For Fruit Preserves Without the Fuss, Make Freezer Jam

This heat-free technique locks in the fresh flavors of seasonal produce.

Published on May 1, 2025

Of all the classic Pennsylvania dishes to grace the table during afternoon tea at Elwood in Philadelphia—cubes of venison scrapple, smoked catfish crackers with sour cream and caviar, shoofly cake—the best among them was merely a condiment. Served in the kind of shallow china saucer you’d use to feed an aristocratic kitten and paired with biscuits and butter festooned with flower petals, the glossy, spoonable, seed-stippled strawberry jam was as hot pink as a flamingo pool float.

The fresh-fruit flavor was just as vivid, too, a physics-defying transfiguration of the sweetest strawberries I’ve ever eaten. So when a little retail menu accompanied the check, listing the jam for sale, of course I was taking some home. My server went down to the restaurant basement and returned with an 8-ounce glass jar smoked in frost: “Freezer jelly,” Elwood’s chef-owner Adam Diltz explained when I complimented him on its vibrancy. “It’s never cooked, so it keeps that fresh summer flavor.”

Elwood Tea Service — *Tea service at Elwood in Philadelphia (Photo: Mike Prince, Courtesy Elwood)*

It does not necessarily follow that if a person loves fruit, they will also love jam. This is understandable, since fresh fruit loses so much of its effervescence when it’s simmered as long as a pot of beef bourguignon. But for me, the thick, sticky, concentrated preserves are just as appealing, whether on toast, with cheese, or encased in crostata. At Green Aisle Grocery, the former Philly market and canning line I owned with my brother Andrew, I made preserves professionally for nearly a decade: fan-favorite Blueberry Cardamom, layered red-and-black Raspberry Roulette, Five Spiced Peach, Apricot Sumac Sage in the rare season an early frost didn’t dash the entire region’s apricot hopes. We didn’t do freezer jam—something I considered then an unserious shortcut. We had a Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) plan, and dammit, we were going to use it to make the real stuff. Cooked in stock pots for hours, painstakingly canned, potentially poisonous if you don’t do it right—these were preserves with stakes! All it took was a dab of Diltz’s loose magenta jam on a biscuit to annihilate all my convictions.

Diltz and his younger brother Toby grew up immersed in the foodways of the Pennsylvania Dutch, the catchall for the German-speaking immigrants who fled to the state starting in the late 1600s to escape religious persecution. This includes, but is not limited to, the Amish and Mennonite communities who live in and around Lancaster County in South Central Pennsylvania. Common ground between these religious communities and the secular people of the Pennsylvania Dutch lineage was found in their recipe collections: chicken and ham pot pies, whoopie and shoofly pies, scrapple, pork with sauerkraut, and endless jars of preserved produce necessary for farm-centric living.

Jam — *Mel Ortiz* *(Courtesy Blind Pig Kitchen)*

It may not be as old as hot water bath canning, but freezing was the preferred process for preserving peak-season fruit on Diltz’s great-grandparents’ farm in Hetlerville, 100 miles north of Lancaster County, where their grandfather, Elwood Andreas, worked metal for freight train cars at the Berwick Forge. When they were kids, the Diltz brothers would forage wild raspberries and Concord grapes or go to the U-pick farm to collect strawberries for their great-grandmother, Leola Andreas. “We would wind up eating half of them,” Diltz told me. With the rest, “Grammy Oley would make her strawberry shortcake on biscuits with strawberry freezer jelly.”

Toby Diltz, meanwhile, remembers Grampa Elwood doing more of the jamming. What the brothers do agree on is the unsurpassed flavor of their childhood jams: “You just can’t find anything that tastes like that anywhere,” he said when I caught up with him on the phone at his 6-acre organic farm and restaurant, the Blind Pig Kitchen, in Bloomsburg. (You can order his freezer jam online for local pick-up.) Red and black raspberry canes were the first thing he planted on his homestead—just so he could make freezer jam. “When you put the work into growing fruit the right way, you want to keep those flavors intact, and the freezer jam is the only way to do that.”

*The dining room at Blind Pig Kitchen in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania (Photo: Graham Walzer, Courtesy Blind Pig Kitchen)*

The luminous strawberries in the freezer jam I had at Elwood were from Toby’s farm. He also likely made that particular batch of jam. Or maybe Adam did. Or their mother did? No one actually seems to know which family member is responsible for which jar, but the recipe is nearly standard across the four generations. “I actually had to buy a second freezer,” Adam Diltz said—enough space to keep a year’s worth of jam properly chilled.

The jar I took home didn’t last long. I ate the first third on grainy toast and the second third off the back of a butter knife moments after finishing said toast. I waited a respectable two days before polishing off the rest of the jar.