Awesome Alison, so glad you like the recipe. The sloe pitting is a labour of love and took me a long time but the jam is worth it:-)

In reply to Camilla.

Thank you for this great recipe – the jam is absolutely delicious. I made 1.5x quantities and used a mixture of bramley and quite sharp eating apples (freebies). I also froze the sloes first as I read that they would be easier to pit but it was very messy and took nearly two hours. So I think I’ll try a cherry pitter next time.

I’ve been thinking more about your saying the jam was bitter, it shouldn’t be bitter. I’m guessing your sloes weren’t ripe as they usually ripen late autumn and at their best after first frost. But seasons don’t follow rules, even if most of your sloes were ripe and you had a few hard, unripe sloes in there it would be enough to turn the jam bitter.

Hi Helen, not you didn’t make a mistake, you do sieve the stones along with the water to get out remaining flesh. This is a tart/sweet jam.

Excellent Alexandra, just didn’t want you adding to your job:-) Look forward to hearing how you get on.

Thank you for your reply! It never even occured to me to cook the sloes separate from the apples, so I’m really glad I asked you! I’m planning to make jam on Thursday, I’ll let you know how I got on and how we like it!

Yes that sounds sensible, you’d want to cook them separately from the apple to save time and effort. Alternatively leave the stones in and remove when serving the jam or you may be able to fish them out while the sloes are cooking.

Excellent Elizabeth, so glad you like it:-)

Bramley apples are tart in flavour and Coxes very sweet so if you were to use you might need to reduce the sugar. If it was me I’d stick to Bramley apples as that’s what works and as the sloes take so long to pit I wouldn’t want you to be disappointed with the jam.

Awe, thank you so much Graham. I imagine the Bramley apples would have more than enough pectin to go round as they are very high in pectin. Really glad you like the recipe, I’m still enjoying my batch of jam:-)

Hi Camilla

We’ve twice used your recipe for Bramley apple and sloe jam—in both cases it was delicious and a huge hit with all the family. For the second batch we re-used the sloes from a fresh lot of sloe gin—but we used jam sugar, simply because I was uncertain of the amount of pectin remaining in the gin-soaked sloes. It worked perfectly and made an especially tasty jam 🙂 A third batch of jam is on the horizon, using excess sloes frozen from last year’s harvest. Many thanks for writing-up this easy-to-use-recipe which produces such great results. Cheers!

So glad you liked it Susan:-)

It is a very delicious jam. Really only recipe that is simple and uses apples that are needed to be used. Definitely will make it again.

I think that would be an extremely messy job as sloe stains really badly and the fruit would be all squishy. If I was you I think I’d cook the sloes separately from the apple and sieve or use a mouli if you have one and then add back with the apple. You will loose the texture of the skin but I think this is the best option

Oh my goodness Juli, I just checked the recipe and there was a typo, it should have been 1 kilo of sugar, not 500g. No wonder it was astringent. 2020 has been a terrible year so my eye obviously hasn’t been fully on the ball. I do apologies!

Hi there!
I love the taste of it, but turned out to be a bit astringent at the end, leaving that “cat tongue ” feeling .. Do you know how to avoid that next time? I picked my sloes after 2 frosts so don’t think that was the problem…
Thanks for sharing!

Hi Sarah, that is the weight before pitting so including the stones.

As I said in the video there was a lot of valuable flesh still attached to them which would have been a shame to waste:-)

Why did you keep the stones and boil them?

Thank you Monica, I hope you get to try it:-)

Haha Choclette, it would be a good family bonding activity that’s for sure! But the flavour made all the toil worth the while, plus I had to walk about 2 miles to find the sloes. We’d all keep in trim if we had to find all our own food like this:-)

Wow Camilla, I take my hat off to you. Pitting sloes is a labour of love indeed. I remember doing a few when I decanted the sloe gin one year and swore never again. I bet your jam is fabulous though. Well done.

Thanks Janice, I don’t drink gin at all so there was only one thing to do with my booty of sloes:-)

This is brilliant, I always have more sloes than I know what to do with, as we don’t drink much slow gin. This will be absolutely perfect because we do eat a fair bit of jam.