Warning! Long, and involves (gasp!) cooking!

In the beginning, there was a field with strawberries:

In the end, there was a LOT of jam. In between, there was a lot of mess and heat. Yep, once again I’ve made enough jam to (barely) keep two growing boys (aka the bottomless food pits) in peanut butter and jam sandwiches and toast with jam for a year. For those of you who haven’t made jam, here’s what you do:

1. Get the berries. Now that we live in Maine, we go to the U-pick fields, where berries are a bargain at $1.15 a pound (about US$ 2.40 a kilo if my rough arithmetic isn’t too far off). Everyone in the family was dragooned into the effort of “getting close to the land.” Let’s say the boys’ work ethic needs work LOL! My goal this year was to get 40+ pounds (nearly 20 kilos), since last year’s 38 pounds of berries and jam lasted with only two small jars to spare. Alas, we got only 38 pounds this year.

Papa / Dear Hubby:

The boys:

Sometimes you need to take a beauty break (and take photos from which to make quilts in the future) like this one:

or this one:

2. Go home and WASH the berries and hull them (remove the leafy do-bob). This is what 38 pounds of strawberries looks like–and don’t overlook the tray in the sink. Make sure you are wearing shoes that support your feet, because you’ll be on them for HOURS.

It took me over two hours to wash and hull all of them.

3. Start making the jam. I use Pomona’s Universal pectin, found in health food groceries. It seems to gel better than Ball Pectin or the brands found in regular every-day grocery stores. And it requires even less sugar than the “low-sugar” version of Ball Pectin. (Ball, by the way, has been around forever in home canning, and the Ball Blue book is the canner’s bible of how to preserve foods by canning, either hot water bath or steaming–find the book and every supply you could ever need other than the Pomona’s at HomeCanning.com).

4. The recipes always call for mashed fruit. My wrists and joints are not up to mashing 38 pounds of berries, and things like food processors pulverize. So I chopped. And chopped. And chopped.

5. Measure berries into a heavy, large pan. My bought-at-an-estate-sale-for-$25!!!!-Le Creuset Dutch oven (bought in the early 80s by the way), an enameled cast iron pan, is perfect. Add calcium water (Pomona’s gives you calcium powder to mix with water) to the berries and bring to a boil:

6. Measure sugar and pectin into a bowl and stir with whisk. Most pectins require equal amounts of berries and sugar: so 4 cups berries, 4 cups sugar. I prefer jams that taste like the berries not “sweet.” So I have used various low-sugar pectins, and like Pomona’s best. I was able to use about 2 1/2 cups sugar to 8 cups of berries, or about a one to four ratio… ta DA… jam that tastes like strawberries!

Somewhere in the middle, take more future-quilt-reference-photos like this one:

7. While bringing berries to a boil, also boil and sterilize the lids and rings and the jars. You’re supposed to keep the jars warm / hot, but I don’t ever have enough space and organization to do that, so I’m diligent on the other stuff.

Aside: by the way, for several years I volunteered at the judges’ table at the Food Preservation section of the San Juan County (Wash.) Fair, and learned a LOT about the subject. The key thing is health and safety. Don’t burn yourself. Don’t poison anyone. So observing proper headroom (the amount of airspace at the top of a jar) is critical…too much air, and the jam can spoil and make you sick. Ditto for too little. Getting a proper seal (more on that below) and a “vacuum” pack through the hot water bath (10 plus minutes) is also critical.

8. During all of this, make sure the jam doesn’t stick to the bottom and burn. I have found that my Mom’s old flat-bottomed potato masher (dates from about 1963 and still going strong) is the perfect stirring tool…stands upright in the pan! See it above, at the photo at step 4.

Once the fruit boils, you add the sugar-pectin mix and bring everything back to a boil again.

Strawberry jam is notorious for making “froth” (yuk) on the top. I swirl the potato masher to spin the froth to the edges. I’ll skim some, but if you add just a few slivers of butter, it makes the icky froth go away (if you can that up, it looks like gray scuz…not attractive).

9. Set the jars near the jam pot. Get a ladle and the wide-mouthed funnel. Here’s a bowl to contain (see… I make some effort to stay tidy… doesn’t work, but it limits the mess, sort of…) the tools: a skimmer, the green wide-mouth funnel (highly recommended), a spoon (to ladle in the last few bits to reach 1/4″ from the top of the jar), a magnetic grabber to get the lids and rings out of the scalding hot water (the blue wand things), and a jar lifter (essential! to get the jars into and then out of the boiling water bath)–it’s that wire thing on the right with green rubberized stuff on the bottom to keep from dropping the jars.

10. FILL the jars, add the lids and rings. Lower into boiling water bath in canning pot (the big tall metal one to the right of the stove in the “view” photo of the kitchen chaos). Cover, return to boil, boil for 10 minutes. Remove using essential jar lifter. I set an old towel on the counter, then a cookie rack on top of that. Place jars on cookie rack to cool. Wait for the tell-tale pop telling you that the vacuum seal has formed! Success!

11. Realize you have skipped lunch and are ravenous after hours on your feet. Eat the first slice of bread with butter and still-warm jam. Heaven!

12. Attempt to clean up. Decide some of it can wait, since you left for the berry fields 11 hours earlier. Take a well-deserved shower and collapse into a vegetative state on the sofa.

13. Next morning: Set out ALL the jars and take a picture to show your blog-friends that 38 pounds of berries and just under 10 pounds of sugar, and four boxes of pectin, makes 35 pints of jam (in 45 jars, pint and half-pint). Feel very self-satisfied (grin!).

14. Get the empty jar boxes and re-fill them with this year’s bounty, and haul them down to the basement, where they will be emptied a few jars at a time. Be REALLY glad it’s another year ’til we have to do this again, but be really glad my boys like my jam better because it’s not too sweet and “tastes like strawberries.” Yum!

And if you’ve read all this way, THANKS! Have a piece of bread with fresh jam for me! Next: find out who sells raspberries in Maine for….drum roll…. more jam (but not nearly as much!).

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.