We made the pineapple preserves as I hinted we would and it was a great success. A little bitter from the limes, salty, sweet and pineapply. I want to compulsively eat it straight from the jar, then smear it on toast, pour it on ice cream or Greek yogurt, and mix some in a cocktail.

4C chunks and mashed fruit
2C sugar
2tbl lime juice
zest of 4 limes
1/2 tsp smoked salt
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
2tsp calcium water
2tsp pectin

Cut pineapple into chunks and lightly mash some of it.

Before you start jamming make calcium water
1. Put 1/2t white calcium powder and 1/2C water
in a small, clear jar with lid.
2. Store in refrigerator between uses. Lasts a
number of months—discard if settled white powder discolors.
3. Shake well before using.

Wash and rinse jars; let stand in hot water. Bring lids and rings to boil; turn down heat; let stand in hot water.

Prepare fruit. Measure fruit or juice into a stainless steel pot (or Le Crusseut, or copper if you are so lucky) with a lime juice.

Add proper amount of calcium water from jar into pan; stir well.

Measure sugar into separate bowl and thoroughly mix proper amount of pectin powder sugar. Bring fruit to boil. Add pepper and salt. Skim foam off the top and discard. Add your mixed pectin sugar and stir vigorously 1-2 min. while cooking to dissolve pectin. Return to boil and remove from heat. Skim off all foam that has formed at the top.

Fill jars to 1/4″ of top. Wipe rims clean. Screw on 2-piece lids. Put filled jars in boiling water to cover. Boil 10 min. (add 1 min. more for every 1,000 ft. above sea level). Remove from water. Let  jars cool. Check seals–lids should be sucked down. Lasts about 3 weeks to infinity once opened.

Notes: Pectin completes its jell when thoroughly cool. Color changes over time do not affect flavor or quality. Lemon juice will make your jam brighter, and is essential for color duration in strawberry jam. If mixture foams while cooking, add 1/2t butter or margarine per batch.

spiral cut pineapple

My friend Lauren has been helping me cook the jams on a couple of occasions, and she’s great–cheerful, funny, smart and skilled with a knife. She’s a huge fan of pineapple, and we found ourselves lost in reverie as we recalled the delicious southeast Asian roadside treat of fresh picked pineapple, lime, chili & salt. It’s pineapple season south of here, so I decided to make a pineapple preserve in her honor. I wanted to keep it a secret, but I can’t keep anything that I’m excited about a secret, so I told all her friends and then I told her. She showed me an incredible technique for cutting pineapple that she learned from a little girl in Cambodia.The fruit is sliced in a spiral, thus removing the eyes and woody bits while sacrificing the least amount of delicious flesh. It will be a rad jam, look for it at a market near you….

Emma, Anarchy in a Jar Jam Apprentice

Meet Emma Krautheim, the fabulous jam apprentice who has joined Anarchy in a Jar for the summer to learn the art of jammin. She’s a student at Smith College studying Sociology & Urban Studies, she’s super nice and friendly, she’s from the rad state of Minnesota and she’s already made a few jars of jam in her day. It’s her first time living in NYC, so give her a big hello and welcome when you see her at the markets and delivering jam around town. She’ll be pumpin the jamz this weekend alongside me at the Greenpoint Food Market, so come say hi and eat some jam.

My boyfriend, Ben Flanner, is starting an acre farm on a roof in Queens. It’s amazing, innovative, crazy and wonderful. The team at Brooklyn Grange needs money to help get the dirt up there and the plants growing for summer! Check out their video and all the raddness:

Brooklyn Grange will be a 1 acre rooftop farm situated in New York City. Such a commercially-viable rooftop farm has yet to be realized in this country. We will use simple greenroof infrastructure to install over 1 million pounds of soil on the roof of an industrial building on which we will grow vegetables nine months of the year. Being in the country’s largest city, the farm will create a new system of providing local communities with access to fresh, seasonal produce. We plan to expand quickly in the first few years, covering multiple acres of New York City’s unused rooftops with vegetables. The business has many environmental and community benefits, and allows our city dwelling customers to know their farmer, learn where their food comes from, and become involved.

