Delicious Homemade Tropical Guava Jam
If you’re lucky enough to grow fruit in your back garden, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the pleasure of harvesting your own home grown produce. How good is it when, after months of watering and feeding, the fruit finally ripens and is ready to be picked and enjoyed! In our house this feeling is very quickly replaced by one of panic – what are we going to do with all that fruit? How can we possibly use it all before it goes off (which would be such a waste)? To help solve this problem I have started to make jam – this is my take on an easy recipe for Guava Jam.
Having moved to Australia we are now lucky enough to grow a variety of tropical fruit in our garden including guava, but the ‘problem’ remains with what to do with each harvest.
Guava fruit, once ripe, only seems to last a couple of days. We just can’t eat it that quickly! My conclusion is to finally follow in my mother’s footsteps and make jam.
If you are not a jam maker (and I wasn’t either!) you’ll be pleased to hear this is a very easy recipe requiring very few ingredients. It really doesn’t take long to make and is a great way to use your garden fruit harvest.
Ingredients
Guava (just however much fruit you have available)
Sugar (you will need one cup of sugar for every cup of guava pulp)
Lemon juice (1 Tbls for each cup of guava pulp)
Water
How to Make the Guava Jam
1. Wash the fruit and cut into halves. My fruit is so small I really can’t do much else with them.
2. Put the cut fruit in a saucepan and cover with water – just enough to cover the fruit.
3. Bring to boil and simmer until the fruit is soft. The time this takes will depend on how small your pieces of fruit are.
4. Remove from the heat and carefully strain the fruit through a sieve into a bowl. This will remove all the pips and skin which remain in the sieve and can be thrown away. You are left with the thick, but smooth guava flesh in the bowl.
5. Measure (in cups) the amount of guava pulp you have made.
6. Return the guava pulp to the saucepan and add an equal amount of sugar. If, for example, you have 1 cup of guava pulp then you would add 1 cup of sugar.
7. Add one tablespoon of freshly squeezed lemon juice for each cup of pulp.
8. Return they mixture to the heat.
9. Heat, stirring continually until the mixture thickens and leaves a thick trail across the back of the spoon.
10. Remove from the heat, allow to cool and then pour your jam into jars whilst still warm.
That’s all there is to it!
I promised you an easy recipe to use up some of the excess fruit in your garden. This is my take on Guava Jam. If you decide to give it a go I’d love to hear how you get on.
P.S. If, on the other hand, you’ve pawpaws growing in abundance then have a look at my recipe for Tropical Banana Pawpaw Smoothie.