The flavors are exuberantly seasonal, and often change from week to week. Last year Saunders bottled up jams like white nectarine, nectarine with peach leaves, and Jefferson plum with lavender. Winter standbys include marmalades of white guava and Meyer lemon; Seville orange spiked with bourbon and star anise; and bergamot, a citrus fruit that is a cross between the pear lemon and the Seville orange or grapefruit.

Pizzaiolo pastry chef Angelica Biafora, who samples the jams on a regular basis, appreciates the philosophy behind them. “I know exactly how she makes them, which makes me comfortable. Local, seasonal, sustainable—I grew up in Italy and that’s the only way I know.”
Saunders doesn’t like to sell her jams much beyond the season that inspired them, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. She makes only eleven jars at a time, up to a few hundred per flavor, and she isn’t against offering an extremely limited run if she lucks into something good. Once, a neighbor gave her a bag of figs from an 85-year-old tree, so she whipped up 15 jars on the spot. At first, Saunders worried that customers would get attached to one particular flavor and be disappointed not to find it day after day; she discovered instead that people are ever eager to try something new. Bergamot marmalade, for example, has become a sleeper hit. “I was shocked the bergamot sold out first at Pizzaiolo. Most people don’t know what bergamot is!”

It’s the freshness that appeals most to Jennifer Millar, chef/owner of Sweet Adeline Bakeshop, who has carried Blue Chair Fruit since the spring and incorporated the rhubarb-kumquat jam into the bakery’s shortbread. “The jams taste like fruit, not sugar. They have a very clear taste.” Biafora echoes that sentiment; she was particularly keen on Saunders’ Black Splendor plum jam this summer because of the concentrated, tart flavors.

Saunders is a genuine fruit lover and an armchair plant hunter who keeps a wish list of hard-to-find fruits that she’s slowly tracking down through friends and industry contacts. The catch is that everything has to come from Northern California. She’s managed to find black mulberries, black raspberries, and Indian red peaches, but she’s still on the trail of dozens more varieties, including white apricots and Montmorency cherries. “I haven’t found every one I’d like to find,” she rues.

Unlike well-known Berkeley jam-maker June Taylor, who invites students into her still room several weekends a year to teach them her jam- and marmalade-making process, Saunders shyly safeguards her technique. What she will reveal? She cooks her fruit in traditional French copper jam pots that she special-ordered to ensure just the right size and shape. The copper conducts heat well, and it doesn’t react with the fruit.

As much as she can, she also eschews commercially bought pectin, the substance in fruit that makes jam set, opting instead to coax it straight from the fruit. “I really believe if you understand fruit, you understand how to use the pectin.” She tends to interpret terms like marmalade elastically. Traditionally, marmalade is made from citrus fruit, but Saunders makes several varieties that blend in guava, strawberries, and herbs. “One thing I strive for is perfect balance in flavor. People who tell me they never liked marmalade like these.”

For Saunders, texture is as vital as flavor. She’s a big fan of jelly, and that appreciation frames her jam-making. “My marmalade has a strong jelly component. My jam has pieces of fruit in it, but it’s easy to spread. What you’re spreading has flavor throughout. I try to make that background flavor taste as though you have a big chunk of fruit in your mouth.” Since jam is not meant to be eaten alone, she crafts each jam with its most common vehicle—toast—in mind.

“I think a lot about how it will look,” she says, pointing out the filaments of rind suspended in the bergamot marmalade like thick strands of saffron floating in space. The quince jam, which incorporates her own homemade quince brandy and secret spices, is a deep, startling red—“like a little jewel”—and the aprium is adrift with green almonds, an addition made in part for the sake of esthetics.

When I ask Saunders what her favorite flavor is, there is an almost wistful quality about her response. “Every jam for me is the most perfect jam in that moment, and then the moment is gone and I move on.”