strawberry jam (sauce)

Howdy readeroonies! My friend Rosemary and I slaved away a few weeks ago to make some strawberry jam which actually was only sauce in the end, but no matter, still delicious and blog worthy! I will show you what I did, and where we went wrong, and what you should do if you want jam and not sauce.

First, git yerself some strawbs up in the hizzle. We used double of what you see here. Roughly one pint of berries will make you 500ml of jam/sauce.

Wash and cut. Chit and chat.

Simmer berries over medium heat and add your sweetener. We made 3 batches:

-lime strawberry with maple syrup

-vanilla lemon with maple syrup and port

-classic strawberry with cinnamon and ginger

The juice of 4 limes is about sufficient for 8 cups of berries. Don't be shy to do multiple tastings. It's part of fun, and hot berry sauce is just about the funnest thing to taste and tweak. Sugar rush!

Boil away, my darlings! Alright people, at this point, when your fruit is nice and mushy and lots of liquid has exuded from the berries, you need to add thickener: pectin, kudzu, agar...something to make it gel. This, we did not do. Well, our piddly tablespoon of agar flakes did not cut it. Surf around the internet for proportions and recipes to suit your needs. 

Still, it was rewarding to see the delicious fruit mush go into sterilized jars and get sealed up in a nice bath of boiling hot water.

Next time, I will use pectin to make regular jam, and agar to make freezer sauce. Honestly, you can go through eating the stuff so quickly that boiling jars to seal them is not worth the time. Freezer jam is the way to go if you hoover through it like I do.

Cute labels! The vanilla strawberry jam tasted incredible on french toast this weekend.