Home Food Restaurant Reviews Recipes Drink Distilleries Whisky Gin Craft Beer Locations Scran Podcast Bramble jam is easy to make, and makes the most of one of autumn's most abundant fruits. Anna Canning , a medical herbalist, ethnobotanical researcher and a key participant in Foraging Fortnight , shares her insights and a recipe for bramble jam. Anna says: "Highly nutritious and versatile, blackberries – or brambles – are a hedgerow staple of autumn in Scotland.
"They are probably also the one wild food plant that many people still seek out and pick without even considering the activity to be foraging in the now- fashionable ‘foodie’ sense. "I always make bramble jam in small batches as I find them – it’s quick, and it saves ‘faffing’ with big jelly pans, thermometers and all the other kit and caboodle you might associate with jam-making (and this, in my wee kitchen, is a definite blessing). "Brambles also combine well with other autumn hedgerow harvest fruits: ripe black elderberries and crab apples with a little cinnamon for a rich, earthy jam, or a sweet-sour jelly combining brambles with a variable combination of rowan berries, rosehips or haws (all of which have inedible seeds).
"If you have any plums in your garden, those work exceptionally well with brambles as a jam too. "It’s worth bearing in mind that ripe brambles don’t contain much pectin, the soluble fibre needed for jams and jellies to set, so including some apple or plum in your mix will he.