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June Featured Jam: Doves & Figs Sparkle Jam

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).

May Featured Jam: American Spoon Valiant Grape Jelly


The juice of the grape is the liquid quintessence of concentrated sunbeams.
– Thomas Love Peacock

Since 1982, American Spoon has been preserving exquisite locally grown fruit in their Petoskey, MI, kitchen. After all these years, their crew of skilled cooks still prepares fruits by hand and cooks them with care using wooden paddles and small-batch copper kettles. They also still work directly with a dedicated group of Michigan farmers who grow the varieties of fruits they love: varieties bred over generations specifically for their unparalleled taste and unique character. In addition to sharing a favorite table utensil, Big Spoon Roasters and American Spoon share an unwavering dedication to ingredient integrity, singular flavor, and relationship-based sustainable sourcing practices.

The artisans at American Spoon are also just plain good at making jam, and it was difficult to choose just one of their jams as the May 2017 Featured Jam, but during a recent tasting, we kept coming back to one particular jar for its absolute perfect intensity, and so the choice was made for us. But first, a story.

Two miles from American Spoon’s Petoskey kitchen, retired dentist Art Denton grows Valiant Grapes, a domesticated variety of northern-growing, cold-hardy wild grapes. The clusters consist of small, dense, deep purple grapes with an intense flavor that has the brambly complexity of a wild grape mixed with the familiar flavor of a Concord. Art has been growing grapes for American Spoon for about six years now, and while he has figured out how to outwit the birds who like to gorge themselves on his grapes each fall, he still has trouble with figuring out Michigan’s short growing season.

During last year’s brutally long and cold winter, snow piled up so high that Art’s plants had six inches of snow on the ground as the vines shot out new tendrils of growth throughout the slow-melting spring. Still, Art kept a watchful eye over the clusters of remaining grapes as they ripened from pale green to deep, dark purple, and in late fall he harvested about 3000 pounds of Valiants, just as the snow was starting to fall again. Once American Spoon got the grapes to their kitchen, they washed and sorted the grapes, then steamed them to burst their skins. Before last year, they had crushed the grapes in an antique screw press, but this year, they upgraded to a modern hydro-bladder press, which squeezes juice from pulp with less waste. The grape juice is then mixed with a little sugar, a little lemon, and pectin to help it set while being cooked down in copper kettles to a rich, jammy jelly with incomparable grape intensity.

We are honored to offer jars of American Spoon Valiant Grape Jelly a la carte and in recommended PB&J and AB&J pairings while supplies last. Enjoy!

April Featured Jam: Plum Tree Tayberry


Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
– Wendell Berry

If you’ve ever been to Oregon in the summer, then you know that the state’s Pacific coast is a veritable paradise of long sunny days, cool sea breezes, and bounties of bright juicy berries that stain everyone from Portland to Medford with marks of sweet happiness. Oregon’s famed berries are just as fleeting as they are delicious, though, and a natural extension of the annual fruit explosion is a strong tradition of home canning and food preservation so that summer’s sweetest flavors can be enjoyed all year.

Oregon native Miranda Rake’s local berry jams are quite simply some of the best we’ve ever tasted. After a stint in the early aughts selling her jams to a friend’s restaurant under the name “Miranda’s Jam,” she moved to NYC in 2009 to pursue a masters degree in food & culture at NYU and jam took a backseat to academia for a few years.

When she moved back to Portland in 2013, Miranda’s natural Oregonian instincts kicked in and her jam making came back with newfound energy in the form of Plum Tree Jam, which focuses on the magical bonanza of native Oregon berries, particularly those varieties that are a bit unusual and nearly impossible to find elsewhere. These berries burst with summer sunshine, which makes them all the more precious in the land of seemingly endless rain. As Miranda puts it, “Anticipation mounts through the drizzle of winter and our reward is brief but so juicy sweet. I hope my jams preserve that transitory joy for savoring year round.”

To let the pure berry flavors speak up for themselves, Miranda makes her jams with just berries, cane sugar, and a touch of lemon juice. Because she doesn’t use pectin, the jams have a very spreadable, somewhat soft-set consistency that we love (and which makes for a particularly ooey-gooey PB&J). There is about half a pound of fruit in each and every jar, simmered slowly into jammy perfection.

We are thrilled to offer Miranda’s Tayberry Jam as our April 2017 Featured Jam, available a la carte or in recommended AB&J and PB&J pairings with our fresh-roasted, handcrafted nut butters.

Tayberries are tangy and slightly sweet in their fresh berry form. These fragile, oblong beauties of Scottish descent become tantalizingly floral, bright, and sweet when transformed into jam. We especially love Tayberry Jam, a Good Food Awards 2015 winner, with a strong cup of coffee or tea, buttery croissants, and the rich flavors of our Peanut Cashew and Almond Cocoa butters.