Category: Cherry
Bonne Maman Cherry Preserve
Texture: runny syrup and recognizable cherry chunks
Colour: dark garnet
Taste: sweet cherry punch
Sweetness: 8/10
Calories: 50 calories/tablespoon
Not sour enough for my tastes, though I could be too blame for packing it on my bread (see photo above). I mistook it for one of the sour versions. But I think it would charm the socks off me if, in a future tasting, it came on a scone.
As a side note, Bonne Maman sells different stuff in different countries. The French site will make you jealous: our European cousins get Bonne Maman rice pudding, rhubarb yoghurt and those lemon tartelettes I couldn’t get enough of when I was last in France.
Crofter’s Morello Cherry Premium Spread
Texture: chunky, a few liquid bits
Colour: ruby
Taste: nice and sour, only gently sour
Sweetness: 3/10
Calories: 35/tbs
Originally I was snobby about Crofter’s, thinking it was a knock-off of Smother’s and I dreaded running into it in the fridge.
A few days ago, I gave it another chance. Just now I had my last helping, on some lightly toasted and buttered stone-milled whole wheat. Well, I will miss it and I would buy this again when I am in a cherry jam mood. It was not too sweet and pleasantly sour. Don’t get me wrong, I love the super sours, but pairing a jam with an Alishan tea requires a bit more delicacy.
Gabi and Gerhard Latka immigrated to Canada from Germany in 1989 and started their company in Parry Sound, Ontario. Their website states that they are “largest organic jam manufacturer in North America.” I’m rather intrigued by their other jams, as they use “heritage fruit varieties like Senga Sengana strawberries [and] Willamette raspberries.”
Back to today’s morello cherry flavour, the ingredients list them as organic, along the organic fair trade cane sugar, natural apple pectin, ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and citric acid.
By the way, the Crofter’s website also has a page of definitions of jams, jellies, preserves, fruit spreads and so on. The US FDA considers jams and preserves to be at least 65% sugar and 45% fruit, hence why Crofter’s had to rename their creations.
First Jam
For my first blog post on Pulp and Pectin, my jam blog, I will start with Langford Foods’ Cranberry, Cherry and Carnation Compote. Its stats:
Texture: slightly gelatinous, only curled petals visible
Colour: watered-down red
Taste: generic red flavour (must be the cranberry), a tad raspberry-ish
Sweetness: 3/10 (with 10 being diabetic coma)
Jar: hard to get the last bit around the rim
Calories: 10/tbsp
From the local Langley-based Langford Foods website: “Cranberry, Cherry, and Carnation Compote is a year round favourite with the tartness of cranberries and cherries enhanced by a hint of clove flavour from our farm grown carnations.” The list of ingredients is reassuringly simple, along with the three title plants, the jam also had sugar (of course), water, lemon juice and pectin. Not sure how the clove snuck in there.
Pulp & Pectin 