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.

Strawberry Preserves No.1

This would make a poor recipe for future use because these quantities are inaccurate and poorly conceived, but here goes:

~10lbs fresh strawberries, washed (& halved or quartered if large) - this was a full 6 quarts (24 cups)
9 cups turbinado sugar (the crystallized kind)
4 cups granulated sugar
juice of 5 lemons, plus some zest
two fistfuls of mint, washed and crushed (~60 leaves?)


Toss the berries with the sugar and lemon juice and let sit overnight. The recipes I used as guidelines (mostly Christine Ferber's strawberry-pepper-mint jam, Clotilde Dusoulier's adaptation of that recipe) all called for nearly as much sugar as berries, which seemed obscene to me so I tried this with slightly less sugar than berries. The potential downside of this is that there won't be enough sugar to properly preserve the fruit, since there is no pectin, so there's a risk of poorly preserved preserves. Maybe we'll eat it fast enough for this to not be a real problem. Most of this jam will be gifted out into the world anyway, so hopefully nobody is going to try to age it. On the other hand, the idea of sweet superb berries in the dead of winter is also a big draw, so hopefully my 2:1 berry:sugar ratio will be good enough for it to keep 6 months or so. Within a couple hours of being sugared, the berries surrender their juices and the mix starts to look like strawberry soup.

The next day, bring just to a simmer and then refrigerate overnight. I tried not to moosh the berries up too much while also stirring the sugar enough to keep it from caramelizing at the bottom of the pot. In fear of over-cooking the berries, I actually took them out of the pot just before the mix hit a simmer, and then let the juices simmer on their own for a minute or two. It began to get foamy, which I just stirred back in.

The third day, boil the syrup (w/o the fruit) for 10 or so minutes, add the fruit and mint and boil another 5 minutes. I left the kitchen at a bad time, and my jam boiled over, so I probably didn't boil the mix with the berries in it quite long enough. Once the berries were added it took several minutes to come back to a simmer, and when it did it started to expand ominously. I was supposed to do the Frozen Saucer Test to check if the jam would set, but I completely forgot (frozen saucer test: place drop of syrup on a saucer that's been in the freezer, tilt the saucer and see if the jam dribbles. if so, boil longer). I think the result is going to be a bit runny, but it should still taste wonderful and I'm not a fan of super-thick jams anyway.

Theoretically the jars are supposed to be boiled various times and sanitized and handled only by virgins, but I made a bold move and simply washed them vigorously by hand before canning. I set them to dry upside-down on a clean towel, hoping to minimize any teeny critters that would want to set up shop in a jam jar. Once filled (not quite full) with the preserves, I tightened the lids ("finger tight") and set them to cool upside-down on the same towel.

I wanted to work with a big batch for several reasons, mainly:
1. I wanted to pick a million strawberries,
2. strawberries are delicious,
3. if the result is good, I want to give the jam to a million people,
4. if the batch were too small, it would feel like a lot of work for little result.
As it turned out, the batch was a little too big to work with comfortably. The berries took up a lot of space in the fridge, were difficult to manage physically (imagine pouring 6 quarts of strawberry soup into pans and large bowls repeatedly), and the ultimate boiling-over that was my undoing could have been avoided if I wasn't trying to fit the fruit in a pot that was barely big enough. I think working with a recipe half this size would be ideal, in the future.

I have no idea how this will turn out. I will post an update when the jam is cool and has been sampled.