since many years i plan to cook rose hips jam but all the years more important things came up and yes, i was a bit afraid of the effort. well, this year i gave me a kick, encouraged by the september blog event of gärtnerblog around what to do with rose hips.

so i started to look for a way how to do this without going completely crazy, as everybody warned me. and yes, simply the imagination to cut off the rest of the blossom and the stem of every single rose hip, after picking them by hand, endangered by the thorns, is awful.

i found some recipes suggesting to cook the rose hips as they are, with all theirs blossoms and stems and press the fruits through the food-mill or mouli-légume. all the recipes claimed that this is a very lazy way to make rose hips jam.

i must admit, i already made simpler and more uncomplicated jams. cooking fruits was fine and cooking jam with the fruit purée was fine too. but the part with the mouli-légume in-between was time consuming and annoying. but ok, at the end i came up with six jars of very delicious jam and i will enjoy it each time i will eat it.

and once i pressed out the last single drop out of the fruit purée, i was unable to throw the remaining fruit mash away and cooked some rose hips syrup out of it.

rose hips jam:

rose hips
jam sugar (amount depends on the weight of the fruit purée you will win)

wash the rose hips, place them in a large pan and cover with water. cook for about one hour until the fruits are very soft. to strain the rose hips, put one ladl of fruits each time in the moulin-légume and add a bit of the cooking water. i recommend to use the medium filter first and to strain the fruit purée through a sieve afterwards to remove the last small hairs of the rose hips.

once your done with that, weigh out the rose hips purée and add the appropriate amount of jam sugar. in my case i had 2 kg rose hips purée and added 1 kg jam sugar. cook the mixture until the jam starts to jelly. this will take a few minutes only. how to do the jelly test if you are not sure when the jam will be ready you can read in my post about the homemade cherry jam.

now you can fill the jam in clean jam jars, close and let them rest for about 5 minutes upside down to create a vacuum.

if you still have some energy, you can bake a tasty soda bread to accompany the jam.

soda bread:

500 g white flour
500 ml buttermilk
1 tsp natron
1/2 tsp salt

simply combine all the ingredients to a smooth dough and form a bread loaf. preheat your oven to 220° C. place the bread loaf on a baking tray and bake for 15 minutes. then reduce the heat to 190° C and bake for another 20 to 25 minutes. allow to cool down before serving and enjoy with your rose hips jam for example. it will be a perfect autumn breakfast.