Tomato and Passionfruit Jam

I mentioned before that I have an abundance of tomatoes this year, and after making a batch of the delectable tomato chutney a few weeks ago, I decided to try making some jam.

I found this recipe for tomato and passion fruit chutney, and it looked so simple and I gave it a bash.

The ingredients are:

1 kg tomato, peeled and chopped (10 med)
400 g green apples, peeled and chopped (2 large)
1/3 cup lemon juice
2 cups passion fruit pulp
1 kg sugar (4 cups)

And you make it like this:

1. Place the tomatoes in a large bowl of boiling water to get rid of the skins and chop roughly
Peel and chop the apples and place them with the chopped tomatoes in a large pot - Use a pretty big one..
2. Cook the tomatoes and apples over a simmering heat for about 25 minutes (mine took a bit longer) until the apple is soft.. they say "pulpy". Make sure you watch the pot and stir it often.
3. Stir in the passion fruit pulp, lemon juice (for me 1/3 of a cup was about 1 and a 1/2 lemon and I had about 16 fresh passion fruits and they only made about 1 1/2 cup of pulp) and sugar.
Stir all the time until the sugar has dissolved and bring to the boil.

NOW..

You need to watch your jam.. and baby it and be there for it.. and nurture it.. not like I did.. because before I knew it.. it had burnt (only ever so slightly) on the bottom of the pot..

4. The recipe says to boil the jam, uncovered until it jells when tested.. so basically when you put some HOT (careful !!) jam onto a porcelain plate, let it cool a bit and run your finger through it, the jam doesn't flow back to where your finger was.

5. You can now pour the hot jam into hot sterilised bottles and seal well. The recipe mentions that one can add some pectin if the jam won't set, but I didn't need to.

This jam is actually really yummy - even though mine burnt a teeny-weee bit. It has quite a sharp sweet-sour taste to it and goes down very well with Brie or Camembert and fresh bread or crackers. Yum!

To be very honest, I was so disgusted with the fact that I burnt the jam - even though it still tasted really good, that I didn't even bother to take another photo of it in the pretty jam jars I bought.. Maybe next time!



Tomato Chutney Recipe

I decided to try my hand at making preserves - something I have never done before! My organic vegetable garden has been completely overtaken by my tomato plants and as the weather has been much warmer after winter - my garden was filled with tomatoes.

I made some relish a few weeks ago - just a basic tomato and onion mixture which is perfect for pastas, but as you can see.. I have a LOT of tomatoes - about 5kg's so I decided to make some tomato chutney!

I found a recipe called Autumn Tomato Chutney on the BBC Good Food website, that looked easy enough for me to give it a try!

Ingredients:

1kg ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped
750g cooking apples, peeled, cored and chopped
375g light muscovado sugar
250g onions, chopped
250g raisins
1 green pepper, de-seeded and chopped
2 tsp salt
½ tsp ground ginger
350ml cider vinegar

I changed it a bit, because I had sooo many tomatoes, so I added another 1/2 of all the ingredients. The recipe is so simple - because you basically just need to chop chop chop everything and put it into a BIG pot. (I went through 3 smaller pots before I finally brought out the biggest one we have)

Peel, core and chop the apples and put them into a HUGE pot.
Chop the green peppers and onions - I used a hand chopper thingie, which was much quicker.
Peel and chop tomatoes and add everything into the pot.

I didn't have muscovado sugar so I used regular white sugar and I used apple cider vinegar.
Bring everything to the boil slowly then let it boil for about 45 minutes - but I let mine cook for just over an hour..

I had to mash the chutney with a masher because I cut the apples far to big - but it actually worked out perfectly because everything came together really well with the mashing.

And finally.. ta daa! I had enough for 8 x 350ml bottles that I bought at Helgas for R4,00 each, and let me tell you - this chutney is really very very good!