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Let there be berries, and JAM!
If it is late June / early July in Maine, that means it is strawberry time!
That is 35 pounds of berries… less than last year. Since Joshua is now insisting on only school lunches, and not eating PB&J (peanut butter and jelly/jam sandwiches for those not living in the US…this is a staple of every school child’s diet… peanuts are also called groundnuts, or in French cacahuete or arachides and are ground into a spread) our annual strawberry jam consumption has dropped. Of these berries, we (ok, *I*) decided to indulge and keep about 5 pounds just to eat, eat, EAT! By the way, they are very good with vanilla ice cream and hot fudge sauce. But I digress. And have gained a pound. Ahem.
First I had to wash and hull (remove the stems) from the berries. Then they are supposed to be smashed. Well… in the past I have sliced. This year, I decided to try something a bit different…and faster! I took the Tupperware plastic cake carrier lid and turned it upside down to use as a bowl (do this for potluck salads a lot). Then I smooshed the berries in my exceptionally well-cleaned hands. Messy but effective, and way faster and simpler than slicing. Like fingerpainting with your food {grin}.
Next you start cooking the jam. I break the rules (what a shock!) and make a double batch. If you cook too large a batch the pectin available for home cooks doesn’t work properly; I like to use Pomona’s Universal Pectin (think there is a picture somewhere on the blog from last year or the year before). It is available in health food / organic stores and you can make low-sugar jam using barely half the sugar / sweetener required by regular (even ostensibly low-sugar) pectins.
One of my favorite jam tools is my mom’s old 1950s vintage potato masher (note the classy phenolic handle with stars… talk about RETRO vintage!). It smashes and stirs well, the handle stays cold, and due to the flat bottom (next picture) it stands upright in the pan!
Here’s what the chaos in the kitchen looks like mid-stream:
When the batch of jam is done, there is… if it is strawberry … a lot of foam (blech) on the top. One way (never told or shared in the cookbooks, passed along by word of mouth amongst jam-makers) to tame the foam is to add some dollops of butter…just little bits… around the edge:
Then you get to do the canning. This year I gave myself a doozie of a steam burn lifting the lid off the canning pot…it turned into a blister almost the size of a dime on my thumb…OUCH! Anyway, then you end up with lots of beautiful jam (where the fruit ALWAYS floats to the top during canning and you have to stir it when you open the jars):
When I lived on San Juan Island (Washington), I always volunteered at the country fair, and particularly enjoyed helping at the judges table for Food Preservation (canned fruits, veggies, meats/fish, beers, wines, vinegars, etc). There I learned from the certified judges that you should always store your home-canned jams with the rings OFF. That way, if the vacuum seal (created by heating the jam with the new lids in the hot water bath) breaks, the loose lid will be readily apparent. This is important because if ANY air gets in, nasty stuff can happen, like invisible bacteria that makes you really sick can grow. If the rings are on, then you don’t know if the lid is lose because you bumped it removing the ring, or because it has been loose a long time and yucky stuff is growing.
And finally, the birds’ eye view of a day’s labor:
July 7th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Inspirational! As always. The slugs seem to get to our strawberries before we get a chance to enjoy any. 🙁
If my ailing trees (apricot, peach, and plum) produce anything this year, I might try some canning myself, and will look for that pectin.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
I missed strawberry season here in NC this year. We used to grow them when I was growing up in PA….and strawberry jam was a staple in our diet! Store bought, no matter what the brand, just isn’t the same!
July 8th, 2008 at 11:35 am
35 pounds of strawberries! Did you pick them yourself? My back complains around 8 pounds… However that was enough to make two batches of jam for us which is ensconced in the refrigerator — freezer space being somewhat lacking a present…
In any event your photographs are most inspirational!
July 26th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Oh my goodness, that is a LOT of jam. Wow.
I totally thought we were doing something wrong when our fruit floated to the top. Glad to know that is what is supposed to happen! 🙂