This jam contains only three ingredients: strawberries, cane sugar and lemon juice. Done.
Safety Warning: Don’t let the mixture boil over ! It creates one hell of a mess, not to mention on an open gas flame it may catch fire … and sugar has an awful lot of energy in it. ( my Mom used to get her winter anthracite fire really going with a 1/4 cup of sugar thrown on it !!!)
That said, I do like strawberry jam, or strawberry preserve, or even just plain old strawberries which we pick from the garden (or the ones we buy from our favourite store)
What I don’t like is the fructose corn syrup or the large amounts of sugar and other junk that ends up in a lot of commercial jam.
So we make our own jam ( mostly Strawberry or Marmalade it has to be said). It’s not difficult, and kids like to help too.
Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn’t set and is too runny ( because I don’t put in enough sugar or pectin or both). But I don’t care because its also delicious over ice cream! Most people add store bought pectin to thicken it up to jam consistency, Unfortunately the pectin we paid good money for also contained dextrose which made it even sweeter, so I just got over it altogether.
What happens is the water slowly evaporates off the mixture and the the strawberries and sugar reduces down by about half.
We decant it into jars and it goes into either the fridge or the freezer, mostly it goes into the stomach via toast, most of it never actually makes it into the freezer.
Steps to make it:
- Cut the off the green leaves and any bruised or rotten bits off the strawberries.
I was left with about 2000g ( 2kg or 4.4 pounds) of strawberries. - To this I added 1/3 of the weight of the strawberries, in brown cane sugar. ( about 700 grams)
- Added the juice of three small lemons ( for pectin, and also so its not too sweet)
- Then put the whole lot on a gentle boil for one hour and a half, stirring now and again, but not too often otherwise (if you beat the strawberries they turn to mush).
- Store it in the fridge for a couple of days. (or in the freezer until required).
Whatever you do with it it wont last long, before its all gone!
