Jams Preserved Foods

Cool and crunchy, delightfully sour and capable of going from snack to sandwich without a hitch — that's what I call a good pickle.

You can adapt this simple formula for any fresh vegetables; try a mixture of vinegars and spices for a truly custom pickle pleasure.

Get yours before it's gone!

Sage is an intensely aromatic herb, and unlike its tender cousins — basil and parsley — its leaves are sturdy and resinous. Because of sage’s powerful aroma and oily texture, a little goes long way, flavor-wise. The preserving possibilities are numerous, so we get to be creative with this potent perennial. Infuse honey with dried sage leaves to add flavor to hot or iced tea, sweeten baked goods, add to a citrus-y marinade, or serve on a cheese plate.

Strawberry butter, anyone?

The ultimate sauce to wake up tired boneless, skinless chicken breasts is also the easiest to make.

It's the best thing you can do this weekend.

Put it in your green bean casserole! Plus, more brilliant ways to use it.

You might not have even heard of the winning brand!

It's not just for cucumbers — and it's not just for hot dogs or hamburgers.

Before you put that fresh fruit or veggie in the freezer, read this.

"I grew up in a family that ate a lot of takeout, a lot of fast food. I didn’t know what a lot of vegetables were, honestly. Now, we grow everything in the city and distribute it within five miles of the growing sites."

It's incredibly easy to make and you can do it for a fraction of the cost.

It's so fast, needs nothing special, and makes you look like a HERO.

And they make a great Bloody Mary stirrer, too.

Nik Sharma says this recipe represents California due to the bounty of gorgeous citrus in the Golden State, and the recipe’s celebration of the state’s ever-growing immigrant cuisine.

As I eat my weight in sweet strawberries this time of year, the subject of what to do with the abundance of spring and summer fruit comes to mind. I am usually more than content with enjoying berries and stone fruit as-is, but when I’ve gone a little overboard at the farmers market, jam is one of the many things I consider making. Or is it jelly? The two terms for fruit spread have always confused me a bit. Luckily, there’s an easy way to distinguish between the two.

Welcome to a new series we’re starting out, called Small Batch, Big Batch. As you may have figured out, the idea is to focus on one (very specific) type of ingredient or treat and then highlight our two favorites: one from a small maker and one from a bigger company (whose goods are more readily available). First up: apricot jam. Spread the stuff on toast or muffins, use it in a sauce, or plop a spoonful on top of a bowl of ice cream.

If you follow Mindy Kaling on Instagram, then you know that besides being super funny and fashionable, she’s also obsessed with food. She knows how to make a crudité plate that no one will eat, and has strong opinions on the best kind of chocolate chip cookies. It’s no wonder, then, that she’s also a jamhead. You know, someone who loves jam. What, you’ve never heard that word before?

Meet the spicy pickled carrots that are about to forever change your Taco Tuesday or even just your snack-dinner Wednesday. These crunchy, spicy, tangy pickles are made for serving with (or on top of) Mexican staples like tacos and enchiladas, or even just alongside a cold beer. And because these carrot pickles are made just like our favorite quick refrigerator pickles, they are as easy to make as they are to eat.

You'll get one perfect jar of jam and a new weekly ritual.

You can use it on burgers, grilled chicken, or just eat it with cheese and crackers.

Can you slice vegetables and boil brine? Then you can make refrigerator pickles.

What is pectin, and how do you use it?

When strawberries are in season, it’s hard not to inhale the cartons you bring home immediately before even thinking about what else you’ll do with them. I encourage you, however, to put some aside to make this butter — rich with all that fruity flavor, enhanced by honey and orange zest, and just begging to be slathered on toast or biscuits and melted all over your pancakes and waffles.

I usually associate canning and preserving with summer — when all those gorgeous tomatoes, stone fruit, and berries are in season — but it’s absolutely a year-round activity. Case in point? This clementine-hibiscus marmalade. The best part about this recipe is that it only requires the following five ingredients: clementines, dried hibiscus, sugar, fresh lime juice, and salt. Unlike some preserving methods, this marmalade is also super straightforward and unfussy.

Stop the search — you’ve found your new addition to this year’s lineup of holiday cookies. This lemon curd sandwich cookie starts off with just-sweet-enough cookies, made rich and tender by a simple cream cheese dough. Don’t expect to find a snappy cookie here — these rounds have some give because we want them to melt a bit when you bite into them. Nestled inside is a sunny, tart and sweet lemon curd.

This cocktail is polarizing. Either you’re going to be with me and love every briny sip, or you will not. And don’t for a second think you only have to drink it during Oktoberfest — it’s just that people are far more affectionate toward pickled cabbage during this time of year. To be quite honest, I need no special occasion to shake one of these up. A Wednesday evening is just as good of a reason as any. Says who?

