What We Did With Rosehips: Part Two

Even after making syrup we had used only two fifths of our rosehip harvest so we decided the rest should become jam since mom had once before made rosehip jam and really liked it.

Although we consulted rosehip jam recipes and other jam recipes we ended up making up our own recipe. We started by preparing the rosehips the same way we had the last batch (taking off the stem and blossom end and chopping them). Then they went into a pan with a little water and simmered until they were all nice and soft. After a little time to cool we mashed them through a sieve with a spoon and collected the resulting puree in a bowl underneath the sieve. For good measure we took the pulp that had not made it through the sieve and repeated the process of simmering and squishing with it and got at least half as much pulp the second time around.

The pulp went into another pot to be simmered to a “jam-like” consistency but once we had added sugar we found it was already at the right consistency. How much sugar to add was a whole other matter though. The amounts given in some of the recipes we consulted just didn’t seem right so we used a ratio of sugar to pulp that seemed fairly consistent with most jam recipes in our canning book. We tasted it, decided it was perfect and poured it into sterilized jars and processed them.


From 3 pounds of rosehips we ended up with 2.5 eight ounce jars. Although this ratio seems pretty pathetic to me I just remind myself that since the rosehips were foraged the only real expenditure was time (and the negligible cost of sugar). And since we enjoy doing this sort of thing I’ll just have to think of it as a nearly free form of entertainment. (Otherwise I might go crazy thinking about the fact that I spent three days picking and preserving rosehips and all I ended up with was a few jars of jam and syrup.)