Strawberry Preserves No. 2

Strawberry Preserves No. 1 resulted in a runny mess that oozed all over my high hopes of perfect jam on the first try. I had 12 jars of soupy, wet syrup that you couldn't really call "jam". In desperation, I re-boiled and re-jarred the jam in two batches, and I got a much better result. This time I took a page out of housemate Paul's book and used diluted iodaphor to sanitize the jars after washing them. Paul brews beer from time to time, and this is a method he uses in his home-brewing which also works well for canning.

I strained the berries and set them aside, just boiling the syrup alone for what turned out to be ~20 minutes. I did this in 2 batches, to avoid the mess that resulted when I tried doing it all at once the first time. An important element of jam-making is using a pot that is at least 3 times bigger than the volume you're starting out with. The syrup, once it heats up, begins to get foamy and the foam expands at least this much.

The frozen saucer test (see S.P. No.1) turned out to be very helpful. It takes much longer than I had thought for the syrup to get to the no-dribbling point, but the result is a heavy, thick syrup that you can actually imagine jamming up quite nicely.

The syrup seems to have three significant stages while it's boiling:
1. it's liquid: it boils, but there is no foam
2. it begins to foam while you stir it (you should be stirring almost constantly), but when you stop stirring it goes back to a transparent liquid
3. it foams like crazy while stirred, and when you stop stirring it stays at roughly the same foamy volume (and might even keep expanding)

It's not until at least stage 3 that there's any hope of it passing the frozen saucer test. I let the syrup get to this point before I added the fruit back in because I didn't want to over-handle the berries. The next time I make this jam, I'll try to handle the berries even less. I was really hoping for a whole-fruit jam that is all about the berries in it, but this batch ended up getting a little more mushy than I care for. The yield after the first boiling/jarring was 12 scant pints, runny. After the second boil, this reduced to 7 full pints - incredible to think that 5 pints of water were boiled off!

Finally, the original recipe called for a smaller amount of mint, and commented that the mint didn't really shine through. Whatever I did here seems to have worked, because the aroma is definitely minty and the finish also has a hint of mint.