The Blue Chair Fruit Company is now a household name, thanks to the gorgeous cookbook written by the company’s founder, Rachel Saunders. Blue Chair jams are now available all over the country, which is very lucky for those of us who do not live in California!  I profiled Rachel a couple of weeks ago after I had the pleasure of visiting the Blue Chair kitchens where I saw the magic happen. Rachel sent me home with several bottles of jam to taste and review.

The first thing you notice about the jams is how lovingly they are presented. The bottles are beautiful – just the right proportions, with a pretty label that appears to have been slapped on by hand. Everything about the packaging makes you feel like the jam is made by hand, with a great attention to detail. I tried two of their more interesting and original jams, Peacotum and Quince Orange Marmalade.

Peacotum Jam

Smell: The jam doesn’t have a strong smell. There is the faint smell of peach that lingers in the background.

Sight: It has a rich, syrupy appearance, almost like caramel that is still warm. It is gorgeous to look at. Taken out of the bottle, the texture is unique. It is neither fluid nor solid. Just thick and fruity.

Taste: The jam has the flavor of caramel as well, like burnt sugar. The flavors of the peach, the apricot and the plum are well blended and have been cooked so thoroughly that the chunks of fruit have dissolved well. The flavor is mild and delicate. It is difficult to differentiate the different flavors, however, if we were to pick the dominant flavor it would be plum. From our taste, the technical virtuosity of the jam-maker is obvious. This jam is well-made, resulting in a subtle but delicious flavor.

Quince-Orange Marmalade

Smell: We loved the smell of this marmalade. It gave off the perfume-like smell of apple and pear mingling. There were also notes of the orange. The combination of is irresistible.

Sight: This jam has a very soft, solid texture. You can see chunks of quince and orange in the bottle. It has a deep golden-coral color. We thought it had a shiny gem-like color.

Taste: Quince is an unfamiliar fruit to many people. It is reminiscent of apple, but it has its own distinct flavor. This jam really highlights the quince. While the jam is very solid, it melts in your mouth. Once again, the texture is evidence of the technically complex and slow process of cooking down the fruit. The natural pectins in the fruit give the fruit a lovely texture.

© Images copyright of Blue Chair Fruit Company, LLC.

Tart Cherry and Apricot Jam

Sight: This jam is very fluid and juicy, with a earthy, red hue.

Smell: When you breathe in the jam, the dominant scent is that of apricot.

Taste: Interestingly, while the jam smells strongly of apricot, the taste captures both the tartness and sweetness of the cherry. The two fruit have been slowly and delicately cooked to the point that their flavors are nicely integrated. The majority of the jam’s body comes from the cherry. The cherries are left whole, they are suspended in the rich, thick apricot syrup. It is very spreadable and very rich in flavor.

There are many ways we can imagine using this jam. It’s flavor conjures up nostalgia for cherry pie. We would use this in a range of desserts and ice-cream. Or we could create little tarts with filo pastry and use this jam as a filling. So many possibilities!

Tart Cherry and Grapefruit

Smell: These two flavors combine to yield a very interesting scent. Taking in a whiff, we enjoyed the smell of vanilla, elderflower and licorice.

Sight: This is a very fleshy jam. There are thick chunks of fruit suspended in liquid. We love the We Love Jam chooses to play around with the textures of their jams, rather than producing jams with the consistent, sticky, solid textures that we are so used to seeing in the grocery aisles. These jams are allowed to separate into their fruit and liquid components.

Taste: Again the two flavors in this jam are beautifully blended. Neither flavor really stands out, but they come together to create a distinct and delicious new flavor. It reminded Mike of an old fashioned cocktail, the ones that have a slice of grapefruit and a cherry in the glass. The jam is reminiscent of an aged bitter. It almost has a woody flavor, and makes him want to take out a cigar. This would be a masculine jam, if such a thing could exist.

Personally, I am very impressed by the way these jam makers have managed to create something so delicious with grapefruit. Grapefruit is such a difficult fruit to manipulate – there is so much tartness and acid in grapefruit. However, We Love Jam manages to take out the best part of the grapefruit’s flavor – its spice, it’s sweetness, while removing the harsher qualities of grapefruit. In this jam, the essence of grapefruit is there in the background, while the more obvious qualities of the cherry are the first thing you notice.

