Thanks to my raspberry bush, I've had a surplus of fresh raspberries, so I set out to find an easy recipe for homemade raspberry jam. The simplest and purest recipe I came across was from Epicurious, and consisted of only two ingredients: raspberries and sugar. It's free of fruit pectin and intensifies the raspberry flavor because fruit pectin needs to be mixed with extra sugar, which dilutes the entire formula.

I did modify the recipe a little because I didn't want it to be too sweet. Here's the recipe I came up with ...

Easy Homemade Raspberry Jam

Total time: 5-10 minutes
Yields about 1/2 cup of jam per cup of raspberries

Ingredients
1 unit of raspberries (I used 2 cups)
1/2 unit of granulated sugar (brown sugar works as well)
Optional: Lemon or lime juice, to taste

Instructions
Pour the sugar into an ovenproof pan or dish and put it in an oven preheated to 250 degrees Fahrenheit for at least 5 minutes. This helps the sugar dissolve faster on the stovetop later.

Place the raspberries in a pot and bring to a boil over high heat, all the while mashing the raspberries. Allow the raspberries to boil hard for one minute before adding the warm sugar. Add the lemon or lime juice now, if you desire. Mix together and bring the mixture back to a boil until the mixture attains a gel-like consistency, about 5 minutes. Pour into a glass jar and allow to cool before storing in the refrigerator.

Epicurious.com says that you'll be able to tell that the mixture has reached the right consistency when you dip "a cool metal spoon into the hot fruit ... lift it out and away from the steam and turn it horizontally" and the liquid "drops are very thick and two run together before falling off the spoon." Mine never did this, so I removed it from the heat and hoped for the best. Once it cooled down, it very much had a jam or preserve-like consistency.

The flavor was a very intense raspberry, and not too sweet, yet not tart. Keep in mind that there will be a lot of seeds, so if you want more of a jelly-like, seedless consistency, strain out the seeds before adding sugar. It was so much easier to make than I'd thought that I'm thinking of making jam out of other fruits now!

Let me know if you've made jam at home before, and what other fruits can be easily made into preserves or jams.