The Japanese Apricot or 梅(うめ）is used often to make pickled plums for eating with rice, or for steeping in strong alcohol and sugar to make a liqueur called Umeshu (梅酒).

I happen to be making some liqueur with Japanese Apricots right now, and recently I found a batch of pickled plums that I’d made a few years ago that weren’t so good after being made, but when tasted recently were found to be great. So, I gave up on making more pickled plums this year.

But yesterday I happened upon packages of Japanese Apricots for about 150 yen for about one kilogram of apricots (I didn’t bother reading the label or weighing them). They looked so good, being big, fat and yellow-orangish that for the price I decided to buy 2 packages.

At first I thought I’d add them to my Apricot liqueur, but then decided that jam would be more appropriate.

I used no recipe but just cooked the apricots and copious amounts of sugar until it was thick and sweet-ish. I say sweet-ish because this jam is not sweet. Japanese apricots are very sour, and these apricots needed sugar and sugar and sugar. As I said, I used no recipe but for about 2 kilograms of plums I used about 1.5 kilograms of sugar.

The end result is a jam that is sweet yet sour, perfect with pancakes (which we had this morning) and also I think with meats in the future (with soy sauce, to make a sweet, sour, salty glaze).

I love the colour and texture and thankfully we have enough to last us through the summer.

Next time you see some, consider making some jam instead of just pickling them.