Pumpkin jam

Dear reader,

while most people I know dart for pumpkins for pumpkin soup, I prefer another way and make pumpkin jam. It's super easy, super fast and super tasty!

Ingredients:

1 butternut pumpkin (some also call it “squash”)

1 pack of 500 g jam sugar/jellying sugar

2-4 cups of water

additional ingredients you like

You'll also need a hand-held blender.

Many use a hokkaido pumpkin for pumpkin soup. I used it to make the jam last year. It's working, but I find that the hokkaido is tough and inconvenient. I therefore recommend the butternut/squash, which is softer and longer in shape. Advantage with the butternut is also that the seeds and fibres are only at the bottom part of it, whereas the hokkaido has the seeds and fibres “eveywhere”, because it's rounder.

By the way: both pumpkins have a bark that can be cooked and is edible! Although I'd suggest that if you do something else other than the jam, it may be good to peal the bark and cook it a bit earlier than the rest, which is softer and will take less time to cook.

1.) Cut the pumpkin in half and take the seeds and fibres out. I like to take a table spoon for that. Cut the two halves once again and than those halves again as well. So all in all three times cutting in halves. Divide the slices into smaller pieces to get square bits. They don't have to be small, thin squares. But keep in mind: the smaller the pieces, the softer they will be after they're cooked. So cut them not too big, but also not too tiny.

2.) Put the cut pumpkin pieces in a large pot with a few cups of water. Don't measure the cups as such, the water is just there so the pumpkin is softer faster. So it doesn't have to be exact cups. Cook it until it's boiling and then set a timer for 10 minutes. Stir every now and then. Put the lid of the pot on top, if you like. That's optional.

3.) When the 10 minutes are over, take the pot off the stove and blend the pumpkin pieces with the blender. If you like, you can keep some of the pieces, of course.

4.) After that, put the pot back on the stove. Add the jam sugar/jellying sugar and keep stirring while it's heating up again. Stirring is important. Otherwise the sugar will either burn your pot or the jam. Feel free to set the stove on maximum at first. But the jam will be thick liquid and towards the end it may produce bursting bubbles. So it may be better to set the stove back a bit then. When the jam is bubbling evenly, set the timer for 5 minutes.

When the minutes are over, fill the jam in jars. Alternatively you can (carefully!) add a bit of cinnamon for the taste. It's easy to add too much cinnamon. So be careful and take only a little bit at a time and keep tasting it. You could also add pieces of apples or grate one apple or add a glass of apple sauce when cooking the pumpkin pieces the first time or whatever else that comes to you mind.

As you can see: the jam needs only 10 + 5 minutes of cooking time. Once the pumpkin is cut into pieces, the most time-consuming part of the recipe is done already. The jam is something like a 15-minutes-jam.

American recipes on the internet take white granulated sugar instead of jam sugar/jellying sugar, depending on the taste either in the same amount of what the cut pumpkin pieces weigh or a bit less sugar. I only made it with the jam sugar/jellying sugar so far.

Have you made pumpkin jam already? And if so, how did you make it?

Until next blog,

sarah