Moscow Food Co-op Food ReviewBlueberry/Bilberry Jam
by Vicki Reich, from the April 2006 Newsletter
I’m sure, if you are a regular shopper, you noticed the big stack of shelving in the front of the store last month. I’m pretty sure you were wondering why we were getting new shelving when we just moved in to a new store. And now I’m confident that you are curious what shelves have to do with my taste test article. Never fear, it’s all connected.
When we were setting up the new store we ordered all new shelving and I asked for a type of shelf that was easier to adjust than the shelves we had in our old store. Unfortunately, as we started to assemble the shelves, we realized that the company we ordered them from had sent the old kind instead of the kind we ordered. Needless to say, I was quite unhappy and complained enough that they eventually sent us the new shelves. Of course, this meant we had to take all the products off the old shelves, replace them with the new shelves and put everything back where it belonged. It’s not the most fun project in the world but you do get very familiar with all the products on the shelves you are replacing.
As it gets closer to lunchtime, the products look more and more enticing. So it was at 11:30 on Friday morning that Phillip and I began taking the jams off the shelves. They looked so yummy and they looked even yummier as we put them back on right at the time I usually take lunch. I had to know which was the best tasting of the bunch, thus this month’s article is about jam.
I was a bit late in deciding what to taste test and therefore would not be able to enlist the help of my trusty testers, the Hog Heaven Handspinners, but I knew just the person to help my try some jam. My friend Jon is a jam aficionado. He likes it on toast in the morning and is particularly fond of the homemade variety. He always has several jars to choose from in his fridge. Plus, he was available.
I like to try the same flavor in each of the brands we’re testing so I was surprised to find that we didn’t have one flavor that was consistent to all the brands. I settled for blueberry or something close to it. Here’s how the four brands we tried compared.
The first contestant was St. Dalfour Cranberry with Blueberry (10 oz., $3.29). It’s not too sweet; the cranberries add some zip to the sweetness of the blueberries. The texture is very good and Jon thought the fruit was cooked just right. There are definitely some good chunks of fruit and it has a nice dark color.
Bionaturae Organic Bilberry (9 oz, $3.29) was the least sweet tasting of the group even though it has one more gram of sugar than St. Dalfour. The texture is more jelly-like and not that chunky. It’s got a nice tang to it that must come from it being bilberry, not blueberry jam.
Cascadian Farms Organic Blueberry Jam (10 oz., $2.99) is the sweetest of the four jams we tested. It has lots of fruit and chunks but the flavor is pretty bland. It tastes mostly like sugar and not so much like fruit, which isn’t surprising since it’s the only one where the first ingredient is sugar, not fruit.
The last jam was Crofters Organic Wild Blueberry Jam (10 oz., $2.85). It’s got a nice dark purple color with big chunks of fruit. It’s got a real blueberry taste with a lot of sweetness that seems to come from the fruit not sugar.
My favorite was the Crofters; Jon’s favorite was the St. Dalfour. We would have made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with our favorites but we had tuna steaks on the grill and mushroom risotto cooking on the stove and, by the time we were finished tasting all that jam, tuna sounded like a much better dinner.
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