Fig Jam, and What to Do with a Jar of It

Name: Fig Jam, and What to Do with a Jar of It
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 25 min
Total time: 45 min
Yield: About 2 1/2 half-pint jars (about 600 ml)
Cuisine: Mediterranean
Ingredients: 570 g (about 1 1/4 lb) ripe fresh figs, any variety; 300 g (1 1/2 cups) granulated sugar; 45 ml (3 tablespoons) water; 15 ml (1 tablespoon) lemon juice; use bottled lemon juice if the jars will be canned

Published 14 Oct 20268 min read

A ripe fig is soft, honey-sweet and almost impossible to ship, which is why so much of the world's fig crop ends up cooked down into jam. The jam keeps what matters in the fruit, the deep jammy sweetness and the crunch of the seeds, and it turns a short season into a jar that lasts through winter. It also behaves differently from strawberry or raspberry jam in the pan, and the reason is in the fruit itself.

Why figs need lemon

Jam sets when three things meet in the right proportion: pectin, the natural gelling substance concentrated in fruit skins and cores; acid; and sugar. University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension's guide to jams sorts fruits by how much pectin and acid they bring. Tart apples, quinces and cranberries carry plenty of both. Ripe figs land in the opposite group, low in pectin and low in acid, alongside ripe peaches and pears. Colorado State University Extension also lists figs among the low-pectin fruits.

Acid is the part a cook controls most easily. Both extension guides make the same point: with too little acid, the gel never sets. That is why the NCHFP's fig jam recipes add lemon juice. The National Center for Home Food Preservation adds a safety reason as well. Most fruits sit comfortably below pH 4.6, the line that separates acid foods from low-acid ones, but figs range right around it, so lemon juice or citric acid has to go into home-canned fig products in the amounts the recipe calls for.

The grouping holds a small trick. The Nebraska guide puts unripe figs in a different group, adequate in pectin though still low in acid. A few firm, slightly underripe figs in the pan give a jam that sets a little more readily.

The recipe: small-batch fresh fig jam

This is the National Center for Home Food Preservation's fig jam without added pectin, scaled to a quarter and converted to weights: the original calls for about 5 pounds of figs, 6 cups of sugar, 3/4 cup of water and 1/4 cup of lemon juice for about ten half-pint jars. A quarter batch fits in a wide skillet, which matters. A wide pan boils off water faster, and the faster the jam reaches its set point, the fresher the fig flavor stays.

Any fig works: Black Mission for a dark, purple jam; Brown Turkey or Kadota for a lighter, honeyed one. Choose figs that are soft and fragrant, with a few firmer ones mixed in.

Ingredients

570 g (about 1 1/4 lb) ripe fresh figs
300 g (1 1/2 cups) granulated sugar
45 ml (3 tablespoons) water
15 ml (1 tablespoon) lemon juice; use bottled lemon juice if the jars will be canned, because its acidity is consistent

You will also need a thermometer that reads to at least 225 F and a small plate kept in the freezer.

Method

Prepare the figs. Put a small plate in the freezer. Pour boiling water over the figs, let them stand 10 minutes, drain, then stem them and chop them into pieces about 1 cm across. The skins stay on; they hold much of the color and the pectin.
Find your set point. Bring a small pot of water to a full boil and read it with the thermometer you will use for the jam. Add 8 F to that reading. That number, not a figure from a book, is the set point for your kitchen on that day.
Dissolve the sugar. Put the figs, water and sugar in a wide, heavy pan over medium heat and bring slowly to a boil, stirring until no grains of sugar remain on the spoon.
Boil hard. Turn the heat up and boil rapidly, stirring often and scraping the bottom, until the jam thickens and reaches the set point, usually 15 to 20 minutes. Late in the cook the bubbles turn small, glossy and slow, and the spoon leaves a trail on the bottom of the pan. Stir constantly at this stage; fig jam is thick and catches easily.
Add the lemon. Stir in the lemon juice and boil 1 minute longer.
Test the set. Take the pan off the heat and drop a spoonful onto the frozen plate. Return it to the freezer for a few minutes. If it gels and wrinkles when you push it with a finger, the jam is done. If it runs, boil 2 minutes more and test again.
Jar it. Ladle into clean jars, leaving 1/4 inch of headspace. Cool, cover and refrigerate. For shelf storage, process in a boiling-water canner following the NCHFP times: half-pints for 10 minutes between 1,001 and 6,000 feet, 5 minutes below 1,000 feet.

