Continued: In a jam

Call it berry guilt. If you've ever watched a flat of beautiful, locally grown berries gradually deteriorate on your kitchen counter, then you've experienced it. The honeysuckle fragrance that the little orbs throw off grows thicker in the air by the minute -- as does the anxiety to do something with them before they rot.

As much as I appreciate the daylong steam facial I get when I use a boiling-water bath to process jam, my ever-shrinking free time has forced me to find shortcuts in canning. If there's a way to preserve without processing, to avoid dangerously dragging the gigantic canner off the top shelf, then I'm doing it. Obviously, I'm a fan of freezer jams -- an uncooked pectin-spiked mixture that you pack into jars and then into the freezer. But even a full batch of that can rob too many hours from a sunny summer day.

Working with smaller quantities, however, renews my energy for preserving. Modern living just doesn't require the enormous batches favored by my grandmother's generation. She ladled her jams into sea-blue-tinted quart jars and pulled up a fresh one from the cellar about once a week. As families now usually consist of fewer children (and even fewer hired hands), smaller half-pint jars suit us just fine.  

Not only is the quantity of most jam recipes too big, they're also pretty sweet, most stiffened with enough sugar to preserve them for years in a dark cellar.

Quick refrigerator jams, which see neither a canner nor a cellar and are meant to be consumed within a couple of months, don't need to be as sweet as traditional jams, which generally call for 50 percent sugar by weight. I use a 60 percent fruit/40 percent sugar formula, which is enough sugar to candy the fruit, but not so much as to mask its natural acidity.

In general, these shorter-term jams -- or, technically, compotes -- substitute a few hours of marination for the white sugar. The extra time the fruit spends wallowing in the sugar allows it to gradually absorb its fill of sugar syrup. Cooked the next day, these spoonable, fresh-tasting preserves last for weeks in the fridge (and longer in the freezer).

An (over) abundance of fruit

My husband is an intrepid forager who often returns from a walk in the woods with a bucket of gooseberries or plums. Unexpected fruit is a great surprise, but short of eating it all raw by the handful to make it disappear, I have to deal with it. The occasional unwelcome glut has inspired some pretty unconventional jam-making.

I tend toward the savory side of the kitchen, and roasted jams indulge that side of my culinary brain. More like cooking than preserving, this technique taps into chefs' current weakness for confit -- a technique for poaching large chunks of fruit in its own sweetened syrup until it is heavy and sodden with it, tender to the bite and absolutely delicious.

Nothing is easier than roasting. I crank the oven, pour the rinsed fruit on a sheet tray, sprinkle it with sugar and throw on a few aromatics (lemon peel, whole spices, herbs, ginger, etc.) before popping the whole thing into the oven. After about 15 minutes at high heat, the exuded fruit juices hit the sugar and begin to caramelize. A few minutes more soften the fruit and give it dark, roasted edges. Miraculously, the skins lift easily from this half-cooked fruit, saving me from the steamy tedium of blanching on a hot day.

Then I scrape the entire pan into a pot, add more sugar and let it marinate a while before finally cooking it until the juice thickly coats the fruit. Bold, tart and aromatic, these jams straddle the sweet/savory line, making them perfect for brunch, a meal naturally torn between the sugary and the salty. I especially like the sweet cherry tomato and vanilla jam on a hot buttered biscuit or spread on toast, where it provides bright relief in between bites of egg and bacon.

Local, local, local is the best

Sun-ripened local berries taste leagues better -- sweeter, more sour, more fragrant -- than the invincible imported sort available in the supermarket year-round. When they start to show up on the farm stands, I think of a former co-worker, a Viennese pastry chef who told me to never cook a perfect berry. I trusted him: His simple berry concoctions tasted as if they'd made a beeline from the woods to the table.

So when I have some extra raspberries, I make a quick berry mash just as he did. I divide about two-thirds of the beautiful berries from the bruised but still succulent ones and douse the imperfect berries with powdered sugar. A quick mash with a fork makes them into a purée, which I push through a fine sieve over the perfect whole ones, cloaking them in a thick raspberry coat. These berries taste even better than the originals, yet they retain a raw, unadulterated flavor. Refrigerated, they last a week but rarely make it that long.

Pickled and potted

Alcohol is another powerful preservative and I put its potency to the test with Bachelor's Jam, a marinated mixed-berry jam of Alsatian origin which lasts for months due to a generous pour of kirsch. The Germans call it Rumtopf (and use rum instead of kirsch), but the method is the same everywhere: Mix fresh berries with half their weight of sugar in a crock and top off with a strong spirit -- 100-proof kirsch or rum. As you pick more berries, repeat the process.

After a month or two, the three layers of blackberries, raspberries and strawberries settle into thick bands of boozy jam. Unlike the roasted jams, this one is not for breakfast. Far better to sample it at the end of the day, perhaps alongside ice cream or a rich, wobbling custard, preferably in front of a crackling fire.

Traditionally, the Bachelor's Jam remains sealed until Christmas time, when indulgence runs rampant and the icy polar wind encourages daydreams set in the sweltering days of summer.

And if your memories of those hot days are blissfully free of the sweaty work of canning, even though you have the evidence right there in the dish you're holding, well, so much the better.

Amy Thielen is a chef and a writer who splits her time between Brooklyn, NY, and Two Inlets, Minnesota, near Itasca State Park.