Today, pickle enthusiasts converge in their spiritual home — the Lower East Side — to celebrate the 15th annual Pickle Day. To mark the occasion, here are seven facts from New York City’s pickled past. When the Dutch settled in the 1600s, New York became home to the largest concentration of picklers anywhere at the time. The majority of cukes were grown in modern-day Brooklyn, where the pickling tradition lives on.

Tomorrow is officially the last day of summer, but that doesn’t mean the tomato party has to end. Grab a pint of late-season cherry tomatoes and turn them into this silky confit with shallot, garlic, and thyme. While you could certainly pickle cherry tomatoes, the confit method for preserving is just so easy.

I come from a long line of Missouri farmers. Our roots were literally in the soil for generations. That is, until my Grandma Dot got fed up with wearing feed sack dresses and growing her own food, getting by on what you could and being reluctantly grateful for the Ball jars still left in the root cellar come February. In the mid-century promise of modernity just after WWII, she packed her bag and took a train to St.

Yes, you can save that runny jam.

Labor Day weekend is upon us, and if you’re wondering what to do with your brood, why not get the gang involved in a summer preserving project? It’ll keep everyone busy and you’ll be rewarded with delicious treats for many months to come. We asked Aimee Wimbush-Bourque, the Simple Bites blogger and author of Brown Eggs & Jam Jars to share what a day of preserving looks like for her and her family of five.

Preserving the season’s bounty in a whirlwind jamming session is one of our very favorite things to do. Pots, pans, and jars crowd every available surface; bundles of ripe fruits and veggies stand at the ready; our hair is tied back; and our aprons are tied on. But before we hull our first strawberry or rinse our first blueberry, we like to set the mood with some tunes. Something easygoing, but lively enough to keep the energy up while we’re simmering, stirring, and straining.

It’s kind of unfair, how over-the-top the summer bounty is in August and how utterly bleak things can get in January. Yes, you can purchase tomatoes and raspberries in winter, but we all know nobody’s being fooled by those silly styrofoam props that look like the real deal but neither smell nor taste like anything. And don’t get me started on the texture. So how do we stretch the abundant sunshine of August to the darkest corners of January? The answer is simple: We can it up!

Slow-cooker fruit butter is a simple solution for preserving large quantities of fruit without any canning equipment or heating up the stove.

If you’ve ever been overambitious and purchased too many juicy summer peaches at the farm stand or farmers market, preserving them in the slow cooker is just the answer. Making peach butter requires no peeling, no pots to stir on the stove, and none of the canning equipment you need when making peach jam. Slow-cooker peach butter is the easiest, hands-off way to make sure your peach haul is turned into something tasty. Fruit butters get their name from their thick but spreadable texture.

Forget canning and instead look to the freezer.

Preserve summer with these 15 quick pickles, no canning required.

If you're looking for a quick way to preserve a bunch of cherry tomatoes, pickling is a unique way to put them to good use.

These oven-dried tomatoes are nothing like their sun-dried cousins.

In the middle of July when you’re swimming in produce and greedily eating all the salads in sight, I want you to stop and think about something (or someone, really). I want you to think about yourself in the future when it’s January and you’re knee-deep in root vegetables and snow. It’s a little sad, right? Maybe a little bleak? Don’t cry! The fourth commandment is here to guide you to future happiness.

To me, the official start of summer is when local strawberries hit the farmers market stalls. There’s really nothing like the taste of those sweet berries, still warm from the sun, after a long winter. Which is why I tend to go a little crazy when they arrive, buying as many boxes as I can carry home each time I wander through the market until my fridge is loaded.

Tired of eating the same bland chicken for dinner? I’ve got just the thing for you. This chicken is sticky, sweet, salty, and spicy, with soy sauce, chili flakes, lemon, and a surprising ingredient that’s lurking in the back of your pantry. The sweet, sticky element in this dish comes from apricot jam! That’s right — apricot jam’s not just for toast or biscuits; it makes a wonderful glaze for all sorts of proteins, but this chicken is a great place to start.

Here's what to do with those underripe avocados!

Q: My chives are blossoming beautifully, and I’d love to make some chive blossom vinegar, but the plant is small, so I will need to harvest the blossoms a little at a time. Can I just add them to the vinegar as I pick them, or should I preserve them somehow (freeze them, perhaps?) until I have enough? Sent by Allison Editor: I love seeing the purple tufts of chive blossoms pop up in my garden. Often the first thing I do is make chive blossom vinegar.

Do you have a rice bowl or a taco dinner in need of a little extra something-something? Or perhaps you are staring food waste in the face, with a lingering carrot, half an onion, or two radishes that have been hanging out in the crisper for a smidge too long, and you want to send them on to a better life. Here’s your answer to both of these cooking challenges: the 10-minute magic of the ultra-quick pickle.

