Blog

Folktales are real.
– Italo Calvino

Whidbey. Blake. Bainbridge. Vashon. San Juan. Orcas. The names of the islands of Puget Sound always stir memories of the magical year I spent there between college and Peace Corps service in Africa. I lived on Bainbridge Island, where I worked for an independent magazine staffed by extraordinary women (I was in fact the only male on staff) by day and a locally-focused pub owned by British ex-pats serving Washington State beer, wine, seafood, and burgers by night. I often cite my year on Bainbridge as a highly influential period in my life and a necessary step toward starting Big Spoon Roasters.

The Bainbridge community of writers, gardeners, yogis, foragers, cooks, and sailors embodied a DIY spirit and pride of work that not only fueled my hunger for new skills, but also inspired confidence that anything is possible through dedication and practice. I came to Bainbridge as someone who loved to cook and was curious about where food came from. I left a lifelong student of cooking and a more active participant in the supply chains leading from farm to table. What a difference a year makes.

Girl Meets Dirt, the maker of our August Featured Jam, was born of this same place and ethic. I first encountered their fruit preserves a couple of years ago at a Good Food Mercantile in San Francisco. I could literally taste the Pacific Northwest in every spoonful, and I felt like I had met a kindred spirit. Just shy of 10 years in Manhattan, founder Audra Lawlor left a Wall Street career and “convenient city life” with a new husband and two dogs to head West and start afresh in a farmhouse down a one-lane Orcas Island road.

It rains a lot on Orcas, but when the spring sun peaks through, a bounty of sweet berries burst forth and must be gathered, eaten, or preserved within a precious few weeks. Tree fruits love it there, too. After the buds and blooms of summer, fall weighs down limbs across the region with juicy stone-fruit and pomes. Bramley apples, Bartlett pears, Italian plums, and heirloom varieties of quinces from century-old trees fill markets, baskets, and bellies. Girl Meets Dirt play an important role in this rhythm of the seasons, preserving fleeting island fruit with just the right amounts of dedication, practice, and a hot copper pot.

We are thrilled to offer Girl Meets Dirt’s Rhubarb Lavender Spoon Preserves as our August 2017 Featured Jam. Deep within Orcas Island’s bucolic Crow Valley, once planted as far as the eye could see in orchard fruit, lies JBS Farm’sgorgeous patch of rhubarb. Audra has selected their deep red Valentine variety for this batch of preserves, which she lightly infused with garden-grown English culinary lavender buds. The perfect balance of tart and sweet with just a touch of floral, this deep pink preserve is gorgeous with soft, creamy cow’s milk cheeses, a buttered baguette, or dolloped over panna cotta or ice cream. According to Audra, it’s also been known to play nice stirred into a bit of bubbly for a special kind of toast. We especially love this jam paired with the lighter roast of our Peanut Cashew Butter and the toothsome richness of our Mission Almond Butter, preferably all piled together in the ice cream sundae of our dreams. We are offering Girl Meets Dirt’s Rhubarb Lavender Spoon Preserves a la carte, as well as in recommended PB&J and AB&J pairings.

She put the lime in the coconut, she drank ’em bot’ up
– Harry Nilsson

Local, seasonal fruit is, quite literally, Jamnation founder and chief jammer Gillian Reynolds’ jam. Hailing from three generations of chefs and food retailers, the native New Yorker turned Californian was born into the food world. During a trip to Brazil after grad school, she was blown away by the complex flavors and textures she found in the country’s panoply of fresh, simple fruits. She quickly realized that not all fruits were created equal, and that small, local farms usually created better-tasting, more sustainable harvests.

Upon returning to San Francisco, she was determined to find the same intensity of flavor in local, organic fruits from small Northern California farms. Her desire to share these exquisite fruits with friends & family back home in NYC inspired her to create small-batch, handmade jams. From these recipes, Jamnation was born.

