Kitchen Products

What Makes Our Gourmet Preserves So Special

The Fruit It's freshly harvested, it's harvested when it's ripe, and there's lots of it in each jar. Most of the berries are picked daily from our organic farm and carted straight into our licensed farm kitchen. This includes strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, currants, gooseberries, tomatoes and peppers. If we run low on raspberries or blueberries we supplement our supply with berries from local farmers whose quality we trust and have experience with. Stone fruit (peaches, cherries and plums) comes from a Michigan farm who we have also been working with for years and completely trust their quality. All peaches are tree-ripened. Once happy with the quailty of the fruit, we make sure there is plenty of it in the preserves, so you can actually taste the fruit rather than the sugar. Our fruit preserves are chunky, with whole or large-cut pieces of fruit that burst with fresh flavor when you bite into it.

The Sugar Some sugar is necessary and even desirable. Necessary to enure the product can be "preserved" safely, and desirable because limited amounts of sugar bring out the juices and enhance the flavor of the fruit. We keep the sugar to a minimum however, by using no commercial pectin in fruit products with enough natural pectin, and a low-sugar pectin in fruits that are low in natural pectin (these are labeled as "low-sugar". We never use sugar substitutes as we feel this sacrifices the taste.

The Process We have chosen to stay small and keep the quality high. In the language of the day, we are known as artisans. We work with small batches (6-10 jars), do not use any artificial preservatives, fillers, artificial coloring and the only water in our products comes from the fruit. Compartively, large-scale jam companies often process jams in cavernous batches where the flavor is boiled out, with less expensive sweeteners (i.e. corn syrup) and far less fruit. In many cases, the fruit that is used is often seconds that are "good enough for jam."

The Flavors Through research, trial and error and a lot of comments from the tasters at the farmers markets, I have developed a range of unique flavors that pair a certain spirit or herb with a particular fruit to enhance the richness of the fruit, or to simply bring out a delightful new flavor.  Many of the single fruit preserves are still available for the purists at heart.