A Sticky Situation: Making Strawberry Jam

Nothing captures the essence of summer fruit like jam.  When I was growing up, we had a large garden in our backyard and we grew strawberries.  I have many happy memories of my mother making strawberry jam, however, I never seemed to have (or be able to find) the time to make it myself.  As my next reduce our waste challenge, I decided to try making jam.  Hopefully it will work out ….. I am nervous.  My daughter Julie offers to help.

With all the good intentions in the world, I bought a case of Ile D’Orleans strawberries.  The case itself is made of carton:

but I was saddened to learn that inside the carton tray were many, little red trays.  I asked the young girl working at the market if they were recyclable and she proudly told me, yes and showed me bottom of the red tray.

Unfortunately, it is number 6, which is polystyrene and is hence not recyclable.  It is amazing to me how little people know about what can and cannot be recycled.  Everyone should also remember that recycling is the fourth R and therefore not a preferred choice!  I decided to keep the red trays and hope that I will be able to use them in some way (Art project? Storage? I will let you know what I come up with).  I wrote to the strawberry vendor and asked them to change their packaging.  They said they would investigate it.

On to jam making!  With the amount of strawberries that I had, I was quite certain that I would have enough to produce many jars of jam.  How wrong I was….

My daughter and I washed, dried and chopped strawberries for over 1 hour.  We used a reusable cloth to dry them:

Eventually, we had chopped 8 cups of strawberries.  We added what was an incredible amount of sugar (6 cups) and started the cooking process.

I used my “Joy of Cooking” cookbook and they indicated that I needed 8 cups of sugar but this seemed too much.  It took over an hour to get the jam boiling and to get the “jammy mess” that the cookbook indicated we needed to achieve.  We started with this:

and then ended up with this:

Then we were supposed to cook the jam for another 20 minutes, but in order to get the needed consistency on a cold spoon (runny but not too much), it took another 15 minutes.  I poured the juice of one lemon over the mixture and then added it to the sterilized glass jars.  The jar support I bought did not fit in my pot so I had to get creative to sterilize the jars:

Let’s just say that there was water everywhere when I was done.

We managed to fill 2 (and a half) 500 ml jars.

We sterilized two of the jars of jam by putting them in boiling water for 10 minutes.  When it was done, I left the jars to cool overnight.  The half jam jar was put right to the test:

 

I have to say, it was delicious.   I had forgotten how much I enjoyed homemade strawberry jam.  While the goal of this “reduce our waste” project was to reduce our  garbage, the side benefit has been to be able to enjoy really good and wholesome food, like this jam.   Plus, my daughter was pleased to learn how to make jam.   And I was grateful to spend time with my daughter.  The simple things in life are really the best aren’t they?

Shout-out to Julie for her help with this project!

Challenge for the Week:  Have you made strawberry jam before?  Or is there something else that you would like to try and make yourself?  My non-zero waste daughter has already suggested our next project:  homemade hummus.  Maybe I can convince her to get involved on this next project….? stay tuned!