Cooking with the unknown berry!

On Saturday i.e. 16 July 2016, I was having a pleasant carefree day. Until I saw a unknown small berries lying on a plate kept on the table. As you can see in the picture below, It was grape sized , wrinkled with perfect blend of red shades on it's skin. I asked my mom what it is? She said it was called vaakaya in Telugu and used to make pickles. 

That weird brown spots on my hand is mehendi.

It tasted like combination of amla/gooseberry and strawberry. My mom said she will be using the unripe ones for the pickle and throws off the ripen ones. But I did not want ripe ones to get thrown away so I decided to make a jam out of it. I once made mixed fruit jam. I guess I can experiment a little with this unknown berry sized fruit. I searched for recipes online but could not find much about it. Scientifically it is called as Carissa carandas and in English it is called cranberries. The fruit is rich in Iron and Vitamin C. Mature fruit harvested for pickles. It also contains pectin; So suitable to make jams, jelly, syrup and chutneys. (Info found from wikipedia ) 

I just took a recipe for karonda jam and began my work. When I cut it into halves, there was a green oval seed which I scraped off using the edge of the knife.

After, the mise en place of the berries, my palms were stained red. 

I guess it can also be used as best alternative for Artificial red food colouring!

So, I simmered the berries in water for 10 minutes until they became soft and permeated into the water.

Then, I filtered the mucilage, skin and pulp of the berries using a sieve to get it's extract. The extract was looking like vermilion or very bright red colour. 

I know it looks like a big magenta blob but the truth is that's how the extract colour looked.

Then, I added required amount of sugar to the extract in a saucepan. The sugar crystals mesmerizingly dissolved into the red extract.

 I heated this mixture and stirred continuously until the liquid gets a darker shade of red and more viscous. 

And I cooked till I got the right stage of consistency and wine red colour. I waited for a while until the bubbles were ceased and poured it into a clean glass jar. Later, kept this jar for refrigeration.

The jam turned out to be delicious because of the tartness of the fruit and sweetness of sugar  which harmoniously complimented each other. The Beautiful red colour remained the same. The spreadability was good. I guess sometimes doing the new things in life can be rewarding experience. In my case cooking with this unknown berry (Now known) rewarded me a delicious jam. Keep on exploring new things in life, you will either gain from it or learn from it.