These are two very different jams that use the cherry fruit. Tasting them together allowed us to better understand We Love Jam’s aesthetic. These jam makers take their time to allow very different flavors to combine and meld together. Their jams are complicated and delicious, a real treat to the senses. If you haven’t tried their jams before, we highly recommend that you do!

In my interview with Emily, the lady behind Emily G’s Jam’s of Love, she told me about her Southern roots. When Mike and I tried these three very different jams, we felt like we could taste the Southern flavors that Emily is so passionate about. These jams represent the most delicious parts of Southern cuisines – sweet fruit cobblers, barbeque, grape jelly. We enjoyed these jams very much! Please read on for our tasting notes!

Peach Marmalade

Sight: This jam has a thick solid consistency, full of fruit. Taking your spoon to it, you can slice through the pieces of orange and the thick peach.

Smell: It smells wonderful! It has a rich, fresh smell of peach.

Taste: This jam is full of Southern sweetness. It reminds us of a peach cobbler. The taste of the orange is more muted, but there are distinct pieces of orange peel. We were pleasantly surprised by the delicate taste of ginger that comes through. It provides some balance to the sweetness and rounds out the flavor. We enjoyed how well blended the flavors are. This jam has clearly been cooked for a long time, allowing the various flavors to combine in a lovely way.  All in all, this jam is a treat. It’s like having a little bit of dessert for breakfast.

Roasted Red Pepper

Sight: We liked the flecks of char that come through in the bottle, as do the pepper seeds. The peppers were clearly roasted very carefully, to maintain the integrity of the peppers.  This jam has a rustic, home-made quality. We like how the various parts of the jam making process are visible in the texture of the jam.

Smell: They have a distinct smell of barbeque!

Taste: This was my favorite of the three! It definite has a bit of a kick to it. It has a very strong and rich taste that is so reminiscent of a summer barbeque. It feels like a masculine jam. (See Mike’s other blog: Masculine Cuisine.) Eating it with toast for breakfast in the morning makes you feel like you are having a very substantive meal. It is not a particularly sweet jam, so it can also be used as the base for making a sauce. Mike would love to slather some of this on a chicken sandwich.

Cabernet Sauvignon

Sight: It has the texture and color of the grape jelly we all loved growing up.

Smell: There is a distinct fragrance of wine. It smells like a Cabernet!

Taste: We felt like this is a perfect grape jelly for grown ups.  We also liked how conceptually interesting this jam is. Jam is typically associated with fresh fruit, yet wine is aged. This also means that the grapes in this jam have gone through two stages of transformation. Once in the wine making process and then in the jam making process.

Mike just loved this. He enjoyed the texture and the flavor so much that he didn’t even think about how to combine it with other ingredients. He wanted to enjoy it on its own. He liked the fact that it tastes the way that it looks. It has a dark, mysterious and uniform color. Similar, the texture is smooth. The flavor is rich and gentle. He thought it was a very pleasant jam to take in.

I apologize for my brief hiatus. There are several exciting reviews that are in the works, in which I will be tasting jam from the Blue Chair Jam Company, We Love Jam and Emily G’s Jams of Love. Watch this space.

For the moment, however, I leave you with a jam portrait. After moving away from the Bay Area, I felt a significant lack of jam in my life. Recently, though, I have found an amazing little bakery in our neighborhood called the Sofra Bakery and Cafe. The pastries there are inspired by the owner’s Turkish heritage. I was particularly impressed by the simit, a sesame seed bun that I loved when I visited Istanbul last.

The owners love jam and often include it in their pastries. My favorite pastry was a brioche, with peach jam in it.

Tayberry Jam

Sight: Beautiful, rich color. Dark pinkish red. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the color is darker than a raspberry but lighter than a blackberry.

Smell: The smell of this jam is similar to the fruit itself, which has a subtle scent. The main event with this jam is its texture, color and flavor.

Texture: It has a thick, caviar-like consistency due to the fact that the tayberry drupelets remain partially intact. It retains the pulpy consistency of the original fruit; a pleasure to eat. Each bite allows you to taste the seeds of the tayberry, making the experience similar to biting into the fruit.

