It’s early in the morning, the air is nicely warm and the wind carries the fungous smell of moist forest ground. All around us are blueberry bushes in the light shadow of birches and pine trees. This means summer for me! Slowly we pick berry and berry. After two hours I feel completely relaxed and our basket contains one kilogram of Blueberries.
Back home we washed the fruits, picked out the leaves and started to cook blue berry jam. Again we decided to go for the purist version using just blueberries, sugar and lemon juice. The lemon juice adds some tartness and is important for the gelling process. Together with sugar the acid is needed to bring the pectin molecules closer together to form pectin chains which is the reason why the jam is gelling.
And as I had the feeling that recipes for jams made without jelly sugar is interesting for some people, is here my recipe for blueberry jam:
When I have some old sweet rolls I love to use them in the swabian variation of bread pudding. It is called “Ofenschlupfer” and consists traditional of sliced rolls and apples, soaked with eggs and milk, sprinkled with sugar and baked until golden. It is one of my favourite dishes of my childhood.