Chilli Jam

This is a lovely recipe for a very versatile savoury jam. It’s essentially like a sweet chilli sauce in jam form. As this is my first batch, I went easy on the chillis to avoid having jars of poisonously spicy chutney going to waste, but really I was overly cautious. There is a subtle background heat from the chillis, but this could definitely be ramped up. I de-seeded the chillis but next time I’ll try leaving some seeds in. But even though this batch is more sweet than chilli-hot, two of the four jars I made have already been used to top cheese, roast chicken, omelettes, toast….eh everything we’ve eaten really. Not too shabby.

This recipe is from Donal Skehan’s Good Mood Food Blog. Catherine and I made foodie baskets as gifts for family and friends last Christmas, and Catherine made a few huge batches of this, which we put in nice jars, with pretty gingham tops and packed lovingly into wicker hampers….and then discovered we had none left for ourselves. So this is actually my first time to taste this, even though I knew it would be good after the rave reviews and recipe requests we got from all the basket recipients. It does make a lovely gift and it isn’t expensive to make. Just start saving all the nice jars you come across from now on and you’ll have enough to fill with jam to give away at Christmas!

Original recipe here. You can easily make a half batch if you’re not sure about it, just reduce the cooking time a bit.

What you need:

3 medium red chillis, deseeded and chopped (I used 2 apache chillis – more below)

1 kg tomatoes

4 cloves of garlic, crushed

2 thumb sized pieces of ginger, roughly chopped

2 tbsp thai fish sauce (nam pla)

450g demerara sugar

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

100ml red wine vinegar

What to do:

Chop the tomatoes into quarters or thirds and whizz about half of them in the food processor until finely chopped. Pop them into a medium sized, heavy bottomed saucepan.

Place the rest of the tomatoes, the garlic, ginger, nam pla and chillis into the processor and whizz until you have a paste. Pop that into the saucepan too.

A word about the chillis. I used 2 dried apache chillis from our own plant.

These chillis are hot hot, so that’s why I only used two and that’s also why I deseeded them (without gloves – ouch).  Also, we have discovered that if you just leave fresh chillis on the plant, they dry out and so they keep for ages. These are some of last autumn’s crop. Anyway, next time I’ll try leaving the seeds from one of these babies in. That’ll ramp up the chilli-ness!

Next, stir the sugar, balsamic vinegar and red wine vinegar into the tomato mixture and turn on the heat.

Slowly bring to the boil, stirring often. Turn the heat down and bit and simmer until the jam has reduced by about 50%, maybe more. Really, have a good constant simmer going or it will take an age to reduce.

This is what it looked like after about 20 minutes:

and after about an hour:

Basically you want any watery liquid on top to boil off, and leave a stickier, jammy substance behind. The mixture will still seem quite runny, but it will thicken as it cools. Leave in the pot to cool.

Now, grab some old jars and lids and wash them in boiling water. Pop them onto a baking tray and dry them in a 150C oven for about 10 minutes. I got about 700ml of jam from my batch, but you may get more if you leave the mixture a bit runnier.

When the jam is cool, pop into the sterilised jars and pop the lid on. Donal recommends to store in the fridge, but we are tight for fridge space, so I only store the opened jar in the fridge. The rest I store in a cool place, away from sunlight.

But you probably won’t have to deal with storing this for very long anyway….