2-Ingredient Chia Seed Jam Recipe (No Sugar)
By Carine Claudepierre
Published on 04/26/2021 - Last updated on 12/06/2023
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This easy 2-ingredient chia seed jam recipe is perfect to spread on a slice of bread, pancakes, or crepes.
Bonus, this is a sugar-free jam recipe ready in only 5 minutes and it freezes very well to meal prep some healthy, tasty jam for breakfast.
What’s Chia Seed Jam?
Chia seed jam is a homemade jam recipe made of healthy chia seeds and fruits.
It’s a jam made without sugar or gelatin. It only uses fruits and healthy plant-based chia seeds as a gel to provide a similar sticky, gooey texture to the store-bought jam.
It’s a great healthy breakfast jam or baby first food for vegan babies infants to introduce berries, fibers, and plant-based proteins from the chia seeds.
How To Make Chia Seed Jam
This chia seed jam recipe is a simple 2-ingredient recipe perfect for people who love sugar-free jam
Ingredients
It’s made with 2 simple healthy ingredients:
- Berries – feel free to use fresh or frozen fruits. Both work very well. The best choice listed in order of sweetness, from the sweeter to the most bitter, are blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries.
- Chia seeds or ground chia seeds – these super seeds contain lots of fiber, omega-3, plant-based proteins, and anti-oxidants. Once in contact with water or juicy fruits, they soak up the liquid and form a gel-like texture similar to jam. As a result, they are the perfect healthy ingredients to create a jam-like texture without adding sugar to kid food. You can also use ground chia seeds to avoid the lumpy texture of chia seeds in your jam.
Optional ingredients
You can add some other ingredients to your baby chia jam recipe to add an extra flavor to your jam like:
- Lemon juice – perfect with blueberries but not recommended if you are making a raspberry chia jam recipe. In fact, raspberries or naturally bitter, so adding lemon turns the baby jam very sour. Sour is a great flavor to introduce to babies, but too many sour fruits can upset their gut.
- Vanilla extract or pure vanilla seeds – to add a hint of vanilla flavor.
- Sweetener – you can sweeten the jam with 1-2 tablespoons of maple syrup or stevia.
Cook the jam
Add the berries to a saucepan over medium heat. Heat and stir the berries, mashing with a fork or potato masher as you go to form a berry mash.
Then, add the chia seeds or ground chia seeds and keep mashing them into the seeds to form the sugar-free jam.
Bring to a light boil and cook the jam for 1-2 minutes until it thickens and the mixture is consistent.
Cool completely
Place the cooked jam in a glass mason jar at room temperature for 15 minutes.
Finally, seal the jar and store it in the fridge for a few hours to thicken.
The Best Jam Flavor Combinations
You can use this baby jam recipe to create varieties of jam flavors like:
- Sugar-free raspberry jam – use only raspberries.
- Sugar-free strawberry jam – use only strawberries.
- Blueberries raspberries – use half/half of each berry.
- Blueberries strawberry chia jam – use half/half of each berry.
Serving Chia Seed Jam
You can serve this raspberry chia seed jam recipe on its own as a healthy raw dessert or for breakfast on top of a slice of vegan gluten-free bread, vegan pancakes, or vegan crepes.
It makes the best combo of flavor served with peanut butter or almond butter.
Another option is to use a baby jam for vegan babies from 9 months.
Storage Instructions
This baby jam recipe can be stored for up to 4 days in the fridge in a sealed glass mason jar or airtight container.
You can also freeze the baby jam in ice cube trays in single portions, but only if you used fresh fruits! You should never freeze a product that has been frozen before to avoid bacteria contamination.
So if you used frozen berries for this recipe, the jam must be eaten within 4 days.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sure, you can make this baby jam recipe using 2 teaspoons of one of the gluten-free starchy flour below:
– corn starch
– arrowroot powder
Cook the fruits recommended by the recipe, then sprinkle the arrowroot flour or cornstarch onto the cooked fruits and keep cooking until a sticky jam forms.
Yes, you can add a sweetener to the pan when cooking the fruits. The best refined-sugar-free sweeteners to use in this sugar-free chia seed jam is unrefined liquid sweeteners – 1 or 2 tablespoons of sweetener like rice syrup, maple syrup, or agave syrup are great options.
More Vegan Breakfast Recipes
Below I listed some more healthy toddler recipes for you to try:
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Raspberry Chia Seed Jam
Ingredients
- 2 cups Berries - fresh or frozen. Can be raspberries or strawberries or blueberries
- 2 tablespoons Chia Seeds - or ground chia seeds (or 2 teaspoons arrowroot flour)
Optional
- ¼ teaspoon Vanilla Extract
- 2-3 tablespoons Maple Syrup - or sugar free erythritol or 3-4 stevia drops
- 1 teaspoon Lemon Juice
Instructions
- Place the fruits, fresh or frozen, into a saucepan and bring the saucepan to low-medium heat.
- Stir and mash fruits with a fork or potato masher to form a fruit mash. If the fruits are frozen, they are difficult to mash straight away, so stir and cook the fruits and mash as soon as they have softened.
- Stir in chia seeds or arrowroot flour, bring to a light boil, and stir/cook for 1-2 minutes until the mixture thickens. Remove saucepan from heat.
- Cool the jam completely into a glass mason jar for 15 minutes. Then close with a lid and place in the fridge to thicken.
Storage
- Store jam for up to 4 days in a sealed jar in the fridge.
- If the fruits you used are fresh, you can freeze the chia seed jam into ice cube trays. Thaw the portion of jam the day before in a bowl placed in the fridge.
Can my 7 month old have this
Yes, chia seeds are fine for babies. It might be advisable to pre-soak them though.
Can’t wait to make this!!!
Am I able to can these by pressure sealing them and keep it in the cupboard? Thanks!
I didn’t try these options so unfortunately I can’t recommend
can you use boiling water bath method, called canning, using chia seed or ground chia for thickener with strawberries? if so, can you give me some details. thank you very much
You can’t really can chia seed jam made without sugar because sugar is what acts as a preservative. This recipe is not sweetened so I don’t think it will last well.
What is the purpose of cooking the berries? I just add fresh berries and chia seeds together in my food processor and that’s it.
You can make raw chia seed jam but cooking berries make the jam thicker, stickier closer to real jam. It also preserve the jam longer.