Living Skills Project

The last owners of this house surrounded the property with rosebushes, of all stripes and colors. My particular favorite has been an exceptionally sweet-smelling one that is red and white striped (I’ve nicknamed it the “Candy Cane” rosebush in my mind but I don’t know the varietal). It’s already begun its second blooming sequence in the beautiful Rose City, and so inspired, I decided to attempt to preserve the seasonal delight of rose fragrance by making rose petal jam. I took recipe inspiration from several other blogs and posts after a quick Google search and hobbled together my own quadruple-sized recipe with what I had on hand:

• 4 cups rose petals (Notes: I did not bother removing the white part as some recipes recommend and it tastes just fine. The roses are untreated – no chemicals to my knowledge since my tenure in this house of two years. 4 cups of rose petals was just half of a small mixing bowl that I’d picked off our bush, after rinsing, plucking petals, and removing bugs and spiders.)
• 3 cups clean-tasting untreated Portland tap water
• 1/2 cup organic lemon juice
• 4 cups sugar (I had 3 cups organic cane sugar on hand and 1 cup maple sugar)
• 3 more cups Portland tap water
• 1 package Pomona Universal Pectin

After rinsing the petals and rescuing two spiders, I blended the rose petals with a hand stick blender with the lemon juice and water, which made a watery, clumpy concoction. I hand-stirred in the sugars.

About sugar and pectin boxes: I hate teeth-aching, throat-burning, super-sugary jams and jellies. This recipe uses about 1/3 the sugar called for in other recipes – I was only able to do this because I was using Pomona’s Universal Pectin, which doesn’t require the massive amounts of the sugar the typical Sure-Jell type pectin packets require. Pomona’s looks more expensive in the store per box, but each box of Pomona’s actually does about 4 batches of jam, while each batch of Sure-Jell or what-have-you does only one batch, so it actually works out cheaper, too!

In a small saucepan, I heated the additional 3 cups of water with the entire package of pectin (since I am making a quadruple batch here) and the 1/2 cup water + 1/2 tsp calcium mixture as described in the pectin box directions. The box directions didn’t include ratios of pectin and calcium water for rose petal jam, so I erred on the jellier side and calculated the batches based on 4 tsp pectin and 4 tsp calcium water. There was only actually 11 tsp of pectin in the packet and extra calcium water, but I just threw caution to wind and used the whole thing. I haven’t done this before, and although I was whisking constantly, it looked pretty lumpy, but as it reached a boil the lumps began to dissolve more and it turned more glue-y.

Once it had reached a full roiling boil, I added it to the rose petal mixture. The resulting mixture had a great clingy and congealed texture, like a good jam ought. Poured into sterilized ball jars, processed in a hot-water bath for 10 minutes.