Many people use a wide range of different spreads and sauces to improve the flavor of the food that they prepare which can include cooking meats or even making sandwiches. However, one of the most common questions that are often asked is what is the difference between relish and jam?
Relish is typically a spread that contains a pickling solution that consists of vinegar, water, and sugar and is typically used to pickle a range of different vegetables and fruits. Whereas jam is traditionally used to preserve fruit and typically only uses sugar as the preserving agent. Jams tend to be used in sweet dishes whereas relish is more commonly used for savory dishes.
Jams generally have a much simpler recipe than relishes and typically the recipe is equal amounts of fruit to sugar will produce a jam of good quality. The only consideration is ensuring that any fruit that you use in a jam has a reasonable amount of pectin.
Pectin is a naturally occurring compound in fruit that helps to set the jam by controlling its consistency. Most of the fruits that most people make jam from such as strawberries, raspberries, and plums all contain pectin and do not require any special additions to the jam.
However, if you’re making jam with rhubarb which does not contain pectin it is best to combine that with another fruit such as strawberries or plums.
Is Jam Easy To Make?
Jam is extremely easy to make and requires very little effort because it is actually not necessary to chop up the fruits that you put into the jam. They can be placed whole into a saucepan with an equal weight of sugar and then cooked until the fruit disintegrates. During this process, the main thing you need to do is just continually stir the saucepan to ensure that the mixture does not stick.
In the case of stone fruits, it is not necessary to remove the stone you can simply put the fruit in whole and allow this flesh to fall off the stone, and then the stone will fall to the bottom of the jam pot. The mixture can then subsequently be drained off when it is ready to be bottled.
Jam should be packed into sterilized jars when the mixture is still hot as that will help to ensure that you get a vacuum seal on the jar which will allow the jam to last for an extended period of time. Once the Jam is in the jar it should be sealed immediately and allowed to cool before beginning to store it in a dark cool location until you are ready to use them.
How Do You Tell When Jam Is Ready To Be Bottled?
The biggest trick to making jam is to make sure that it will set once it is stored. This is difficult to tell just by looking at what is in the pot. The traditional test that is used is to place a plate in the freezer to cool it down.
Once the plate is cool enough a spoonful of jam is placed on the plate and it is tilted on its side. To make sure that the jam will set it is important to ensure that the jam is not running freely down the plate. If this is the case, it means that when the jam cools down it will set in the jars to produce the desired consistency.
How Do You Make Relishes?
Relishes are traditionally made of three main ingredients fruits or vegetables, sugar, and vinegar, however, in addition to this many recipes also add additional spices to add flavor and character to the relishes. Some of the most common ones that are typically added are mustard seeds, turmeric, cumin, and also ground cloves are also extremely common.
Relishes typically tend to take a little bit longer to prepare than jam because most recipes contain a combination of vegetables that do not disintegrate as easily as fruit. It is extremely common to have a fruit or a vegetable combined with a reasonable quantity of onion. Onions do not tend to break down as readily so, therefore, need to be chopped up prior to putting them into the saucepan.
The quickest way to do this and avoid all the tears associated with cutting up onions is to simply run them through a food processor on the slicing setting which will make light work of the job.
In terms of the quantities that are typically used in relishes, vinegar and sugar are usually added in equal amounts by weight and it is also very common to add a thickener to the recipe as well such as flour which controls the viscosity of the final product.
As most vegetables that are used in relishes do not contain any pectin, if you do not add a thickener you will end up with an extremely runny mix. A generic formula for a relish is provided below.
The vine-ripened tomatoes can be replaced with any combination of vegetables to produce a relish. Additionally, some of the spices that have been placed in this particular recipe can also be interchanged depending upon your particular tastes.
- 1.5kg vine-ripened tomatoes, peeled (see notes), chopped
- 4 onions, chopped
- 1 tbsp salt
- 2 cups (500ml) malt vinegar
- 2 firmly packed cups (500g) brown sugar
- 1 tsp chilli powder
- 2 tbsp plain flour
- 1 tbsp KEEN’S Traditional Curry Powder
- 1 tbsp KEEN’S Mustard Powder
Additionally, is also important to note that relishes can easily be made gluten-free by replacing the flour with cornflower and the malt vinegar with white vinegar.
Relishes are prepared in much the same way as jam in that most people put all of the ingredients into a large saucepan and then allow it to cook for an hour or 2 depending upon the nature of the vegetable that you have put in.
Once the relish is done it is transferred directly into sterilized jars when it is hot to ensure that the jars remain sterile and they seal properly when the mixture cools. Relishes are typically made at the end of the growing season when there is a huge glut of a range of different vegetables.
This allows people that are growing their own food to make the most of what they produced from the garden as relishes will last for 12 months to 2 years provided that they are stored in an appropriate location. Relishes should ideally be stored in a dark cool location.
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