Once again I found myself in the familiar situation of having a lot of garden produce that needed using, fast. So naturally, when my excess happened to be strawberries, why not make jam I thought? So here we go – here’s my photo guide to making strawberry jam.
Firstly, I gathered a bundle of freshly picked (and not so freshly picked) strawberries. I have these things coming out of my ears at the moment – my strawberry plants have done very well this year. I made this jam about a week ago and once again have collected enough to make some more!
First off all the strawberries needed preparing, so I washed them:
And then set about topping and slicing them.
Next came the mashing. I popped a bunch into my blender and they basically wedged the whole system up. So I tried mashing them a little first as per the instructions. How fine you mash them depends on how big you want your fruit lumps to be. I like smooth jam so once I’d mashed them by hand I then blended them successfully into a fine pulp.
Next to pour this into a jam pan – which I didn’t have, so I used two frying pans. You also have to add your sugar at this point – strawberries are low in pectin (helps jam set) so I used jam sugar.
Simmer this gloop for a bit then bring to the boil for exactly 4 mins, according to my recipe. One of my pans had a loose handle which ment strawberry slop went everywhere which you can see in the photo below:
To test my setting point I used the saucer trick – drop some jam onto a cool plate and push it with your finger – if it wrinkles your jam is done! At that point to siphoned the jam into jars and voila!
(I have two half full jars as I had to do each pan separately.)
And that’s it!
