Blackberry season is one of my favorite times of the year. I’ve been getting into jam making recently, so I just had to try my hand at blackberry jam. My sage plant is growing like crazy right now, and blackberry and sage do go together… so I think it was meant to be.

I like to use Pomona’s Pectin so I followed their recipe for blackberry jam here. The recipe gives several options for sweeteners; I chose to add 2 cups of granulated sugar.

To add the sage, I harvested the top 2″ from new sage shoots, so that I ended up with 8″ of sage springs total. I added the sprigs to the saucepan with the berries (at step 2). I wanted the blackberries to be a little more broken down than what would have resulted from the recipe, so I knew I wanted to cook the fruit mixture longer. But with the extra cook time, I also didn’t want the sage flavor to start to overpower the blackberries, so I tasted my jam frequently as it cooked. I ended up simmering the fruit mixture for (an extra) 10 minutes and pulling out the sage springs after 3 minutes.

I was really happy with the texture, taste, and set of the jam. Apparently so was my family, because it vanished from our fridge very quickly. 🙂