Banana Jam complications

While I make a ton of jam and jelly on a monthly basis, I usually don't make Banana Jam, because of the pH value of the jam you have to be much more careful in cooking and canning it.
A friend asked me if I would make her large amount of Banana Jam for a special trip she was making to the East coast for a weekend conference and workshop. My friend had taken some of my Banana jam to the workshop a couple of years ago and they were quite taken with it so she felt it would be a hit again this year. So my little adventure with Banana Jam began.

My day started out with trying to find my original Banana jam recipe among all of my jam and jelly recipes, well needless to say it was nowhere to be found. Of course if you ever saw or knew of my filing and organization skills you wouldn't expect me to find to much of anything. If I'm looking for something that I used just a day or so ago it is usually on top of some stack of papers, but if it's been a year or so it may be lost for ever. I have this bad and good habit that if I haven't touched something for six months or more I throw it away because that means most of the time it's not important enough to keep. Well that works most of the time but not always example: Banana jam.

Finely giving up on trying to find the recipe I decided to just look up a new recipe on the internet expecting to find the one I used in the past. That was a exercise in frustration. There are many recipes on the web and a simple search isn't so simple sometimes. I came up with a couple that looked close to what I remember using in the past, most of the recipes for banana jam are pretty simple for there really isn't that much to making the jam.

Now I have learned over that past few years just because someone has posted a recipe on-line it doesn't mean that they have ever made the recipe. Sometimes I think they just copy the recipe from someone else not always making sure they have copied the recipe word for word sometimes leaving out some of the important facts. Unfortunately I found this out this time causing me to waste over a gallon of bananas and another gallon of sugar.

In using the first recipe everything seemed easy enough and things went pretty well, with the banana jam looking very good and tasting delicious. I was quite taken with how well the jam was turning out and even that canning process was going very well. Everything was great I had the Banana in the pressure cooker and it wasn't long before I started taking the jars out and that began the first hint that there was a problem with the jam. As I pulled the jam out of the pressure cooker I noticed a bit of separation with the bananas and the sugar, and it wasn't long before the jam began to separate big time. This was very upsetting that I had wasted the time and product on a recipe that some Bozo had screwed up listing on-line.

After throwing out more than a bit of wasted Banana jam and then spending some time researching recipes on-line I found out that the recipe failed to mention the proper time needed to cook the jam down, the bad recipe only said to cook the jam for five minutes when the actual time it should have been was more like a half hour. I found that the extra 25 minutes made the world of a difference in the jams ability to set up and thicken as it cooled. So after another gallon of bananas and gallon of sugar I was able to turn out a successful batch of jam for my friend.
What I have learned this time the hard way, is to spend a few more minutes in researching things on the internet before jumping into whatever I'm going to do, and not to always trust what it on the net.

We've been making jam and jelly at our restaurant for years now. We are also known for our Sweet breads like banana bread, Peach bread etc. and also our fresh made and Baked fruit pies. We also have our Beckeys Kountry Kitchen website for our sweetbreads and jelly and jam

Banana Bread made the Difference

Banana Bread Made the Difference

We have owned and operated our small family restaurant for a bit over fifteen years now, while we have been somewhat successful and have a good defined direction, we didn't always have that. I'm writing this story to in a way explain how we got were we are at now, and that's where fresh in house baked banana bread comes in. We had been open running our restaurant for a few years and while we were getting by as far as sales and profitability there just seemed too be something missing that little extra umph or bling I guess you could say for a lack of other words to describe what makes people go out and broadcast to friends and family about their experiences at your restaurant. There are a lot of restaurants in the world some of them very successful a lot of them not, some of them have been around for a long time and more sad to say, that are just a flash in the pan, successful for a while then they just fizzle out quietly disappearing to later re-appear as something different.

     We had been baking fresh bread for a our customers for a while, making small demi loaves of white and wheat bread to serve in place of the generic dinner rolls that most restaurants serve to their guest. This little extra that we did for our guest always seemed to go over pretty well, it just wasn't what most of our guest saw as a wow moment in their dining experience with us. What made me realise the lack of enthusiasm on the guest's part was when we had interchanged dinner rolls instead of bread one week because we were having problems with our ovens and pretty much no one complained about it. That was a wake up call in itself, here we were spending all that extra time in labor and food cost baking fresh bread for our guest and basically they could have cared less.

 

     So besides the wake up call with the roll incident what changed course for us was one day watching my wife bake banana bread at home a bell went off in my head telling me that she was doing something different something most people don't do at home any more probably because of their lack of time and possibily knowledge. I know most people like banana bread and definitely my wife's banana bread, so I thought why not try it out at the restaurant offer it as a choice along with our white and wheat demi loaves of bread. Well needless to say it wasn't long before the banana bread surpassed all the other breads in being requested by our guests for their dinner bread choices. The banana bread was so well liked that customers were asking if they could purchase extra loaves to take home with them to enjoy later, this was not something we did much of with our other breads.
It wasn't to long after introducing the banana bread that we started adding other sweetbreads to the line up as far as offering to our guest for dinner. Peach bread was the second bread we started offering, and it wasn't long before the fresh baked peach bread took over the banana bread in customer request, then after that apple bread and blueberry zucchini showed up with Pumpkin bread coming around during the holiday season.

Well we had finally found that bling we were looking for, so much so that we now sell as many if not more loaves of bread to customers just coming in to purchase bread as we do to our dinner guest. The same goes for our fresh made jam and jelly and also our fresh made pies, but that is another story.

Our fresh made sweetbreads like our Banana Bread have turned out to be wildly popular with our guest and I'm always happy to see our valued guest come in to enjoy them like they do. With todays busy schedules more and more people are finding it harder to homemake breads like days of old, and I believe that is part of the reason to our success with our homemade style jam and jelly sweetbreads and fresh made and baked pies.

 

 

    Why is it that Beckeys Kountry Kitchen pies cost more than the pies I can buy at the grocery store?  Answer: To start with the fruit quality and quanity are much different between the pies. Most pies made in factories use what they call fruit slurry to make their pies, what fruit slurry is is it's much like the pie filling you buy in a can at the store, only a little worst quality less fruit and more sugar. The fruit in fruit slurry has already been cooked once to make the slurry, by the time you bake it again into the pie the fruit tends to break down to a point that the texture of the fruit in the pie is more like baby food than anything else. In most pie recipes the recipes call for up to 4 cups of fruit to make the filling in Beckeys pies we use 6 cups of fruit to make our pies thats 50% more fruit, and we use real fresh fruit not slurry.
    Last of all each and every pie we make we hand roll out the crust one at a time just like families have been doing for many generations, doing our crust like that makes for a more flakey lighter crust. Factory made crust have a definitely different texture because to mass produce the crust the recipe for making the dough for the crust is a bit different so that it can be mass produced without gumming up the machinery.

   So to make a long story short Beckeys pies have more fruit and hand made crusts making our pies tastier, and bigger.

Along with processing jam and jelly we also make sweet breads and now bake pies from scratch. All of these things have become very popular at our restaurant. Its been great that our guest have taken to our jams, sweetbreads, and pies so well. Please visit our website for more info http://www.jam-jelly-beckeys.com