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Food & Wine, February 2007

Food & Wine, August 2007

CoolHunting.com We Love Jam: Blenheim Apricot Jam, BBQ Sauce and Biscotti

by Ami Kealoha, 11 June 2008

Like having the best of the best Farmer's Market delivered to your door, California-based We Love Jam hand makes some of the most tantalizing jams, sauces and other treats we've ever tasted and sells them online. Using produce sourced from obscure varieties of fruits and refining recipes to perfection, their products are bursting with flavor and boast addictive qualities that make them disappear quickly.

Their pitch-perfect BBQ sauce, hitting the ideal vinegary sweet balance with a touch of heat, has fast become our favorite summer condiment. As recommended by the makers, the sauce is as delicious on grilled meats as it is on sandwiches, fries and any other excuse you can find to get it into your mouth. A 16-ounce mason jar is $10 from their online store.

Similarly habit-forming, We Love Jam recently introduced a citrus, dark chocolate and nut biscotti that's exceptional. With a subtle dose of hand-candied citrus, a liberal sprinkling of raw Mission almonds and hazelnuts with touches of Belgian chocolate, the combination goes well with coffee and teas. A much softer, more snackable texture than other biscotti, they're tasty on their own as well. The treats are made in small batches and a box of nine (packaged in biodegradable cellophane) is $10.

We Love Jam made their name with their exceptional Blenheim Apricot Jam. The makers started with the apricot variety back in 2002, producing an apricot jam with a superior flavor, color and texture to all other versions. They since discovered that the Blenheim is an endangered tree, which combined with its popularity makes for extremely limited quantities and a waiting list. Sign up now to reserve jars ($20 for 16 ounces and $10 for eight ounces) that will be available in August.

Though we've only had the privilege of tasting these three products, they're enough for us to bet that We Love Jam's other offerings, including bread and butter pickles, Fukushu Kumquat marmalade and the intriguing hoshigaki (hand-dried, massaged persimmons), are worth ordering.

Jam of lords, lords of jam

The joys of Blenheim apricots

BY PAUL REIDINGER

Blenheim, as those of us who feel the occasional twitch upon the thread of Anglophilia will recall, is the ancestral home of the dukes of Marlborough as well as the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill, a figure much admired by, though not at all resembling, le George W. Bush. Blenheim is also a type of apricot, and Blenheim apricots were indeed grown on the grounds of Blenheim Palace in the 19th century; in due course the fruit, taking its way ever westward, arrived in California. You can occasionally find Blenheims at farmers markets; in addition, if you like or even love jam, they can be found in the jam produced by welovejam.com, a tiny San Francisco concern that until recently was making its entire production of apricot jam from the fruit of a single Blenheim tree in the Santa Clara valley.

The Blenheim, despite its grand pedigree, has recently fallen on parlous times.

Its fruit is smaller and slower to ripen than other varieties of apricot and, in my experience, can have a greenish tinge when bought fresh. ("Let them ripen for three or four days," I was told when I bought some last year. I did, and several rotted, which was rather irritating at $4 per pound.) These delicate qualities, while redolent of Old World charm and languor, do suggest that the fruit is at least as well-served being made into jam as harvested, shipped, and sold fresh in our mechanized agricultural economy. As with canned tomatoes, the right sort of processing — loving processing — can show Blenheims at their best.

The duo behind WLJ, Eric Haeberli and Phineas Hoang, don't use the word "love" lightly. Their entire enterprise (whose roots are traceable to some impromptu jam-making in 2002) is about passion, not money, from the saving of a particular type of apricot to the packaging of everything they make (including barbecue sauce and superlative biscotti) in containers that are either recyclable or, in the case of their cellophane sacks, compostable.

At the moment, WLJ looks a little the way Recchiuti Confections did a few years ago: it's a tiny and unlikely freckle on the face of the food business. But (as the young Alfie so gloomily observed in Annie Hall) the universe is expanding, and WLJ's products (available through the Web site) could soon be coming to Bi-Rite— and from there, who knows?

Jam Sessions: San Francisco Chronicle, 5/28/08

They Love Jam: David Lebovitz, 12/26/07

Best of the City/Best Jam: 7x7 magazine, 6/18/08

Cue up the 'cots: San Francisco Magazine, 06/08

We Love Jam: KQED, 08/23/07