I know there are no tested recipes out there yet for aronia berry jam, but in scouring this sub over the last few months, I was able to find some great links about testing the pH of aronia juice from various extraction methods and it was always under 4.0 (average high of 3.7) and in general slightly higher than strawberry pH. So I used this ball strawberry low sugar recipe as a base and also added 1/4c lime juice into each batch. It’s basically a merging of that ball recipe and the Pomona pectin blackberry port jam recipe but I had Ball pectin, not Pomona. Also I used more sugar than the strawberry jam recipe called for because aronia needs it. So my sugar was about double that recipe, which I figured was fine since it’s against the risk direction.
Normally I’m not one to go off script, but I did enough reading and internet rabbit hole searching to feel ok about canning the aronia jam. And a lot of it. Planning to use it as my reading favor in a couple months. Also hoping that an extension does some testing of it someday so I can follow a real recipe!
by Decent_Finding_9034
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Oh my gosh. Did you water bath can all of these ? What was your approach for pH testing?
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Oh.
I used the Pomona “berry” recipe years ago for aronia and apparently I got lucky. I don’t recall needing much extra sugar for aronia. The astringency comes down a bit when cooked. In retrospect it could have used just a hair more sugar.
I don’t have access to aronia bushes anymore but I will poke around. Wisconsin had a tested recipe for elderberries.
To anyone questioning the safety of this:
Most of your typical jam berries are sour by nature, and aronia is no exception. There are very serious sources out there that publish pH of various fruits and berries. The typical berries you make jam out of are *generally* very similar in features other than acidity as well, and will become very very similar in texture and consistency when cooked into a jam. Notice how pretty much every jam recipe out there is 10 minutes of water bath? It’s a reason for that.
That said, a newbie should be very cautious before doing a thing like this. But once a canner read and tested a thousand different Ball/Bernardin/USDA-recipes, they might start to feel they understand what makes sense and what does not. Making jam out of aronia berries does make total sense to me.
But that said, I wouldn’t recommend doing it to a total newbie without explaining the reasoning behind it first. Mainly because newbies should do recipes down to the letter until they really start to understand the logic behind it all. Otherwise, they might start getting ideas that are *actually* stupid but think is fine.