Lidia Celebrates America

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Lidia

In 1982 with just two copper kettles, Justin and Larry started a jam company in the basement of a candy shop where they filled each jar of preserves by hand. They called it American Spoon because they felt their jam should be spooned on, not spread with a knife. I'd seen Justin pass down his passion for fresh products to his grandson. Now I want to see how he's passing down the passion for jam-- Follow me. -

Lidia

To the American Spoon employees. Lidia, this is Chris Dettmer. -

Lidia

Good morning Chris, how you doing? Very nice to meet you. All right, we're going to invade your little test kitchen here. Let's make some jam! This is where the magic happens. -

Lidia

So a strawberry and rhubarb jam. -

Chris

Classic. Rhubarb macerated, and then some of the early glow of strawberries macerated, so just with a little sugar and lemon juice. How can you get the juice out of the fruit without smashing it or pressing it? Well that's chemistry. -

Justin

That's the chemistry of the osmosis. So we have all this very flavorful liquid. What we wanna do first is, we're going to drain it all. Okay. And so we have all this. It's very flavorful, but we wanna put that syrup in the pan first, and reduce it down. Mmm, delicious. So the great thing about this two-stage is that most of the pectin is still over here. So you can get to a higher temperature without sticking or scorching in the liquid phase. -

Chris

Now we just put our mix of strawberry and rhubarb in there. What we wanna do now is just heat this all up together. -

Lidia

After 45 minutes over a low flame, the jam is almost ready. One of the first ways we can start telling it's done is when this first came to a boil it had all that pink foam, as we see it diminish, we see that still that small ring of foam, that's one of the ways we can tell it's done. The more traditional way is just putting a plate or a spoon in the freezer, dropping a dollop of jam on it and seeing how it sets up. -

Lidia

And I can taste it? -

Chris

Yeah, then we can taste it. Delicious. So good. - Wow. I can taste the strawberries, the rhubarb, everything separate, and yet a beautiful harmony all together. And so now it's ready to be jarred? Yeah. - Okay. You wanna make sure that everything is sterile in that pan. And then the heat from the product is going to actually sterilize anything in the jar. So we can be confidant that, in January or February, when we pull this out of the pantry, it's still perfectly safe to eat. A little taste of summer, in the middle of winter.