Taste: It has a tart start, but finishes sweetly. Retains a lot of the original sweetness and flavor of the fruit. This is not your simple strawberry jam. It immediately reminds you of the landscape where the red berries of Western Europe are found – the ligonberry, the raspberry, the blackberry.

Pluot Jam

Sight: Color and texture is reminiscent of strawberry-rhubarb with translucent whole pieces of fruit suspended in a thick jelly.

Smell: Much more distinctive smell than the tayberry jam. You get a whiff of the skin of the pluot, which has a slight tart tang.

Taste: It concentrates the essence of the pluot; we get a stronger sense of the pluot fruit from eating this jam than we would from eating the pluot itself. We also sense a hint of pear in the aftertaste. It finishes on a sweet note. We get the full taste of the pluot’s skin, which is difficult to describe but that you recognize immediately.

Texture: Smoother due to its lack of seeds. The pieces of fruit are very soft which indicates that the jam maker was patient enough to wait for the pluot to achieve a perfect ripeness.

We generally look for interesting original uses for jams as cooking ingredients. However, these jams capture the essence of the fruit so perfectly and so deliciously that it almost seems wrong to mix them with other flavors. I have had the tayberry jam every day for breakfast for two weeks now and each morning, I feel I am getting a mouthful of summer fruit. It is wonderful. I am excited to have a similar experience with the pluot jam. Since the pluot jam is a little more savory, you could have a bit of it alongside a pork roast.

Dafna Kory, the jam maker behind INNA Jam, is obsessed with the fruit itself. She strives to create jams that capture and enhance the flavor of the fruit. She doesn’t complicate the flavor by using different varietals or additional flavors. When we tasted this jam, we felt that she has executed her mission perfectly. These jams taste like the fruit they are made from, but in a much richer form.

What interests her is the complexity of the fruit itself. To that end, she chooses fruit that already have complicated flavor profiles, such as these two hybrids. To highlight the fruit, she keeps every other aspect of the jam simple. The jams are not overly sweet nor are they overly gelatinous in texture. Even the bottles are simple.

These jams are a treat! We highly recommend that you try some. They are available online through the INNA Jam website or at select stores across the country.

To Emily, making and eating food has always been a way to spend time with loved ones. She was raised in the South and remembers going to “Pig Pickin’s” as a child. Her family would get together with other families in the neighborhood to buy a pig and roast it on a spit. The roast would take all day and meanwhile, her dad would shuck oysters for the kids. It was a simple pleasure. The oysters were raw and unadulterated, tasting of brine.

Jam making was also a family endeavor. She remembers how her grandmother would gather fruit to make canned preserves, which in the South is described as “putting up”. All the ideas that are now in vogue about slow food, eating locally and eating seasonally are not new to Emily. “People have always been eating seasonally down here,” Emily remembers. “It just makes sense to eat strawberries in the spring and eat peaches in the summer.” In fact, after our chat in a cute cafe in Decatur, GA, Emily was going to go home and make a strawberry cobbler that very evening for dinner!

Four years ago, when Emily was herself a mother, she took her two kids out to a farm to pick strawberries together with her neighbor. With the excess of berries they brought home, they simply had to make jam. She made so many bottles that she could give it as gifts to her friends and suddenly, she was getting requests for more jam. People even wanted to buy jams from her. “I have always been entrepreneurial,” Emily says. “If someone wants to pay me to make something that I love making anyway, I’m in!” Suddenly, Emily and her neighbor Gina had a business. Shops around her home wanted to stock their jams. They started selling their jams at farmer’s markets. There was incredible demand, even though the country is in the middle of a recession.

In fact, Emily thinks there is a connection between the increase in her jam sales and the recession. “During times of crisis, people want things that remind them of home. They want things that make them happy. Jam does that. In the recession, when people are cutting down on expenses, a nice bottle of jam seems like a worthwhile indulgence.”

Emily’s jam business actually carried her family through the worst parts of the recession. “The economic crisis hit my family hard. One day, I woke up and I realized that I had to help support my family together with my husband. I knew that failure was not an option. My kids mean everything to me. I would do anything for them. I decided that I had to turn my jam making into a viable business for us.” She looks back at the worst moments of the recession and is grateful that she had her jams to fall back on. The crisis also forced her to scale her business up, a task which she has managed to achieve quite successfully.

