Jam is obsolete

July 25th, 2020
food
Jam is a very natural way to preserve fruit. The fruit is ripe only a small fraction of the year, you'd like to be able to eat it all year long, so you cook it with enough sugar that it won't go bad for a long time. But now that we have freezers, jam is obsolete.

When you make jam, you change the taste and texture of the fruit in several ways:

  • Squishing the fruit makes it into a more consistent texture, suitable for spreading.
  • Adding sugar makes the jam sweeter, and also much less healthy.
  • Heat changes the flavor of the fruit, With more volatile flavors evaporating.
  • Heat evaporates some of the water, thickening it (reducing).
  • Heat releases pectin, or you add additional pectin, which gels the jam.

Some people make freezer jam, which skips the heated steps, and gives you a flavor much closer to fresh fruit. Because it hasn't been cooked thoroughly, you need to store it in the freezer, but since freezers are a thing now, that's not a problem.

We can go a step further, though, and just use frozen fruit. Take frozen raspberries, defrost them, and squish them up with a fork:


on eggy waffles, with nutella

This takes about a minute for defrosting, 10s for squishing, and is far superior to jam. Not so sweet, better flavor, and it's cheaper [1] and healthier as well!

Being able to store traditional jam in the refrigerator once you've opened it is an advantage, but I think it's a temporary one. Over time, I expect households will shift towards more freezer space relative to refrigerator space, as the quality of frozen food continues to rise. We got a chest freezer soon after we bought our house, and I'm glad we did!


[1] Our grocery store has raspberry jam for $2.75/lb, frozen raspberries for $4.39/lb, and jam is ~40% fruit. Though since we have the freezer space like raspberries a lot I've been buying them online, 30lb at $3.08/lb shipped. A shipment fills 6-8 one-gallon ziplocs depending on whether it ends up mostly whole or mostly pieces.

Referenced in:

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Ozy and Vasili Review Lilo and Stitch

Sometimes my seven-year-old, Vasili, wants to see some godawful movie that makes me want to melt my eyeballs out of my head.

via Thing of Things June 27, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

more     (via openring)