making fruit jam with Maple Syrup

[Ragged View]

Has anyone done this? The recipes I find online often use sugar as well as maple syrup. I am interested in using syrup as the only sweetener/preserver. Although I do not hot water bath my jams made w sugar, just fill the hot, sterile jars w hot jam and screw the lid down, and have never had an issue w spoilage, I would consider doing a hot water bath if necessary.
Also, just found out about calcium (Pomona) pectin. I have never used it but apparently it depends on calcium (a small amount) for the "set" rather than sugar, allowing the sugar in jams to be reduced or perhaps eliminated. Seems like it might be a good choice to use w maple syrup.
Anyone had any experience with this?
Thanks,
Mark

[Ragged View]

Also,
I wondered if cooking the syrup a bit to thicken would either make the jam set or at least help it. If so, how high to cook it?
Thanks,
Mark

[Tweegs]

We make apple, peach and strawberry jams using maple syrup.

The strawberry and apple were reduced sugar while the peach was a no sugar added recipe.

My wife would know more about this but she has taken the grandkids to Disney and won’t be back until this weekend. I’ll pass on what I know and get more info from her then.

Lemon juice was used…color, preservative…I think.
We used regular pectin.

First, apple has a natural pectin and set up very well.
The strawberry set well but not as good as the apple.
The peach was a bit runny.
All were good but it was hard to get the maple flavor.
Because of the reduced/no sugar content, all were just a little tart and that actually won favor with many of our customers.

To combat both the set and flavor problems, we talked about using maple sugar instead of white and going to a sub “B” grade (very-very dark) syrup instead of the dark we used this time around. Using maple sugar increases the cost, that’s the downside. Perhaps substituting half of the white sugar with maple sugar would be the way to go for the reduced recipes.

Also, vanilla tastes close enough to fool those who expect a maple flavor, as we found out with the peach jam (actually labeled peach-maple-vanilla jam). Most mistook the vanilla flavor for maple (wasn’t our intention, it just turned out that way).

The Pamona pectin is something we are looking at. It came highly recommended, but we haven’t tried it yet.

Of course, syrup contains water so you need to reduce moisture elsewhere to compensate (I think that’s what bit us on the peach).

[Ausable]

Mark - We usually make a lot of coarse apple sauce every year and cook it down and can it with no sweetener added. So this year we also made a few different apple butters. The best was a Maple- Apple Butter recipe. We followed the recipe - except - cut the white sugar in half and of course used Maple Syrup as called for and added some raisins. While we were cooking this down - I used a hand mixer to turn into a puree and we put in pint canning jars and water bathed. This is the best apple butter we have ever made. You can taste the apple - maple syrup - cinnamon and raisins. I even put it on pancakes as well as toast. Next time we make it - I think we will skip the white sugar and use strictly maple syrup for the added sweetener. ---Mike---

[Ragged View]

Mike,
Thanks for the info.
On the three kinds of jams I am assuming you substituted MS for white sugar. Did you use a 1:1 ratio or ?
The lack of maple flavor is not an issue for me. I will let the fruit stand on its own as much as it can flavor-wise. I am just looking to get away from white sugar and use the syrup I have. I am going to look into making old-time cake sugar and using that. Seems like the goal would be to cook it just barely high enough so it will keep w/o being too rock-like.
Interesting about the vanilla.
I used MS only, no white sugar, in my bread&butter pickles this year and they came out fine, flavor-wise. Not too mapley.
Here is a link to a similar thread I started in another forum:http://www.draftanimalpower.org/forums/topic/maple-syrup-for-fruit-jam/
Thanks,
Mark

[Tweegs]

Yes, 1:1 on the MS vs. white.

We also make a Dutch maple pickle, kind of a bread and butter/sweet.
Folks love ‘em or hate ‘em, there’s no in between.
We make around 4 doz pints a year and always sell out.

Syrup will keep as well as sugar…your call if you want to make the sugar up front or as needed.

We have one customer that buys 6 gallons from us at the start of the season. That’s all they use for sweeteners. No white sugar/corn syrup at all if they can help it.

For next year we are trying a couple of new items.
Maple vinegar
Root beer, made with syrup instead of sugar (there are recipe’s out there).