Strawberry Jam

posted by Angie

Making jam is not as hard as you would think. I recently canned 36 small jars of strawberry jam in a morning. Though it's not necessarily a cost-saver if you factor in the cost of jars (though these are re-usable) and fruit, the quality you can get with home-made jam is incomparable. Commercial jam is generally made with over-ripe, under-ripe, and ripe fruit, which forces them to use a lot of sugar or worse, high fructose corn syrup. Home-made jam is generally made with fruit that is at the height of flavor, allowing for a deeper fruit flavor without requiring as much sugar.

For this batch of jam, I bought a flat of strawberries from Heavenly Harvest's stand at the Wednesday Farmer's Market. The fruit was perfect, my biggest challenge the entire day was saving some for the jam and not getting a stomach ache from overconsumption. I do love strawberries. Don't bother canning with anything except direct from the grower or home-grown strawberries. The strawberries that are available at most grocery stores aren't worth the trouble, they are made for transport and taste like cardboard. I know it sounds like I am a strawberry elitist, and I admit that I am spoiled, but the only time I eat strawberries is when they are in season. The taste difference is phenomenal.



After getting most of the strawberries home, rinse them off and cut off the stems. Again, this is a dangerous time, you must have nerves of steel to make it through this without gorging on fresh berries. Cut the berries into smaller pieces and plop them in a nice big pot.



Don't forget to feed your stem pieces to your chickens, they will LOVE eating off all of the extra bits of strawberries. This may require you to get some chickens, if you don't already have some. Which you really should.



Add a tablespoon or so of lemon juice to your strawberries, this will bring up the acidity of your jam and help preserve it. You will also want to add sugar. How much sugar is entirely up to you. Most recipe's call for almost as much sugar as fruit, I find this totally excessive and it tends to drown out the taste of your fruit. What I generally do is add some, let it mix and boil for a bit, then taste it and add more if it's not enough. Boil your berries, stirring constantly, until it gets a nice mushy texture. Because you are going with less sugar, you will need to add in some pectin. Pectin is a natural thickener made from apples. For a full flat of strawberries I used 2 packets of liquid pectin. After adding the pectin, let it cook for a few minutes, stirring it constantly. You should see your jam thicken up. It will still be a bit runny, but it should be thick once it cools. While your strawberries cook it is a good time to sterilize your jars. Just put them in boiling water for a few minutes. Keep your jars hot after sterilizing.



Turn off your strawberries. Line up your jars and fill up to 1/4 inch from the top. This is your headspace. Use a clean damp rag to carefully wipe the rim of your jar. Put your new caps on and cover with a screw-top. Your lid should be "fingertip" tight, stop when you meet resistance. Put in your boiler-canner and make sure there is at least an inch of water over the top. Boil for 10 minutes, only start the timer once it is really boiling.



Once the timer goes off, use your jar lifter to pull them out. Let your jars cool on a towel, with a bit of space in between each one. You'll hear a pop sound. That's just the jars sealing up. It's a happy jar sound.



That's it, congratulate yourself on your extreme cleverness! Canning is becoming a lost art, and believe me it looks very impressive when you go over to someone's house and bring them a jar of home-made jam. For strawberry jam I have to really like them an awful lot.

For further reading, there is a fabulous write up here
on how to make apple butter.