It seems like everyone is on the fermented drink bandwagon lately, but what if kombucha or even shrubs and switchels aren’t for you? Then it’s time to try something made with whey instead — like KeVita’s line of sparkling probiotic drinks. Not quite as bubbly as sparkling lemonade or seltzer, these drinks get their fizziness from fermented whey. It’s a much more subtle sparkle, which allows all the flavors to shine through.

I was raised in an Ashkenazi Jewish family, which means that unlike my friends from Sephardic or Mizrahi backgrounds, who eat rice and legumes and corn on Passover, I was instructed to avoid them all, along with any grain-based products that aren’t matzo. As such, I grew up associating Passover with an upset stomach. (This is what happens when you subsist on seder leftovers, matzo pizzas, and matzo spread with butter and jam.

Fermented foods are bubbling up in popularity, thanks to an increasing awareness of gut health. Research suggests the balance of bacteria in our gastrointestinal systems plays a vital role in more than just digestion. In other words, there may be a connection between our gut and our bad mood or that nagging cold — and fermented foods like kimchi and kvass may put us on the right track to a healthier GI.

It happened again: While your taste buds applaud your dinner choice, your belly is less than impressed — and it’s making it known. Enter: after-dinner tonics, a homemade remedy made of herbs, vinegars, bitters, and aromatics concocted to encourage your body’s natural digestive fluids to help settle your stressed-out stomach. The different elements used to build your homemade tonic should depend on what your indigestion woes are.

Meet the after-dinner spritzer. This is the drink to whip up after a particularly rich meal when your belly needs some help settling after too many enthusiastic bites at dinner. Turmeric plays a starring role in this spritzer, along with orange juice and apple cider vinegar, and together with a handful of herbs, this drink becomes the delicious solution for your full tummy woes.

An after-dinner tonic made with a variety of herbs, including rosemary, sage, and mint, and topped off with kombucha is the perfect tonic to sip on after a meal has left you stuffed and bloated. Each ingredient in this tonic adds to the flavor and function of this drink. The sage and rosemary are carminative herbs and aid the body is producing the digestive juices that help accelerate the digestive process. Fresh ginger amplifies the gingery flavor of the kombucha and helps settle any nausea.

Germany has sauerkraut, Thailand has naem (fermented pork sausage), Sweden has surströmming (fermented herring) — it seems every culture has its own traditional fermented food. And with good reason: Research suggests these foods are nutritional powerhouses, and fermentation has also been found to break down poison in foods, like cyanide in cassava. Beyond their alleged health benefits, though, fermented foods are also delicious and useful in building tasty meals.

When friends ask how to ferment deli-style pickles, I recommend that they start by practicing with asparagus spears. By practicing with asparagus you’ll learn all you need to know by the time cucumber season arrives. Thankfully this isn’t all about learning; asparagus makes for great pickles and is a welcome accompaniment to spring grilling. Preserving has taught me to look at ingredients differently than I used to; each part of a fruit or vegetable can be prepared in different ways.

What do pancakes, puppies, and pillows have in common? Fluff! Nine out of 10 pancake connoisseurs (aka, my friends) agree that fluffiness is the most desirable trait in pancake prep (and puppies and pillows, too). The tenth guy said “soft,” but he’s never been one for words. There are a few tried-and-true ways to achieve ultimate pancake fluff, one of them being Chef Clayton Miller’s tip to incorporate three whipped egg whites for soufflé-like cakes.

A few years ago, homemade sauerkraut was just another DIY food trend, but happily now it looks like home kraut-making is here to stay. Why? Perhaps it’s because it’s easy, delicious, good-for-you, and fun. I say, lean into your kraut-love with abandon! These five important tips will help you make delicious, nutritious sauerkraut a beloved kitchen staple.

It’s no secret that cashews — a stand-in for all manner of creamy spreads, dips, and desserts — are a vegan’s best friend. But as lovely as a dollop of cashew ricotta can taste slathered on a scone or tossed in with a pear-and-walnut salad, you just can’t get that sharp, aged real-cheese flavor (not to mention meltability) from the nut stuff. Or can you? Enter: rejuvelac, one simple ingredient that launches cashew and other nut cheeses to the next level.

Pickling and fermenting are two methods for naturally preserving foods, and both produce some delicious, tangy results. Do you know what sets them apart? While both pickling and fermenting produce different results, there are some areas of overlap that can easily spark some confusion.

Gut flora getting you down? Microbiome under siege? With the surge of interest in the health of our gut, Gusty, a new Brooklyn-based food startup, has set out to conquer our colon conundrums with a carefully curated selection of artisanal fermented foods delivered directly to your doorstep. To learn more about this new endeavor, we spoke with founders Edith Whey and Lawrence Scoby.