Rose hips are plentiful and beautiful this year. Apparently, roses liked the nice first half of summer and wet August. Roses around here are the wild prickly rose (Rosa acicularis), which blooms in pretty pink for about a week in June, and for the rest of the summer serves as an invasive weed, prickly alright. In our location, fruit are of the elongated type as shown in the linked Wikipedia article. Here is how the bushes look right now, at the height of fall/autumn:
Rose hip jam s traditional in Franconia, where I come from in Germany. We use it to fill jelly donuts, traditionally for carnival. Recipes vary a little bit by what fruit are available/ If your rose hips are large and firm, you want to remove the hairy seeds in the center. This can be done either by cutting them in half and scooping the seeds out with a tiny spoon, or by squeezing the insides of the rose hip out through the end. However, our prickly rose seeds go from underripe to very soft right away and have only a shallow layer of flesh, so this doesn’t work. The alternative is to boil the rose hips entire and use a food mill of the kind called Flotte Lotte in German to squeeze out the good parts. I have the Foley type that’s classic in the US.
I made two batches. The first time I was experimenting and didn’t write down quantities very well. I used about 2 cups of rose hips, water to cover (most of which evaporated), more water to thin the very thick marc, and then about the same amount of sugar as rose hip mash and however much fruit pectin to look right.
The second time I also had some local apples. (This being Alaska, apples only barely grow here. The ones I got are pretty tart but flavorful cooking apples, just about 2 in (5 cm) in diameter. So here’s the recipe
- 260 g (9 oz) rose hips, bud parts and stems removed (2.25 cups, approximately)
- water to cover
- 250 g (8.75 oz) cooking apples, cut in quarters/chunks
- 250 g (8.75 oz) sugar
- 1 Tbsp fruit pectin (Bell RealFruit Classic Pectin, which contains citric acid an dextrose)
Pull stems and bud leaves off rose hips, put in saucepan, add enough water to cover. Cover with lid and boil for about 1 h. Then add apple chunks (they’ll stick out a little from the water but should be wetted — add a little water if necessary). Boil for another 15 min until apples are soft. Break up all fruit parts with potato masher. Set aside to cool.
Use food mill to extract the fruit marc. With a simple Foley mill this takes many passes, and is a good bit of work. I ended up with about 450 g (1 lb) of fruit mash after milling. If it is very thick, thin with water. Put back into saucepan (wash it in-between), add sugar and pectin, stir well and bring to a boil. Boil until the jam thickens, stirring with a wooden spoon. Do a gelling test to figure out when you boiled it enough. From what I read, enough of the very high vitamin C content of rose hips should survive the boiling for the product to be still a great source, but you want to boil as little as necessary. Also, I like my rose hip jam somewhat runny. YMMV.
The above yielded about 1.5 pints / 700 ml of jam, which is sweet and tasty. I’m sure it is possible to reduce the sugar a little and play with the amount of pectin.
London, Paris, Fairbanks 