Fourth of July Plum Sauce

I've been waiting for a day when I had time to work on this plum sauce idea and, even though I have to work tonight, I have plenty of time during the day. So, after hanging up the flag outside, I got cooking!

I used the plum sauce recipe in the Ball Blue Book of Preserving but, since I was just using plum juice, I had to make a few changes to the recipe:

4 c. plum juice
2 c. brown sugar
1 c. white sugar
1 c. cider vinegar
1 medium onion, diced
2 cloves garlic (farm share!) minced
1 T. ginger, minced
1 t. dried red pepper
2 T. mustard seed
1 T. kosher salt
1/4 c. powdered low-sugar pectin

The pectin was an afterthought. After reducing the sauce for an hour, and running the immersion blender through it, it still wasn't thickening up. So I thought about it and decided to try some of the low-sugar recipe pectin I had. One half of the package is about 1/4 cup. I have no idea what I'm going to do with the other half-package. (Note to self: use powdered mustard instead of the seeds, they don't blend well.)

I'm putting this into 4 ounce jars since I think that small amounts of plum sauce are more likely to get opened and used. Hopefully I'll take some to work tonight with chicken nuggets for people to share. We usually try to have a little pot luck on holiday shifts.

Happy 4th of July!