The set point in Denver

Jam is done when it reaches 8 F above the boiling point of water. At sea level that is 220 F. The National Center for Home Food Preservation's table drops the target as elevation rises: 212 F at 4,000 feet, 211 F at 5,000 feet, 209 F at 6,000 feet. Colorado State University Extension gives the same rule from the other direction: water boils about 1.9 F lower for every 1,000 feet, and the done temperature drops with it.

In Denver, a sea-level recipe that says "cook to 220 F" overshoots: by the time the pan reads 220 F the jam has cooked well past its set and can scorch into fig paste. The table puts Denver near 211 F. Step 2 is still the more reliable number, because boiling point moves with the weather and thermometers drift. Boil water, read it, add 8. The freezer-plate test then confirms what the thermometer says.

A winter version with dried figs

Fresh figs have a short season. Dried figs make a softer, darker spread any time of year, closer to a fig paste than a set jam. Stem and chop 250 g of dried figs, cover them with 350 ml of water in a small pan and simmer gently, covered, for about 20 minutes until completely soft. Add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice, 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar or honey and a pinch of salt, then mash or pulse to the texture you like and simmer uncovered until spoonable. Dried figs are sweet already, so taste before adding more sugar. This is a refrigerator spread, not a canning recipe: keep it in the fridge and eat it within two weeks.

What to do with a jar of fig jam

The cheese course. The obvious use and still a fine one. Fig jam goes with salty, sharp and blue cheeses: aged Manchego, a crumbly blue, a creamy goat cheese. Spoon it beside the cheese instead of over it so each bite can be built to taste. The guide to choosing what goes next to cheese compares fig jam with honey, mostarda and membrillo, and Rustic Bakery's sourdough flatbread with French grey sea salt is the cracker under it (shop Rustic Bakery sel gris flatbread).

Roast pork and ham. Loosen 3 tablespoons of fig jam with a tablespoon of vinegar or mustard and brush it over a pork loin or ham in the last 15 minutes of roasting. The sugar browns quickly, so watch it. McEvoy Ranch makes a savory fig jam with caramelized onions and balsamic vinegar for exactly this job, suggesting it as a glaze for ham, chicken or pork (shop McEvoy Ranch savory fig jam).

Flatbread. Spread fig jam thinly on a flatbread or pizza base, scatter with goat cheese or blue cheese, bake, then lay prosciutto and a few arugula leaves on top as it comes out. A thread of fig balsamic glaze finishes it (shop Giusti fig balsamic glaze).

Baking. Fig jam is thick enough to bake without running: in thumbprint cookies, as the layer in a crumb bar, spread under the almond cream of a tart. A sharper, fruitier jar helps here, such as BRINS's peach, fig and laurel leaf jam (shop BRINS Forbidden Fruit jam).

Breakfast. On buttered toast, stirred into yogurt, or in a sandwich with sharp cheddar pressed in a hot pan.

A few things worth knowing at the table

The fig may be the oldest crop people ever planted on purpose. In 2006, archaeobotanists Mordechai Kislev, Anat Hartmann and Ofer Bar-Yosef reported in Science on nine carbonized figs and hundreds of tiny fig seeds found at Gilgal I, an early Neolithic village in the lower Jordan Valley, dated to about 11,400 to 11,200 years ago. The figs came from a kind of tree that sets fruit without pollination and cannot spread on its own, so someone had to plant cuttings. As the Harvard Gazette summarized the find, that puts fig growing roughly a thousand years ahead of wheat, barley and legumes in the region.

The crunch in fig jam comes from those same tiny seeds. For anyone who wants fig without the cooking, Dick Taylor layers California Black Mission figs across the back of its 72% dark chocolate bar (shop the Dick Taylor Black Fig bar).

For the technique behind every jam, the raspberry jam without pectin is the first recipe to learn, and the jams and jellies collection has the jars for days when the figs are out of season. Fig jam rewards understanding the fruit: low pectin, low acid, high sugar. Add the lemon, read the boiling point where you stand, and trust the cold plate.