Running her own business can be an exhausting endeavor, especially with two kids in tow. In the midst of making executive decisions about the design of her bottles and making endless calls to vendors, Emily loves coming up with new flavors. “I live, breathe and dream jam,” says Emily. “I will sometimes wake up with an idea of an interesting jam flavor and I won’t be happy until I test it out in the kitchen.” The line of Emily G’s Jams of Love is full of interesting and unique flavors. Her jams are available on her website and at select stores throughout the country.

June Taylor is something of a legend in the Bay Area foodie community. Her marmalades and preserves have been appearing in some of the best farmer’s markets and specialty shops for about three decades. I first came across June Taylor Jam products at the Ferry Terminal Building in San Francisco. Through word of mouth, her acclaim as a master jam-maker has spread, yet June herself has maintained a relatively low profile and a small production.

June has been very deliberate about maintaining the small scale in her company. I was fortunate enough to spend a delightful afternoon with her in her kitchen on 4th Street in Berkeley. As I looked around, it was clear to me that June believes in making jam slowly and by hand. Her kitchen is utterly devoid of cooking appliances. There are two large preparation tables where fruit is cut by hand into small pieces. There is also a large stove where jams are cooked over low heat in relatively small pots. “You can taste the difference in the jam,” June says. “Every spoonful of my marmalades has a special kick to it. I love that people experience something wonderful when they taste my products.”

Her small shop and kitchen space on 4th Street is called The Still Room. When I entered it, I felt a sense of stillness and peace. There are delicate flowers and branches interspersed between the bottles of jam. In the kitchen area, there is plenty of open space, with neat trays of jams and peels in the corners. Sunlight pours into the space from the two large skylights.

While the name The Still Room reflects June’s peaceful and naturalistic aesthetics, it actually refers to something more historical. “It’s a play on words,” June says with a smile. The term ‘Still Room’ refers to a space found in aristocratic houses in Europe, where the ladies of the house would hone their domestic crafts by making delicate cosmetic or edible products. June describes it in this way, “In the past, women would forage their properties for fruit, flowers and herbs to make the very kinds of things that I make here. I see my Still Room as a way of learning about these traditions of the past, honoring them and bringing them into the modern world.”

June has an intellectual interest in jam making. She began her career as an academic in London, researching sociology in various universities. Her focus, funnily enough, was the study of occupational happiness. “It’s ironic. At the age of 26, after researching for several years, I decided I was not completely satisfied with academia, so I decided to travel.” She came to Berkeley, met the man she would later marry and decided that she was interested in the food culture.

When she took an interest in fruit preservation she immediately went back to the library. “I examined antiquarian cookbooks and manuals. I studied ancient cooking techniques. I brought this knowledge with me to my jam making process.” Her jam making brings together both her love of nature and physical processes with her academic passions. “Jam making is a good marriage for me. It brings together my mind and my body. It has made me very happy.”

These ancient techniques have not been primarily about marmalades and jams. In the past, jams were just one method among many to preserve fruit and make it delicious all year around. In her kitchen, June has revived many fruit preservation methods. She makes candied peels, syrups and pickles. She also makes fruit cheeses. These are highly concentrated fruit that have been molded into different shapes. They can be sliced, like cheese, which explains their name. June discovered this technique through her study of traditional British preservation technique. Together, these methods allows her to use every part of the fruit, so that none of it is wasted.

June Taylor set the stage for the current renaissance in jam making that is sweeping over the Bay Area. However, while other jam makers are trying to scale up their businesses, June is quite happy to focus on maintaining her relatively small production. She is fortunate that she already has a solid base of loyal customers. It is hard work making her jams. For her to maintain her level of quality, it takes a great deal of time and effort. Even her letterpress labels are attached to the bottles by hand.

June is deeply committed to doing every part of the process by hand and in small quantities. ”You are still young,” she told me. “You may not realize that we are coming out of an age of industrial food production. My whole philosophy goes against that. I want to respect the fruit. I want to respect the farmers, whom I consider my peers. I want to respect the traditions of jam making that have been passed down for centuries, but that are in danger of being forgotten.”

