After spending a relaxing day harvesting mirto and walking around the woods of La Cera we had to do something with all the berries, so we decided to use eight chilograms of mirto to fix the traditional sardinian liquor and about six chilolograms to fix jam. For now I will only describe the process to make jam since to make mirto, berries need to rest under 90° alcohool for at least three months. So here's my recipe I hope you will enjoy it 😃
Ingredients:
4 kg of mirto pulp and juice
4 kg of apples
5 kg of white sugar
1 cup lemon juice
Place berries in a large stainless steel or enamel saucepan and add two or three cups of water. Bring to a full boil and then turn it off.
After heating up the berries in water wich was necessary to make them softer and moist you need to get rid of seeds and obtein as much more juice as possible. To do so you can press the berries in a vegetable mill or you can process them in a tomato sauce making machine like we do.
Mirto goes through the machine which devides peel and seeds from pulp and juice. After processing all the berries, we extracted about 4 kg of pulp and juice to which we added apples, sugar and lemon juice. Apples are necessary because they give to the jam the right consistency for the pectin they contain and they also take out the bitterness from mirto berries which are more aromatic than sweet.
After mixing all ingredients you bring them back to a boil and when apple slices get soft you need to grind them with a handblender.
After grinding the apples you need to keep boiling and stirring the mixture untill it reaches the right consistency. It will take an hour or two and it depends on how much water you added at the beginning or on how strong your burner is. In the meanwhile you can boil your canning jars in order to sterilize them. Put all the empty jars and lids in a saucepan covered with water and let them boil for half an hour.
After boiling jars and finally getting jam out of the previous fruit mixture, you need to fill all the glass jars and put them again to boil for half an hour. This will seal the jars,taking air out of them and it will make it possible for you to storage it safely and taste it even years after you've fixed it without getting worried about it getting spoiled or ruined.
We did it !!! Finally after a hard day's work we canned a delicious homemade jam excellent on bread or pancakes for breakfast or on a piece of tasty cheese like pecorino for a snack with a glass of red wine🍞🍷🧀
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