Any Way You Spread it

Photo courtesy of Black Radish Creamery

Any Way You Spread it

Making artisan jam is a sweet hobby for these locals

Whether you’re a strawberry and grape traditionalist or you vie for more distinctive alternatives, there is a plethora of options for fruit spreads.

A few local companies are putting their own spin on the classic spread to make artisan jam their bread and butter.

Black Radish Creamery

John Reese can still remember the taste of the strawberry and vanilla preserve he and his wife, Anne, had with camembert cheese while on a Vermont road trip.

“It stuck with us,” John says.

When the couple moved back to Columbus from New York and got married, their intention was to start making artisan cheese. For their wedding day cheese plate, they knew they needed to try to recreate the cheese-and-jam combination they first sampled back in Vermont.

John, who attended culinary school in New York, set to work, and Black Radish Creamery’s “Billionaire” was born: strawberry, rhubarb, Beaujolais wine and organic vanilla bean.

The flavor was a hit; so much so that the New Albany couple decided to make a batch for John’s sister to sell in her Westerville store, Ohio Art Market. In three hours, they sold $400 worth of the product. Inspired by their success, John came up with more recipes that summer.

The following year, Black Radish began selling at farmers’ markets. In 2014, one of its products, Mr. Atwood’s Jelly, garnered a Good Food Award in a California competition, while Billionaire was recognized as a finalist.

“That really started to propel us,” John says.

This year, the Reeses took home a second Good Food Award with King B, made with black raspberries and vanilla candied lemon zest.

Black Radish offers between six to eight flavors at a time, and two to five of those could be rotating special batches.

While John is the brains behind the recipes, Anne is the creative strength behind their brand’s image, photographing the products and creating labels, website content and other media.

John and Anne both tackle the cooking, which can take between six and eight hours, most of it stirring. They make four different kinds of fruit spreads: jam, which doesn’t have fruit pieces; preserves, which do; jelly, which is made from fruit juice, not pieces; and fruit butter, which is cooked down and thicker in consistency than the other types.

Where to buy it:

Lucky’s Market
Weiland’s Market
Bexley Natural Market
Hills Markets
Market Italian Village
www.blackradishcreamery.com

Photo courtesy of Sweet Thing Gourmet

Any Way You Spread it

Sweet Thing Gourmet

Kyla Touris remembers helping her mother, of the Depression era generation, can and preserve items from her garden.

Touris, of Bexley, never thought she would take up the practice, but years later, in 2003, as a mother reluctant to leave her children and return to work, she turned the hobby into a moneymaker.

Touris had a vision of putting a modern spin on her mother’s jam, creating flavors complete with packaging.

“That was my main focus,” she says.

She also decided to add biscotti, something that took four months of trial and error to perfect.

Sweet Thing Gourmet’s jam selection originally had just four flavors: strawberry, peach, strawberry kiwi and ginger peach. The product line has grown considerably since then.

At any given time, Touris offers 10 flavors in her signature line, a collection that changes frequently and is available when she sells at farmers’ markets. Her core line, listed on her website, includes about 35 flavors.

Operating out of her home, Touris gets assistance from her husband, Mark, and her sister-in-law to make jam, butter and jelly. Her three children help during market days.

Touris and her small crew process their fruit ahead of time. Once they start making their jam, it can take from 45 minutes to an hour per batch. They typically make several batches at a time, and each batch makes about 17 jars of jam.

Apple butter is a different story. Touris will work from 7 a.m. to 5 or 6 p.m. to make 30 jars.

Where to buy it:

Whole Foods Market, Upper Arlington
Clintonville Community Market
Katzinger’s Delicatessen
Lucky’s Market
Near East Side Cooperative Market
Bexley Natural Market
Curds & Whey, North Market
Weiland’s Market
Meza Wine Shop
Celebrate Local
Worthington Farmers Market
Clintonville Farmers’ Market
Bexley Farmers’ Market
New Albany Farmers Market
Westerville Farmers’ Market
www.shop.sweetthinggourmet.com

Photo courtesy of Fruit Strength Farm

Any Way You Spread it

Fruit Strength Farm

Sarah Sullivan made her first jar of apricot preserves when she was about 5 years old during a seasonal trip to visit her grandparents, when the apricots were “so ripe, they were falling off the tree,” she says.

“By golly, that was a lot of work for a little kid,” Sullivan says.

Now she’s been making jam for more than 50 years, and Fruit Strength Farm in Marysville is home to a startling variety of fruits for her butters, preserves, jellies and jams. In addition to her four fruit concentrations, Sullivan offers four sweetness levels for her products.

Sullivan’s 15-acre farm includes strawberry, blueberry and rhubarb. While 10 of the acres include brush and weed trees, they’re also home to wild fruits including mulberry, black raspberry, blue grape, elderberry, pear trees, apple trees, blackberry and crabapple. She’s working with the Natural Resource Conservation Service and applying for grant money to help deal with surface water, to ensure that the land can properly drain.

“The virgin prairie is all highly erodible land,” she says.

Sullivan hopes to add to her eclectic fruit collection, and she plans to plant gooseberry, currant, honey berry, sea berry and june berry once she clears land.

This year, Sullivan is also planting stone fruits including plum, peach, apricot and sour and sweet cherries. Since it takes her four pounds of fruit to make a single batch of preserves, the trees will have to grow a few years until they can be used for harvesting.

For her part, Sullivan says she enjoys harvesting her fruit on her chemical-free, virgin prairie acreage.

“Since these fruits are more fragile than grocery store varieties, often the cost-effective way to bring them to market is in the form of spreads,” she says.

Where to buy it: