Queen Palm Jam (by Jeff)

What to do with those messy palm fruits covering your sidewalk? Make jam!

I've never made jam or done any other form of 'canning' before, but it's been on my radar for some time, so I recently decided to give it a go. One might think that for my first jelly/jam/preserve-making effort, I'd go with something straightforward... maybe follow a recipe, or at least try to make a food that I was personally familiar with, so as to be able to gauge whether things were turning out as they should. But it wasn't fresh strawberries that inspired me to buy my first canning jars. Rather, it was those sweet smelling, if unsightly, orange palm fruits covering my front yard that prompted me to open up Joy of Cooking and see what making fruit preserves was all about.

Familiar sight? (Fruits of the Queen Palm...I think..."littering" the ground)

Here they are in the hand, along with the tree they came from:

Although I am not 100% certain, I am pretty sure this is a Queen Palm. I did a bunch of internet research, and it seems that the Queen Palms is the most common species of palm tree planted in southern California (or close to it). Descriptions and photos I found of Queen Palm fruits, foliage, and trunk morphology all seem to match what I've got in my front yard, which looks the same as most other palm trees in our neighborhood and indeed the city.

Ok, but are Queen Palms edible? They certainly smell edible. And they taste edible, too. If you gnaw on one, you will find them syrupy sweet, and incredibly sticky. You can't just eat them outright, though, because there's not really any flesh to them -- just a bunch of woody fibers covering a hard pit:

I found conflicting information on the internet about the edibility of Queen Palm. Some sites said yes, others no. But all primary sources (e.g., botanical pages) indicated that yes, these are edible. And having nibbled on several to this point without incident, I concluded that at least they are not lethal in tiny amounts. How's that for the scientific method?

Perhaps the lack of total consensus on their edibility comes from one source I read that said they are edible when ripe, but contain a neurotoxin to mammals before ripe. So, wait until they turn orange and fall to the ground before you imbibe.

Right, so anyway, time to make jam. A bit of improvising here, combining some Joy of Cooking jelly-making fundamentals with a "Palm fruit jelly" recipe or two that I found on the internet. These recipes use Jelly Palm fruit as the main ingredient, which is quite a bit different from the Queen Palm, so the recipes aren't quite transferrable.

Step 1: Boil the fruits covered for about an hour, periodically mashing and stirring. There is very little water in these fruits, so you have to add a lot. I started out by just covering maybe 5 cups of fruit with water but ended up adding probably 5 cups of water or so (I didn't count). This is resulted in the liquid being the consistency of maybe a fruit nectar-type drink.

Step 2: Place contents in a colander lined by 4 layers of cheesecloth. Let drain into a bowl for a couple hours.

When making proper jelly, you apparently only use the thinnest clearest liquid, i.e., that which drains through the cloth with only the help of gravity. But I got less than a cup of liquid this way, perhaps in part because of all the fibrous matter clogging up the sieve, or because I didn't make the original mixture thin enough. Beats me. But I wanted more volume, even if it meant a cloudier or inferior product in the end. So I closed up the cheese cloth around the pulp/seed/juice mixture and squeezed as much juice out as a could. This ended up giving me 4 cups of pretty thick liquid (not as thick as corn syrup, but perhaps close to this).

Step 3: The 4 cups of palm fruit juice went into a stock pot along with the juice from 1 lemon, a box of fruit pectin, 3 cups of sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon of butter:

Most recipes call for more than 3 cups sugar for this volume of juice (e.g., more like 5), but in addition to this juice being very sweet on its own, it turned out that 3 cups of sugar was all I had in the cupboard, and I was too lazy to go to the store. To make matters worse, one of those cups was brown sugar (which turned the concoction dark). What the heck...

Right, so after boiling the brew for about 15 minutes (stirring frequently), it was time to jar:

The next evening, I gave it a full taste test. The texture is somewhere between a jam and a fruit butter (for example, apple butter). The taste is somewhat reminiscent of apricot and pumpkin. I can tell you that it goes excellently on goat chevre with a glass of Savignon Blanc. And having eaten several full servings of it to this point (it also goes well on a bagel with cream cheese), I can vouch for its apparent edibility.