Her idea was to create bright, bold jams with pure, carefully sourced ingredients. We think she’s done this quite well! Jamnation’s preserves sing with beautiful flavors and luscious textures, pairing wonderfully with our fresh-roasted, coarsely milled nut butters.

Gillian’s jam recipes started as gifts to her family; each one references a specific memory she shared with a particular family member. Her “In the Limelight” strawberry jam is one of those originals and was a gift to her mother. In Gillian’s words, “It is an ode to the strawberries that we ate during summers I spent in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, as a child. My mother was obsessed with these strawberries; they were only available for a few weeks every year and she made strawberry shortcakes, tarts… you name it.”

In California, Jamnation uses Seascape variety strawberries because they are a bit more tart and hold up better to cooking, leaving gorgeous whole strawberries in the finished jam, which cooks down in a three-day process to create its lush texture.

For each jam, Gillian also tries to find a secondary flavor that complements the primary fruit. Since many strawberry preserves tend to be cloyingly sweet, she chose citrus for this jam, using both the zest and hand-pressed juice of Key limes to provide an addictive balance of acid and sweetness. In the Limelight may have started as a gift to Gillian’s mother, but it is now her father’s pick for PB&J’s – one of his favorite midnight snacks.

We are excited to offer Jamnation’s In the Limelight Seascape Strawberry Jam with Key Lime as our July 2017 Featured Jam! It is available a la carte or in recommended PB&J and AB&J pairings on our web shop. We hope you love it as much as we do!

I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill.
– Fats Domino

I first encountered Doves & Figs at the Taza Chocolate Factory Store in Somerville, MA. Taza co-founder Alex Whitmore has been a friend and mentor since my days at Counter Culture Coffee in the mid aughts, when we worked with Taza on a number of collaborative projects. In fact, I had the idea for Big Spoon Roasters just a few days before a trip to visit Alex and his team in the fall of 2010. Inspired by Taza’s success, and their ability to maintain industry-leading quality and integrity, I shared my vision with Alex, who gave the perfect combination of encouragement and advice. Doves & Figs had been in business for about a year at that point, and the Taza store was sampling out their “Razzle Dazzle” jam, a perfect blend of tart raspberries and Taza chocolate. Immediately a fan, I brought home a few jars of their jam to use in PB&Js with some of our very first nut butter test recipes. In a sense, we’ve been “working” with Doves & Figs for quite some time now.

As a little girl, Doves & Figs founder Robin Cohen spent summers at her family’s small motel in Montauk, Long Island. According to Robin, the town was less refined than it is today, but the long stretches of sand between soaring cliffs and cool foaming ocean still defined the character of the place. Robin’s family washed all of the buckets and pails retired from sand castle building and filled them with local wild grapes, which had grown fat, dark purple, and plentiful by summer’s end. She and her brother squeezed piles and piles of grape “middles” from their skins so their dad could make gallons of grape jam. As Robin tells it, the “sweet drunken scent of grapes and sugar wove a crazy path out of the windows riding on the breeze and drew motel patrons to the kitchen.” While most kids wanted to open a lemonade stand, Robin dreamed of someday selling summer jam.

More than a few years have passed, and Robin has long since realized her dream in the form of Doves & Figs, revered throughout New England for its phenomenal expressions of the region’s produce. Doves & Figs creates all of their products with sun-ripened fresh fruit grown on New England farms, pure cane sugar, and no added pectin or preservatives. They craft unique blends of fresh fruits with an array of herbs, spices, nuts, dried fruits, chocolate, and spirits. Slowly simmered in small batches just like her father’s grape jam, Robin’s preserves taste like fruit touched by precious New England sunshine.

We are thrilled to offer Doves & Figs’ “Sparkle” Jam, a blueberry conserve with Meyer lemon and bits of candied ginger, as our June 2017 Featured Jam. While supplies last, the jam is available à la carte, as well as in recommended AB&J and PB&J pairings with our fresh-roasted nut butters. We especially love this jam in a PB&J ice cream sundae, which is the perfect dessert for summer entertaining (even if you are just entertaining yourself).