June Taylor Jam products are available in several retail locations listed on her webpage. However, I highly recommend visiting her shop at the Still Room in Berkeley. It is located at 2207 4th Street in Berkeley. I brought away with me candied peels, fruit cheeses, syrups and jams. Check back soon for reviews of all of these products.

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Rachel Saunders’ dream as a child was to write a cookbook. For as long as she can remember, Rachel would pore over cookbooks, enjoy their beautiful pictures and think of the dishes she would cook up. Fortunately for us, her mother encouraged her to experiment in the kitchen, because this is how Rachel discovered her flair for cooking. “One time I wanted to make this complex curry,” Rachel remembers. “It called for all of these spices that my mother had never heard of, like fenugreek. She was very supportive of me as I put these unusual ingredients together to produce a perfect curry.”

Rachel is attracted to the complexity of cooking. “This is something I have discovered about myself,” she told me. “I am really attracted to complicated things and I love the challenge of mastering their complexity.” In college, Rachel studied French. She loved the idea of mastering a language. When she discovered jam, she was immediately drawn to its intricate quality. To her, it was like a language waiting to be learnt. So, after college, this is exactly what she did. She spent ten years learning everything there is to know about jam.

Mastering the language of jam, for Rachel, meant understanding how fruit works, understanding which fruit works together and understanding how sugar and pectin fit into the equation. Once you learn the parts of the jam making process, you can combine them with ease, the way you combine words to form a sentence.

Learning jam was a long and extensive process. She did almost all of her learning in the kitchen, through trial and error. “I found that many jam cookbooks out there were not helpful at all. They skipped steps and there were no pictures to help the reader understand what was going on.” After a chance encounter with someone in the publishing industry who mentioned that there was a market for jam cookbooks, Rachel began to think that perhaps now was the time for her to create a cookbook. “I wanted to include everything I wish someone had told me about jam-making. After spending all of that time learning all of these methods through trial and error, why on earth wouldn’t I want to teach that to other people?” This was how the Blue Chair Jam Cookbook came to be. “I wanted to write the definitive cookbook on jam,” she says.

Before she began work on the cookbook, Rachel had already established a jam company called Blue Chair Fruit Company. Rachel’s jams are known throughout the Bay Area and indeed, the country, for being complex and very high in quality. Rachel continues to be heavily involved in their production. She ensures that all of the fruit is chopped by hand and that the jams are cooked in small batches in her iconic large copper pots. She has managed to grow her business while ensuring the quality of each bottle of jam remains as delicious as the very first bottle she made.

Rachel says that the best part of her day is talking to her sous-chef, Jo, about possible jam flavors. The two of them are inspired by flavors and experiences in everyday life. “Anything can inspire me,” says Rachel. “I can eat a squid salad and it will make me think of an interesting fruit flavor combination.” Rachel and Jo spend hours bouncing around ideas about the next round of jams they might create. After her years of study and experience, Rachel has become so fluent in the language of jam making that she doesn’t even need to do a trial batch of jam. She is so familiar with each fruit that she knows exactly which fruit will combine well and how the jam making process will work.

Blue Chair Fruit jams are available from specialty food stores all over the country and also online on their website. Rachel sent me home with a couple of jams. I will be reviewing them soon, so stay tuned for some tasty reviews.

For Dafna Kory, it all began with a loquat tree. Dafna, the jam maker behind INNA Jam, was walking around Berkeley when she discovered a loquat tree in somebody’s back yard. The loquat fruit immediately brought her back to her childhood in Israel where loquats grow in abundance. “They’re not an easy fruit to eat,” she says. “They are small and the pits are very big so it takes a lot of effort to get a little bit of fruit. It was a whole experience.”

She was fixated. She spent days staring at the tree until one day she got up the courage to knock on the door and ask whether it would be okay for her to pluck some of the fruit. The people living in the house said that she was most welcome to do so.  ”I went a bit crazy,” she remembers. “I went home with baskets and baskets of loquats.” Once Dafna discovered the loquats, she  started seeing fruit trees everywhere. On trees by the side of the road, in people’s gardens, there was just an abundance of fruit. So she started knocking on doors and foraging for fruit. With all this fruit on hand, making jams and preserves seemed like the natural next step.

