Mouna Joulali is the jam fairy.
Every month, she concocts wild flavours – strawberries and orange blossoms; orange, walnuts and saffron; and pear cardamom – posts them on her Facebook page, and the orders come flying in.
Customers pick up either from her house, from La Centrale Culinaire (the shared commercial kitchen space on Casgrain in the Plateau), or from any of the fine food shops or cafés where she sells her products, including Kahwa Café, Coin B, and Le Panivore.
What makes Mouna’s jams special?
Her background. She was born in France to Tunisian and Moroccan parents, lived in all of those countries plus Belgium and now Montreal. And all of those influences end up in her three lines of jams.
She has a Classics line, an Oriental line and an Audacious line. “The oriental jams are ones that we do in my country or that use oriental spices,” she says. “Once a year in fall with pomegranate, I do a roasted almonds and toasted sesame seeds, which is a traditional jam from my mother’s city. Audacious is really the inspiration that comes and I think it’s a crazy idea but I still do it, like the kiwi-lemon. Well, in the beginning I thought it was audacious, but now it became classical.”
Now her Audacious line includes her moitié-moitiés, like the Frananas and “The Red and the Black” (half raspberry and half blueberry). She cooks each jam separately, pours the first halfway up the jar, lets it cool and solidify a little, then adds the second jam on top.
“It’s like getting an ice cream with two scoops!” she says.
Mouna brought me a basket of jams to test, including a Frananas, but there was an unforeseen hiccup: “This one I gave it to my son, he wanted to hold one as we were going to the daycare, and it mixed.” It was still delicious.
The others we tasted were the Viva Brasil (kiwi-lemon), Piña Colada (pineapple-coconut), strawberry-balsamic and Seville clementine. She uses less sugar than most jams, she says, but the jams taste plenty sweet because she uses fruit at their peak of ripeness and flavour. She also uses organic fruit whenever possible. And there’s no commercial pectin, keeping it all-natural and slightly more runny when the fruit has less natural pectin or she uses less lemon (which might be why her son was able to destroy the Frananas!).
My favourite was the Seville clementine. It was sweet and fresh and had chunks of juicy fruit in it. She says men generally like the kiwi-lemon for some reason. And ever since she created the Piña Colada, it’s been selling out fast.
What’s her favourite jam?
She has a special place in her heart for apricot, which inspired the name of her company. “My grandmother has a cottage in a city by the water in Tunisia where we had our vacations,” she says. “There was a forbidden shelf where she put all her jams. It was very tall and we were small. And I remember the huge jars of apricot jams on it that were my favourite. It was the shelf where my grandmother put all her sweets, so we called it the Étangère Gourmande.”
Family inspired the name, but it also inspired the business. Mouna used to work in market research, but took time off when she had children. She started making jams and friends loved them so much that they insisted she sell them. So she put her market research background to good use. “We did a big, blind tasting event,” she says. “I made around 60 flavours and the 60 or 70 people who came filled out questionnaires. We eliminated two flavours.”
Which left a lot of flavours for her monthly rotating list. She’s also always developing more flavours, but obviously it’s easy to get bored making only 58 flavours of jam, right?
She also started selling at markets, including Puces POP, the Marché de Nuit in the Mile End, and the Marché des Possibles. She’s applied to be on Etsy starting in September and in August you’ll find her at the Grand Débarras Hochelaga Maisonneuve.
What else does she sell?
“Lemonades, sometimes granola, sometimes little cakes, and Oriental puddings,” she says.
Her most recent side project has been organizing cooking classes. “I hate winter,” she says, “so I was so down in my creativity.” So when a collective in Île-des-Soeurs contacted her about a Syrian refugee who had arrived and needed work, she came up with a plan. “I told them I didn’t have money to pay her but what about we do cooking classes for Syrian food and we started it as an exchange, as a way for people to meet actual refugees, to have a more realistic view than what we have in the news.”
The classes are 3 to 4 hours (about 1 1/2 hours of cooking plus eating and talking) and involve a full menu: two entrees, one main course and a dessert. We did muhammara and babaganoush, the main was mehchi, which is stuffed veggies, and the desert was muhallabiya, which is milk pudding with pistachio and orange blossom. We cook and then we sit around the table and eat. And people stay after to talk.”
As she became more involved with the Syrian refugee community, she realized that people were coming from different regions and they could do cooking classes about the food from each region. “Aleppo is the culinary capital of Syria, but people from Damascus say they’re the culinary capital.”
“It was such a big success,” she says. “I thought I’d do it once or twice, but now we’re at the sixth one. I stopped it for the summer but I’ll start again officially later.
In the meantime, she’s hoping to grow her jam community, which is how she thinks of her customers and fans on Facebook.
This month’s jams haven’t come out yet, but here’s last month’s Facebook post/menu to give you an idea:
*Blueberry
*Apricot
*Clementine
*Pear vanilla
*Strawberries with orange blossom
*Strawberry Rhubarb
*Strawberry Balsamic vinegar
*Clementines ginger
*Ananas Coconut
*Kiwi Lemon
And the half-and-half jams:
*Stendhal: Raspberries- Blueberries
*Franana: Raspberries-Pineapple
Prices are between 9$ and 10$ per 250ml jar. Gift boxes of four 109ml jars are $28-$35, and they come all wrapped up.
To order, leave a comment on her Facebook page or message her privately. You can see and learn about her jams on her website.
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