Tag: food

The best jam in the world!

The above title is, of course, simply clickbait, since  everyone knows the best jam in the world is actually produced in Megan Markle’s kitchen over in Montecito in California, and marketed under the, “American Riviera Orchard” label. How do we know this? Well partly because she’s told us so, but mostly from empirical evidence: demand appears to be so high it’s simply impossible to buy a jar anywhere!

At the other end of the spectrum, there is probably a lot of competition for the worst jam in the world. A strong contender might be Ticklers “Plum and Apple” jam which was produced in large quantities for the British Army during WW1 and allegedly didn’t contain any of either fruit.  However, we won that particular conflict, so it can’t have been that bad, and anyway it’s not available now. So this leaves the really budget jams from the supermarkets, the cheapest of which, from Aldi, retails at about 39p a jar and seem to be basically thickened cheap fruit juice. It’s probably briefly worth considering if you’re running the household on a tight budget, but ideally you’d want something better for your kids. What you might call ‘basic’ supermarket jam (Tesco) retails for 89p a jar, which is better, but at that price must be a loss-leader.

This rather raises the question of what a jar of jam should cost. Those of us who have tried making our own using fresh fruit know that it can taste so wonderful that the big question becomes, what do the commercial manufacturers do with all the flavour after they’ve taken it all out? We also know it turns out to be somewhat expensive with PYO fruit prices being something north of £11/kg. Thus a jar will usually work out at a little over £3.00.

So this got me thinking:  Can we make a high quality low cost jam? 

Well, the answer is, Yes, you can!

The solution is frozen fruit from the supermarket.  Frozen raspberries retail at about £7.50/kg, so add 1kg of sugar and for £8.60 you can make excellent Raspberry Jam for about £2.15 a jar (allowing for evaporation).   Ok, that’s still expensive. But there are several lower cost alternatives, all of which work well – mixed summer fruits, or Black Forrest mix.

But I recently discovered Tesco sell 1kg bags of so called, “Imperfect fruit”, a mix of blackcurrants, redcurrants, blackberries and strawberries, for the princely sum of £2.99.    Yup, under £3 per kg… and it makes a beautiful mixed fruit jam!  It’s also full of pectin, so there’s no need to add any – any sugar will do. Honestly, I couldn’t believe how good it was.  This is the recipe:

  • 1kg bags imperfect frozen fruit (£2.99)
  • 1kg granulated sugar (£1.09)
  • 1 lemon (use zest and juice) (35p).

Method: defrost fruit in microwave oven, add sugar, lemon juice and zest. Boil until it reaches setting point (104c), breaking up the fruit a bit using the potato masher if necessary. Cool and put into sterilised jars.

Makes 4x 380g jars. Cost per jar, £4.43/4 = £1.11. A bargain!

The only question remaining is where do you get empty jam jars from? Well obviously you can save them, or buy them from Hobbycraft for about £10/doz. That’s quite an overhead, but it’s much cheaper to buy the 39p a jar of jam from Aldi and dispose of the contents – lets face it, at that price they can’t have much food value anyway!

Pubs in crisis.

As I understand it the Turks Head, Hasketons currently shut pub, has recently been sold for a figure slightly north of £600,000. I’ve got no idea who has bought it, but the now infameous Red Cat pub company (the current owners) have failed to make it work as a business and have decided to bug out. Prior to the whole COVID business it was a very successful gastro-pub, but Red Cat seem to have pulled off the impressive feat of running it into the ground in a very short time.

So far, so bad, but the problem seems to be nationwide. In todays paper I read that ‘Stonegate’, Britians largest pub chain, are struggling to service a £2.2bn debt. Given that they run about 4500 outlets (i.e. pubs, bars etc) that means that the average debt of each outlet is about £490,000. Now it’s possible the average value of each outlet is also about this figure, so the company might just be worth…. oh I don’t know, maybe, err – nothing. To me that seems completely bonkers – the business model must be completely broken and the owners asleep at the wheel for this situation to have arisen.

But if this reflects the current state of the so called, “hospitality industry”, we can expect a lot more disasters are going to fall upon Britians pubs. This is a great shame – I like pubs. They’re relaxing, pleasant, social places and I tend to feel good in them.

But the problem is quite obvious really – they’re just too damn expensive. I mean, over £5 for a pint of beer!!!!!! For goodness sake, that’s over 10x the cost of the ingredients. Over £7 for a modest glass of wine: they’re out of their minds if they expeact us to pay that – it’s more than I usually pay for a bottle! See my analysis of the price of a pint for a better insight. And then there’s the food – I’m sorry, but I’m not paying £15 per person for a meal I could cook myself. Not happening!

But in reality, the pub owner needs to make a profit, and the venue has to pay the wages of the staff. That’s probably 3 people. And there’s the problem in a nutshell.

Cast your mind back 150 years. (OK, that’s impossible – how would you know?) But take Samuel Moss as an example – he ran the Turks Head for about 50 years from 1859. By profession he was a thatcher. OK, it’s not really clear how much thatching he did during that period and the economics of the day were very different, but the point is, he didn’t have to rely on pub takings for an income.

So let’s go back to basics (as John Major said – ha ha, no , don’t laugh!). The British village pub started in an organic way – people, mostly women, brewed beer at home and sold it from or in their houses to all-commers. The whole business grew from that. No licencing laws, business rates or insurance in those days. Just do it! There were also ‘Inns’, which were stopping places for travellers: a different market, but the principle is similar – a simple supply and demand situation.

And maybe that’s the model for the future. We all become more sociable in our own homes. I, for example, enjoy brewing my own beer. Maybe I should make modest changes to my domestic arrangements and ‘entertain’ friends with my own brews on a more regular basis. Convert my workshop into a ‘man den’ where we can all relax – by invitation only of course. No need for anything formal (for obvious reasons), but payment in kind, bartering, favours, etc become the order of the day. Under the radar sort of stuff – not that I’d anything actually illegal, but maybe just see how far the current rules can be pushed.

Of course, the new owners of the Turks Head might play a blinder and we end up with a nice village pub again. Then the problem goes away. But it’s good to start thinking about alternatives….. Cheers everybody!