You can tell canning season has been too long when you get excited about finding a new style of jar.
One of the problems that crop up in making jam is separation of fruit and jelly. This often happens with strawberry jam, but we ran into the problem with our pear jam and hot pepper jelly. It is more of an aesthetic problem as taste is not affected, but the jam looks nicer when the fruit is well-distributed in its jar.
The separation occurs because of the difference in density between the fruit and jelly. Internet searches turn up several fixes, such as chopping the fruit into smaller pieces, letting the sugar and fruit mixture macerate before heating, swirling the filled jars to encourage mixing, and stirring the jam mixture in the stockpot on and off for 5 minutes before transferring into jars. I have not tried the macerate method as I would rather not drag canning on longer than it already takes, but that seems like the most promising fix. The Ball canning book actually recommends against the stockpot stirring method as it can interfere with gelling. I did not have a gelling issue using the stockpot stirring method, although I found this method alone did not produce good fruit distribution. The Ball canning book recommends the jar swirling method - gently swirling the liquid jam in the jar periodically, once the lid seals.
Which brings us to the new jar style. We usually can jams and jellies in a standard half-pint jar, which use standard lids and rings. While we were scrounging for jars earlier in the year, Maggie bought two cases of wide-mouth half-pint Kerr jars, which are shorter than the regular-mouth jars. These are perfect jam jars for two reasons. First, when swirling the jar after it has sealed, the mixture does not have to disperse as deeply because the jar is shorter. As a result, less vigorous swirling is needed. Second, because the jar is short, the separation of fruit and jelly is less apparent as compared to a tall jar. I did not get a perfectly uniform distribution in the short jar with my pear jam, but it it was better than what I saw in the taller jars.
Anchor Hocking makes a short half-pint jar with a standard lid and ring, as does Ball. Ball, however, sells this style of jars in four-packs and is more expensive than the Kerr and Anchor Hocking short half-pints. Yes, you have been canning too long when you ramble on about different manufacturers of short jars, but the jam looks great.
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