length of time, since butter is thinner than jam.

• apricots
• blueberries
• sweet or sour cherries
• figs
• pears
• raspberries
• strawberries
• pineapple (pectin only)

Since my cherries were overripe, I added both lemon juice and applesauce to the next batch, which did the trick for us. I was then able to just make a fresh batch from the frozen cherries whenever we needed more jam.

Very Low-Pectin Fruits

These fruits also take both lemon juice and commercial pectin to turn them into preserves and jam.

• nectarines
• peaches
• kiwi
• pomegranates

However, you can avoid the commercial pectin if you make peach-butter or mix the peaches and kiwi with higher pectin fruits.

I like to toss a 16-ounce can of applesauce into whatever type of jam I'm making to help boost the pectin. but homemade applesauce would work as well.

How to Make Your Own Jam Without Pectin

The nice thing about making your own jams, preserves, and butters is that you can spice them and sweetened them to your own taste.

Sour cherries obviously are going to take more sugar than other fruits, so the sugar content in homemade jam will vary.

Traditional jams are made with an equal proportion of fruit and sugar, but I read a featured article over at InfoBarrel on making jam with berries that said you only need 1/2 cup of sugar and 1-1/2 teaspoons of lemon juice for every cup of fruit to help with the jelling process.

So you can either start with 4 cups of sugar, taste it, and then add more if you need too, or start with 2 cups if you're dieting and want a low-sugar jam.

If you're using unsweetened applesauce, you may need a bit more sugar. The type of applesauce that comes in a can, however, is already sweetened.

The same goes for spices and flavorings. If you want a highly spiced jam, you're going to need more sugar.

For spices, you can use:

• cinnamon
• ginger
• cloves
• apple pie spices
• pumpkin pie spices
• extracts

Or mix-and-match the above spices to give you a really nice flavored jam. I hardly ever measure the spices. I just sprinkle them in to taste.

Concentrated frozen orange juice and a little grated orange or lemon peel would also be good and help with the thickening process.

Homemade Jam Without Pectin

Makes 3 pints

Ingredients:

• 4 cups of smashed, ground, or blended up fruit
• 4 to 6 cups of cane sugar
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 2 cups applesauce (16-ounce can)
• 1 tablespoon vanilla
• Assorted spices, as desired

Method:

In a very large soup pot combine all ingredients.

Bring the mixture to a boil over medium-high heat. The fruit should release its own juice as it heats. If it doesn't, you can add a little bit of water or fruit juice to get things moving.

Stir frequently so it doesn't burn and simmer the jam for about 30 minutes, stirring often, until it thickens nicely.

It's done when it mounds on your spoon.

You will know you are close when you have to start stirring it more often. When it starts popping and burning me, that's when I'm done.

It will continue to thicken more as it cools in the refrigerator.

How Long Will Homemade Jam Keep?

Homemade jam will keep in the refrigerator, unprocessed, for several months, especially if you use the higher amount of sugar. Sugar acts as a preservative in jam, as well as a catalyst for the pectin to spark the gelling process.

You don't have to go to the hassle of canning the jam if you don't want to.

However, if you have more jam than you think you are going to use within a few months, a pressure canner is the way to go.

Pressure Canner

(Available at Amazon)

Super simple to use, you just scald your jars, seals, and rings by running them through the dishwasher, fill your jars with your hot jam, and then let the pressure canner do the rest of the job.

Pint-Sized Canning Jars

(Available at Amazon)

When I was small, my mom use to seal our jam by pouring liquid wax over the top, but I wouldn't recommend doing it that way anymore because the wax didn't make a very tight seal and the jam used to leak out from beneath the wax.