Last Sunday my husband, my father and I piled in the Corolla (baby Green Me stayed with his Grandma La La) and headed out to Monroe Farms, our CSA of choice. The mission? To pick enough strawberries to make the 48 mile trip worth the actual and environmental price of our gas! But seriously, whatever our individual goals may have been, my personal goal was to make jam and lots of it! We made it home with a crate and two medium sized boxes of strawberries. The berries that came home with my husband and I are pictured below. We estimate that we had at least 24 pints of strawberries, some of which we ate and the rest I turned into 24 jars of strawberry preserves!

Although I have probably consumed gallons of strawberry jam over my lifetime, this was my first time making it myself. For many years I could count on my grandmother for my supplies, but she and her strawberry patch retired from jam making about 5 years ago and since then I have been at a loss. Only once have I found store bought jam that came anywhere close to rivaling homemade strawberry jam and it was imported from Holland for $8 a jar! Not exactly local nor affordable!

I used Pomona’s Universal Pectin to make my jam and followed her low sugar recipes using both cane sugar (organic from Costco) and Clark’s organic honey. Clark’s actually keeps hives at the Monroe Farm, so it is possible that the honey I used was made from the very strawberry plants flowers’ that I jammed! I made several small batches using anywhere from 1/2 a cup of honey (for the honey preserves) to 1 cup (or less) of sugar for the sugared variety. That may not sound like low sugar, but 1/2 cup to 1 cup of sweetener to 4 cups of mashed fruit is a pretty good ratio as many recipes and store bought jams contain more sugar than they do fruit! Low sugar preserves are not only healthier, but they also really highlight the delicious flavor of the fruit. The negative aspects of low sugar is that once opened the preserves last about 3 weeks — although in our home this likely won’t be a problem as we’ve already gone through two jars in just under one week! If your fruit is ripe you have the perfect setup to make a low sugar recipe; however, if you are preserving fruit that is slightly tart or lacking in flavor I would probably go for a more highly sweetened recipe.

Making the preserves: First I filled up the canner with water and set it on the stove to boil (start this early as it takes FOREVER). I also made my calcium water and put the jar in the fridge, as recommended by Pomona. Then I carefully “dumped” a pile of strawberries into a sink full of cool water and really got down to business! The strawberries were fresh picked, so they were a bit dusty and home to the occasional scuttle bug or spider. Did you know that the old and or damaged fruit tends to sink while the perfectly ripe or slightly unripe berries float? I suppose that as they get older and start to prune up a bit the strawberries become more dense and thus sink. As it was, this made it somewhat easier to select out the freshest berries for immediate consumption and use the slightly older and or imperfect (but still sweet) berries for the jam!

As I washed the strawberries I laid them on a towel to dry (as I seem to remember that one should use dry fruit for jams, pies and baked goods). Once the fruit was moderately to mostly dry I measured out 5 heaping cups, which I then mashed in a bowl. Once the berries were adequately mashed (this is subjective) I poured them in a large pot and mixed in two teaspoons of calcium water and set them to boil on medium heat. As the strawberries began to cook, I mixed my sweetener of choice (either sugar or honey) with two teaspoons of pectin, so that it would uniformly dissolve when mixed with the fruit. The pectin clumped (at first) in the initial couple batches that I made, but by the third round I figured out that I needed to vigorously mix the cooking berries with a wire whisk, while slowly pouring in the sweetener pectin mix. The vigorous mixing seemed to do the trick and I never again had a problem with clumping pectin. The good news is that after cooking and further mixing the clumps in the first two batches appear to have disappeared!

Once the berries were cooked I poured them into hot sanitized jars — I let my dishwasher do this task for me as it keeps them hot and clean while I cook.  Next I wiped down the rims and put on the lids. Once I had 8 jars filled I inverted them and put them in the water bath canner to cook for 18 minutes. The recipe calls for 10 minutes of water bath plus an extra minute for each 1000 feet of elevation. We live at about 5500 feet and my canner doesn’t center perfectly on the burner, so I add 8 minutes for good measure. The water bath is one step that I certainly would not want to under do!

Once the jars cooked for their requisite 18 minutes I carefully removed them with a dry towel and barbecue tongs (not recommended). I then precariously turned the jars upright and set them to dry and to wait for the lids to pop. One of the most satisfying aspects of canning is that at the end you get to sit back and relax while listening for the lids to pop. As the preserves cool the lids “pop” as they cool — indicating a safe and sanitary seal. If you’ve never canned you may find this element of satisfaction to be a bit peculiar — if so think of the satisfaction you get from listening to pop corn and then expand your auditory memory to include the resonance of a bell and you may be able to hear the oh so satisfying “pop pop” of success as your preserves cool!

If you have never before made jam and would like to try, please feel free to email me for more detailed instructions. The pectin boxes and lots of other web sites or books have recipes, but frankly no one seems to explain the nuances and details of canning, leaving novices to figure them out for themselves. And, honestly the first time I made jelly a few years back, I prayed before opening every jar (or when giving jars away) that I had not made some tragic error!