Rose Hip Jam

Image: Rose Hip Jam

• Ingredients
  • ~1.5kg rose hips
  • ~1kg sugar
• Instructions
  • Cut off the stems and black ends and wash the rose hips. (Image)
  • Just barely cover the cleaned rose hips with water and boil them until soft. I use a pressure cooker, in which I boil them for ~10 minutes at high pressure, then leave them to cool until the pressure is gone. I'm not sure how long it would take without a pressure cooker.
  • Use a food mill to separate the pulp from the seeds. I've heard that some people instead scrape out each rose hip individually before boiling them. That's probably the better version since it doesn't allow any of the scratchy hairs to get into the jam, but it's a lot of work. (Image)
  • Combine with sugar and possibly a bit of water, then bring to a boil. I also added a bit of water since the pulp was fairly thick, but I don't think that would have been necessary. If I hadn't added the water, I probably wouldn't have had to boil it for as long as I did. Of course, this also depends on how much water you added when boiling the rose hips.
  • Boil for ~10-15 minutes while frequently stirring, until it becomes hard enough (put a few drops onto a cold plate to tell if it becomes hard when cooled). It should really boil properly, so make sure to use a big enough pot that it doesn't boil over. (Image)
  • Fill into jars, screw on the lids, and set them upside-down until they have cooled.
  • Optional: Dry the seeds and other parts that were removed by the food mill. These can be used for making a sort of tea. Note that the small hairs in rose hips make you itch when you get them on your skin, so watch out when using the dried seeds. (Image)
  • Notes
    • Apparently, you should only harvest the rose hips after the first frost because the freezing temperatures make them a bit more sweet. I haven't really tested the difference, though. I've also heard that you can harvest them earlier, but then freeze them to simulate the frost.
    • The measurements here are very approximate. The general rule of thumb is to use the same amount of sugar (by weight) as fruit pulp (using less sugar is possible, but the jam goes bad more quickly then). In one instance, I had 1460g of rose hips, which turned into 1316g after cleaning and gave me 1070g of pulp, but the exact measurements depend on a lot of different factors. In this specific case, I added some water to the 1070g of pulp, but still only used 1kg of sugar (although probably that water evaporated during boiling anyways).

Source: Myself, I guess, possibly with inspiration from elsewhere.