Blueberry, Blackberry & Grape Jam Recipe

I love combination jams because they are a great way to use fruit that you have (either fresh or frozen) but don’t have enough of anything to make a single fruit jam.  They also provide a wonderful range of flavours.  This jam recipe is courtesy of Chelsea sugar who make a great Jam Setting Sugar that allows you to make a quick and simple jam.  You can also easily scale the recipe up or down because you just use equal quantities of fruit and sugar.

Juice and peel of 1 lemon, large pieces of rind removed with peeler*
500g seedless black grapes
375g blackberries
125g blueberries
1 lemongrass, cut into 3cm lengths
1Kg Chelsea Jam Setting Sugar

Combine lemon rind and juice, grapes, blackberries, blueberries and lemon grass in a large heavy based saucepan. Bring to the boil and cook for 2 mins.

Add sugar stirring over a medium heat for 1 min or until sugar dissolves. Bring to the boil and boil rapidly for 4 mins (removing any foam with a tablespoon). Mash the grapes down as you stir so that they are not whole by the time you get to this stage.

Test a small amount of jam on a cold saucer (the surface should wrinkle when a spoon is pushed through it).  If surface doesn’t wrinkle when testing for ‘set’, return to boil for 2 minutes and repeat the test.

Ladle hot jam into warm sterilised jars and seal with a lid. Set aside to cool, then label, date and store in a cool dark place. Refrigerate after opening.

* this is presumably so that you can remove the pieces of rind and lemongrass later, but the recipe doesn’t indicate when you should do this.  It is easy to find and remove the lemongrass stalks but I only found one of the pieces of rind because the grape skins look similar once it is all boiled together.  Next time I will grate the lemon rind finely so that I can just leave it in there intentionally.