Homemade sugar free jam

Last year, during the first lockdown, the hubby and I were out in a local park picking blackberries when we met a lovely lady who pointed us to some hidden trees at the back of the park that were laden with greengages and damsons and told us that she'd just picked loads to make jam with.  

Now, I've never made jam and to be honest, hadn't eaten it for years because of its high sugar content but I can't resist 'free fruit' so we went home, returned with some tupperware boxes and picked my first ever greengages and damsons.  (I'd only ever eaten shop bought greengages and not sure I'd ever tried a damson before!)

I got right on the internet and did a big of googling to see if there was a way to make a low sugar or sugar free jam and got loads of tips so tried a few versions out.  I tried several different fruits (blackberries, damsons and greengages to name a few) and all worked really well.

The finished product is more like a thick sauce / syrup than a jam and lasts for a few weeks in the fridge (and it freezes well too).

We went back to the same trees this week to check on progress and surprisingly (considering the lack of summer we've had this year), the trees were bursting with fruit and we could have brought home wheelbarrows of fruit!  In the end, we got 1 kilo of greengages and 2.2 kilo of damsons.

We both love greengages so they've been added to breakfasts / desserts and snacked on but the damsons were picked specifically to make a big batch of sugar free jam (it was one of my favourites from my experiments last year).  

The method I'm going to post here though works perfectly with any soft fruit so if you've got a surplus of anything - give it a whirl!

Ingredients
1) Your fruit of choice (I ended up with 1.1 kilo of pitted damsons)
2) Honey (2 tbsp)
3) Chia seeds (I used 37g)
4) Juice of one lime

Method

1) The most labour intensive part of the process is removing the stones from the fruit.  There may be a quicker way but I put on my favourite cooking programme (Masterchef Australia is a must watch if you're a fan of cooking programmes) and just used a knife to slice all of the fruit away from the stone and settled in for an hour!  (Obviously this step isn't needed for fruits like blackberries or raspberries).

2) Put your fruit in a saucepan - no need to add anything else at this stage and heat gently for about 10 minutes, stirring often.  The fruit should start to break down and create its own sauce / syrup.

3) Once the fruit has softened, add your honey.  I used 2 tbsp of honey for this amount of fruit and give it a stir.

4) Squeeze a lime and add that to the saucepan, stir through and leave on the heat for another few minutes.

5) Leave to cool for about half an hour.  I chose to blend my jam using a stick blender because of the skins on the damsons which don't break down but if you are using blackberries for example, you can leave this step out.

6) Add your chia seeds.  If you are not a fan of these little seeds, they have amazing health benefits (they are packed full of protein and fibre, are gluten free, great for the digestive system, keep you feeling fuller for longer, are high in anti-oxidants amongst other things) but the beauty of them in sugar-free jam is that they act as a thickening agent.  These tiny seeds absorb about 10 times their weight in liquid so once your fruit mix has cooled down a bit, stir in your chia seeds and just leave them alone to do their thing!

7) Once your mix has completely cooled and thickened up, pour into a container and refrigerate.
Best to consume with two weeks

Uses

- Add to your breakfast for a fruity syrup topping

- Mix with fat free natural yoghurt to flavour

- Spread on your toast

- Add to desserts as a fruity sauce

- Add to rice pudding

- Add to porridge

Nutritional information

Using checkyourfood.com, I work out the calories of my sugar-free jam to be a quarter of standard shop bought jam so that's a win win in my eyes.

Hope you enjoy and give it a go!

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