For Dafna, the fruit is the thing. The jam is just a natural extension of her love of fruit. “Honestly, I’m not a huge jam-o-phile. I just love fruit.” This fact influences her jam making a great deal. In each jam, she uses only one varietal of fruit. She doesn’t even use lemon juice in her jams, because she doesn’t want to alter the taste of the primary fruit. The idea is to take fruit that is so delicious and seasonal and preserve its original flavor so that it can be eaten all year round. Dafna also believes in buying fruit that is local. She limits herself to fruit produced within 100 miles of where she lives. “I have imposed so many limits on myself,” she says with a laugh. “These boundaries force me to think creatively about what I can do.”

It is her focus on the fruit that influences her decision to use commercial pectin, which many other jam makers are shunning. “When you make your own pectin, it is hard to control how much you are putting into the jam. I want to consistently use the same amount of pectin and sugar, so that the only variations in texture and flavor are coming from the batch of fruit that is going into the jam.” Dafna also has an interest in science. She spent ages learning about the chemistry of pectin in order to master its usage. She is as happy to use commercially made pectin as she is to use commercially made sugar.

Dafna originally made jam just because it was fun. Then she started giving it to friends as gifts. Before she knew it, friends were asking her to carry the jam in their shops. She realized that her passion project could become her life. She started taking fewer film editing projects, which constituted her day job, and decided to throw herself into jam making. This is how INNA Jam was born.

Today, Dafna has big plans to expand INNA Jam’s production. It involves her having a kitchen of her own. In March or April, Dafna is moving into a large industrial kitchen in Emeryville where she will be able to make jam more efficiently. This will bring down her costs and allow her to turn INNA Jams into a viable business. Making jams the ways she does is expensive. “When you buy the best fruit you can find and pay everybody you work with a decent wage, the jam is going to be expensive. I am trying to price my jam as low as I possibly can, so that people will think of it as an everyday jam, rather than just a luxury item.” This new kitchen is going to be expensive, but people are being generous and supporting her dream to make ultra local, eco-friendly jam. You can learn all about her commercial kitchen project from the video below.

I checked out the kitchen space when I visited Dafna in Emeryville. She is so excited about the space and the things she will be able to do when it is fully operational. The kitchen is also located next to a park where kids are always playing and where food trucks stop by every afternoon. It’s pretty heavenly. I’ll be writing some reviews about several different flavors of INNA Jam shortly, so keep a look out for them!

Mike and I both love grapefruit! For me, it’s a recent passion. When I was little, it always felt too bitter to me. However, a few weeks ago, I tasted a really sweet ruby red grapefruit,with just the right amount of bitterness to it. I’ve been hooked ever since.

I thought it would be interesting to experiment with the flavors of grapefruit, because it is such a strong and distinct flavor. After trying several combinations, I have arrived at one that I really like. Lavender works well with grapefruit. It is a fairly unusual flavor, because until recently it was never considered an ingredient for cooking. It goes very well with the taste of the grapefruit.

I cut four grapefruit, so that I only had the flesh of the fruit. The membrane, the pith and the pits, I set aside, for their pectin. I cooked down the grapefruit in two cups of water for about half an hour. I added two tablespoons of lavender to this.

I experimented with honey as a sweetener instead of sugar. I added a cup of honey to the jam about half an hour into the cooking process. It worked fairly well in this recipe, however, the jam didn’t achieve the thick, gel like consistency that I usually get with sugar. I don’t mind a watery jam, however, if you feel strongly about the texture of your jam, you can replace the honey with sugar.

After cooking the fruit down on medium heat for an hour and a half, I added two tablespoons of vanilla essence and another teaspoon of lavender. I continued cooking for another half hour before bottling.

This was a fairly small experiment. It yielded five four ounce jars.

All of the flavors come together beautifully. There is still some bitterness, but if you like the taste of grapefruit, you will enjoy this jam. It is fragrant and unusual and delicious.

Ingredients:

4 large ruby grapefruit

3 tablespoons of lavender

1 cup of honey

2 tablespoons of pure vanilla essence