The farm will be run by Ben Flanner, who started and ran a proof of concept rooftop farm in the summer of ’09. The beyond-organic produce will be sold directly to the community at an onsite stand, affording shoppers a direct relationship with the farm and farmers. Additional produce will be sold to a small group of market-driven local restaurants.

Our model capitalizes on an unused resource – rooftop space – and has the potential to change the way densely populated cities produce, distribute and consume food.

Your contribution will go towards ordering our lightweight rooftop soil, renting a crane to install that soil, and seeds and irrigation for our summer crops.

*All of our produce prizes are for local pick-up. It’s a great chance to see firsthand how your food is grown. For those who can’t pick up their produce prize in person, shoot an email with your address to brooklyngrangefarm@gmail.com and we’ll send you a starter set of our favorite heirloom seeds so you can grow your own!

the rad new BK farmacy & soda fountain

cool shelves @ the BK farmacy & soda fountain

bluebell about to shake her spokes on discovery channel

my little sister makes grilled cheese with jam at the market

hawking jam at the lyceum market

Where ya at? We’ve been cruisin around town, shakin’ that jam booty on TV for the Discovery Channel’s “Construction Intervention” and making grilled cheese & jam in Park Slope.

“Construction Intervention”, a new show on Discovery Channel that helps save small businesses, took on the Brooklyn Farmacy & Soda Fountain in Carroll Gardens. It’s a great store run by Petey & his sister Gia, two of the loveliest people–they are exactly who you want a show like that to help out. And they did an awesome job! Look at the pics above! I was their special “surprise” present that these kind of shows always offer. I let them design their own Farmacy jam flavor. It was fun and an honor to help these kids start a great new business — hopefully I didn’t look too foolish or bob my head incessantly like I usually do on TV. Go get your egg cream on starting May 14th!

My sister Emma and I also sold jam at the Brooklyn Lyceum Craft and Food Market. She made grilled cheese with hot fireman’s pear chipotle jam. It was delish! As always at markets in NYC, there was a slew of great vendors offering amazing food, beverage & stuff. And as always, the charming and friendly people of Brooklyn make it all worthwhile. One little girl said in a hushed and serious tone, “this is better than better,” after eating 3s company triple berry jam. I hired her on the spot to be my spokesperson.

young anarchy fan eats a pizzella with jam

People often ask what the best jam carrier is, and the answer is, hands-down, pizzelle. I often make them for markets, and might start selling them this summer since people seem to dig them so much.

But what are they? Traditional Italian waffle cookies made from flour, eggs, sugar, butter, and vanilla, anise, or lemon zest. Developed from the ancient Roman crustulum, food lore claims they are the oldest cookie.

In 700 BCE, snakes terrorized the region of Abruzzo in south central Italy. Life was intolerable, with the vicious snakes biting everyone, so the people of Abruzzo appealed to the god Apollo for help. He advised them to capture the snakes, domesticate them by draping them around his statue and then release them into the wild again. It worked, and everyone celebrated by eating pizzelle. They are still eaten to celebrate the Festival of the Snakes, now known as the Feast Day of San Domenico.

Pizzelles were originally baked over open fire using irons that would be made with family crests on them and passed down through each generation. Today they are made using a pizzelle iron, which is similar to a waffle iron, but has a pretty floral pattern rather than a boring grid.

Pizzelle are awesome and keep the snakes at bay, what more can you ask for in a cookie?

ramps: foraged, loved, pickled

WARNING: this is a post about pickles, not jam.

I know, I’m a cheater. This is a website about jam and I’m squeezing in a post about pickles. Everyone knows pickles are sexy, masculine, brutish in their flavor as they swivel their savory, salty boldness in the face of the more traditional (dare I say feminine), sweet, simple, demure jam. But whatever, I love pickles. I’m obsessed with pickles. I eat them almost every day. Thankfully, I’m friends with the best pickle maker in town, Shamus Jones of Brooklyn Brine, and he keeps me satiated.

