After falling off a bit with the documentation during each of the last two years’ Jelly of the Month Clubs, we’ve decided to start anew this year (and actually eat and write up twelve jellies)!
First on the menu, we’ve got rhubarb jam that came straight from our Penn’s Corner CSA.
We were pretty curious to try this out — we’ve used rhubarb in a couple dishes now that we’ve enjoyed, and we love rhubarb pie. How would the jelly stack up, judged with our time-tested methods? The methods namely being:
1) Spread the jelly on an English muffin and eat it
2) Spread the jelly on a Ritz cracker with peanut butter and eat it
3) Spread the jelly on a knife and let our dog Lucy eat it
Sadly, I have to report that we were a little underwhelmed by this offering. The jam didn’t really carry enough of a distinctive flavor; the peanut butter completely overtook it, and even the English muffin tasted primarily like English muffin, and not like the delicious, tongue-seizing tartness of fresh rhubarb.
Our disappointment did not dampen Lucy’s eagerness to taste the stuff, though.
She was as excited as ever, lapping the rhubarb jam up with desperate fervor. To be fair, Lucy was on to something we only realized late in the game: the jam tasted best when eaten alone.
So let’s look at the numbers for this, the January entry.
color: 3 – it had an amber luster in the right light, but on toast it just kind of looked like baby food.
flavor: 2 – a pretty weak entry here; it just can’t stand out among any other flavors (aside from, possibly, something sweet)
jelly-ness: 3 – it was kind of on the thin side.
jar presentation: 3 – no muss, no fuss: it’s the standard Penn’s Corner jelly/jam branding.
awesomeness: 2 – sadly, we liked the idea of a rhubarb jam way more than its actual execution.
We thought the jam might work well if it were incorporated into a pie or pastry of some kind, something with a bit of sweetness to it, but on toast at breakfast or in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? No thanks; we’ll probably pass.