Several months ago a friend gave me a jar of rhubarb ginger jam – oh wow! It has the sharpness of the rhubarb and the liveliness of the ginger. Delicious on toast, but amazing on ice cream! Good with roast pork… There are a ton of ways you can pair this jam to make something remarkable – it’s just a matter of imagination.

Rhubarb Ginger Jam

My jar of jam is just about empty. Time to make some for myself. I checked out several recipes online – the one I decided to try was the one I found at “all recipes.com“. My friend got her recipe from the UK Certo website. (You can also download their book of recipes).

I started with a bag of frozen rhubarb (early January is definitely not rhubarb season although fresh rhubarb was what the recipe called for), put it in a pot (still frozen), added three tablespoons of grated fresh ginger root (I keep my ginger root in the freezer and grate it as I need it, works fine), three cups of sugar (next time I’ll try 2 1/2 cups – it shouldn’t affect the sweetness all that much and will reduce the quantity of sugar used; I might even be able to get away with 2 cups), and three tablespoons of fresh squeezed lemon juice (no substitute for this).

Started the mixture on a low heat to defrost the rhubarb – once it was softened, I turned the heat up to medium high, brought the mixture to a boil, turned it down to medium and boiled for 15 minutes until the rhubarb was falling apart. (Here’s where I cheated a bit – I used my immersion blender to break up the remaining intact pieces of rhubarb after boiling for 15 minutes, but didn’t whiz it enough to purée the jam).

The recipe made 5 small bottles of jam which will go into my refrigerator as soon as it’s cooled to room temperature.

I couldn’t resist tasting as I went along – I admit to licking the spoon and the pot before cleaning them. The taste is heavenly. Do try it.