Southern Italian Jams

Loving the southern Italian jams, so this morning lesson is about their typical morning spreads ... "marmalade"
Marmalade in Italy means fruit jam, but not from citrus.  

 

 

 The big difference to what we grew up with in Australia is that the jam here in southern Italy is all about the fruit.

 In Australian our great grand parents recipes were pound for pound  fruit to sugar, and in recent years is has been at a ratio of 2 cups fruit 1 cup sugar.

Here in the south of Italy its 1 kg fruit to 50g sugar for the cherry and fig but for the quince it is 250g of sugar as the fruit is so tart.
 

This was cooked slow over 5 hours with only a few table spoons of water. This gave the fig more of a roasted sundried flavour and a dry paste as you can see in the picture above.

The beauty is its low sugar and the taste is all about the fruit.
To preserve and seal pop the jars of cooked jams into the oven at 100 deg.
 

The cherry was not cooked quite so long so it was a moister jam.