NYC is an infectious town full of bored people ready and waiting for fads to sweep through, arouse and amuse us. Ramps are perfect for this: wild, available for only a few weeks in spring, and they must be foraged from secret places in the forest. They also come at a time when we are so bored and sick of winter and winter foods, root vegetables and apples–meh. Ramps arrive in all their green, spicy, garlicky glory at the Greenmarkets and restaurant menus–beautiful, delicious wild leeks that allow us to believe that spring is finally here.

My man went foraging last weekend with his friend who knows a super secret location in Pennsylvania (I won’t even tell you which river it’s beside!), and they gathered ginormous bags of ramps. We’ve been eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but we still had a lot. So we decided to pickle them.

White vinegar, honey, sugar, salt, mustard seeds, coriander seeds, fennel, star anise, hot peppers, and fresh thyme. Phew! Lots of flavor. They look awesome, and once they’ve sat for awhile and been infused with all the seasonings, ramp season will be just a memory. But, thankfully, we’ll have these pickles to reminisce with.

Still, as always, in solidarity, Jam on.

lavender baby before it heads to the roof

As springtime bursts into glorious verdure throughout the city and leaves erupt into canopies of vibrant green, we all dream of summer’s bounty and plan to this year, finally, for real, complete that DIY gardening project in our window/fire escape/roof/backyard. Our dreams are collective, as can be seen by the plethora of plants and little seedlings that have started to arrive at the Greenmarkets.

I pranced through rows of baby plants, imagining my fire escape ensconced in morninglories while I plucked ripe tomatoes off the lush vines that swayed beside my open window. Ah, to dream!

For me, daydreams lead to jam. I got a hankering to play with blueberries and start planning for the delicious, hot days of August. Lavender is a flavor that I love to add to my blueberry pie, so I decided to add it to some blueberry jam. It’s good. But lavender is expensive, and easy to grow, so I decided this was one ingredient I could go super local with. My man runs a rooftop farm in Brooklyn, but he was noncommittal about planting me some lavender. I solved the problem by buying some organic seedlings at the Greenmarket. Aren’t they pretty? They smell and taste delicious, and make me instantly relaxed! I’ve been testing recipes in the kitchen this week and perfecting my ratios.

Now we’ll just have to wait until August to taste the results!

the Lyonsville Sugar House -- photo by Carol Lloyd McCarthy

Janine Stockin standing in front of her Lyonsville Sugar House -- photo by Carol Lloyd McCarthy

the beautiful finished product

One of Anarchy’s signature flavors is Easy Like Sunday Morning blueberry jam with maple syrup. I get my maple syrup from some lovely folks Upstate at the Lyonsville Sugar House in Accord, New York.  When Spring begins to dissipate the dark winter, the Stockin family gathers and then boils down the sap in a wood-fired stainless steel avaporator. Their award-winning syrup is processed from the tree to the finished product in less that one day. John Stockin has been making maple syrup in Lyonsville with the help of friends & family since 1973. The Stockin family – John, Janine, Ben & Raymond – sets approximately 4000 taps, producing 600 to 1200 gallons of syrup yearly. This sounds like a lot, but it’s small batch and the best damn maple syrup I have ever tasted. It must be the love they add that gives it the extra delicious flavor. I like it grade B for my jam, to give it that rich and toasty flavor.

I couldn’t make it up to their pancake breakfast this year, but my mom grabbed some gallons of syrup for me to add to this year’s Easy Like Sunday Morning.

student pours jam into jars -- image by Alexander Bitar © 2010

little hotties ready to be capped -- image by Alexander Bitar © 2010

perfect pouring by star jam student -- image by Alexander Bitar © 2010

i lecture about jamz -- image by Alexander Bitar © 2010

we taste some final product: yum -- image by Alexander Bitar © 2010

me with the student's final jamz -- image by Alexander Bitar © 2010

I had a great time teaching jam class to a bunch of folks last week with Kara Masi of  Ted & Amy Supper Club. Here are some shots taken by the amazing photographer, Alexander Bitar.