All three popped!
But that is starting at the end....
Saturday I learned how to make
strawberry jam from an award-winning jam maker. She had donated a lesson to a parish bazaar last fall, for the
silent auction, which I won. We
arranged to do the lesson this summer so that I could use strawberries from our
garden. Here she is with some of her awards.
Here I am with three jars of my very
own strawberry jam made from our very own strawberries!.
Preserving food really isn't as
complicated as I thought. We forget
that how to make the fruits of the summer last all year long is a very old
problem, and solutions to it have been around for a very long time. There have been important updates, mostly
having to do with safety like no longer using paraffin wax, but the basic
procedure is quite simple.
I enjoyed myself very much although
Mary and I decided it wouldn't be nearly as much fun for the pioneer woman
trying to keep a constant temperature on a wood stove with no air
conditioning. Of course, the pioneer housewife used her outdoor
kitchen, if she had one.
The recipe called for two
ingredients: strawberries and sugar. You gotta love a recipe with only two
ingredients!
Strawberry
Jam
(From “The Ball Blue Book”, Edition 32)
2 quarts
crushed strawberries (8 cups)
6 cups
of sugar
1. Combine
berries and sugar in large, heavy-bottom sauce pot. Bring to a boil, stirring
until the sugar dissolves. Cook rapidly until thick, about 4 minutes. As the
mixture thickens, stir frequently to prevent sticking. (Depending on how think
you like your jam, you can cook it longer, up to 15 minutes. Be sure to stir it
often so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan.)
2. Pour
hot jam into hot jars, leaving ¼-inch head space. Wipe jar rims and apply lids.
3. Process
15 minutes in boiling water bath. Yield:
about 4 pints.
I'm guessing there are roughly
873,462 online tutorials for how to make jam, so I am mostly including the
following steps for my own reference. I
will add some tips here at the beginning that you might find helpful.
1.
Get the right equipment. This
would include special tongs to remove the jars from the boiling water, and wand
with a magnet on the end to retrieve the lives from boiling water, and I would
strongly recommend heatproof gloves.
Buying equipment is not a good time to be cheap.
Mary was a sweetheart and gave me a lid lifter (the blue wand), a jar lifter, and a funnel PLUS some faux pineapple and some apple pie filling jelly. |
2.
The glass jars must not touch side to the bottom of the pot while they
are boiling. My teacher actually
improvised her canner, using a large stockpot with a circular piece from an old
pressure cooker to keep the jars from touching the bottom of the stockpot that
she uses. She put the jars close enough
the center so they wouldn't touch the size of the pot, while still making sure
they didn't touch each other. (The
rings on the outside of the lids make it hard for them to snuggle up right next
to each other.) I plan on getting an
actual water bath canner.
3.
There are two ways of canning: water bath and pressure canning. The kind that you pick needs to match the
kind of food that you are preparing, with high-acid food like fruits and
tomatoes being suitable for water bath canning and foods like most vegetables
and meats requiring pressure canning.
Before you buy canning supplies, make a list of everything you want to
can. I'm planning to stick with a water
bath canner to start with, and experiment with other methods like freezing to
preserve foods that would have required pressure cooker canning.
4.
You can make jams and jellies out of all kinds of amazing things! For example, Mary and I munched on lilac
jelly, on crackers, and it was fantastic!
She used the tea from lilac flowers, pear juice, lemon juice, and
pectin. It was like eating a kind of
floral honey. She had found lots of
other recipes for making jams and jellies out of unusual things, including
zucchini and jalapeƱos.
5.
There is a difference between a jam and a jelly. Jams are thick and opaque, with chunks of
through still in them. Jellies are
clear and uniform. You can see the
difference below. The larger container
is apple pie jelly and the smaller container is one of my very own strawberry
jam.
6. You can always cut a recipe in half (like we did), but don't double it. That can really throw off the cooking times.
OK, this is how it went down!
1.
Gather equipment. We used:
- large stockpot
- some to keep the jars from touching the bottom of said pot
- jars with no cracks or missing bits, particularly around the rim.
- New lids
- rings or bands (they go around the top of the jar, keeping the lid in place until it seals)
- lid lifter
- final
- jar lifter
- heat-resistant gloves
- (optional) pastry fork
2.
Wash jars with soap and water and then boil them jars in enough water to cover them completely. You can add a quarter cup of vinegar. (I forgot to write down why.)
3.
Clean, core, and remove bad spots from your strawberries.
4.
Crush the strawberries with the pastry fork, or using whatever method you like.
After crushing they look like this. Note: They aren't blended! You want some identifiable strawberry chunks in the final product.
5.
Add strawberries and sugar to the pot.
6.
Stir to completely dissolve the sugar.
7. Let the mixture sit 10-20
minutes.
8.
Bring the mixture to a boil.
Stir occasionally to prevent scorching.
Leave the lid off. Simmer for
approximately 20 minutes, or whatever you have on the recipe. You'll need to turn down the heat or it will
splatter and spit when it gets close to being done. Cover with the splatter lid, those kind that are netting, not
solid.
9.
Remove from heat when the mixture has reached the desired
thickness. Basically this "desired
thickness" means that you scoop up a bit in a metal spoon and let it drip
back into the pot. If it's liquid, it's
not done enough. If it has started to
transition from liquid to goop and you have kept it simmering for the time
required by the recipe, then it's done.
10.
Skim off the foam. Foam = air
bubbles = air to feed bacteria.
11.
Carefully remove one jar from the boiling water at a time. This is one place where your jar lifter
comes in very handy. Ladle the jam into jars.
You should fill them until there is only one fourth of an inch left at
the top.
12.
Being very careful and wearing heat-resistant gloves, tap each jar on
the counter to get out bubbles.
3.
Using the the measuring gauge or some other similar instrument, push the
jam away from the sides of the jar, releasing air bubbles.
14.
Using a paper towel dipped in the boiling water, carefully run it over
the rim of the jar to make sure that no jam splashed onto the rim. The rim needs to be perfectly clean or the
jar will not seal. If the jar does not
seal, then the jam will be edible, but not preserved, and you will have to keep
it in the fridge and eat it in the next week or so. All jars must be this full.
If you don't have enough jam to fill a jar all the way, then fill it
part of the way and put it in the fridge.
You can eat it this week as a sweet reward for all of your jamming hard
work.
15.
Using the handy dandy magnetic wand, retrieve a lid from the boiling
water. Don't drip water in the
jam! Put the lid on the jar.
16.
Put a ring on the jar. It will tighten as it cools, so don't screw it on so tight you need power tools to get it back off. Firm but gentle.
17.
Using the jar lifter, put jars into the boiling water. (The same boiling water used to sterilize
the jars.) The jars must not touch the
sides or the bottom of the canning pot.
If they do, they can crack or break.
18.
Boil filled jars per the recipe, usually 10-15 minutes.
19.
Remove the jars from the water with the jar lifter. You must be extremely careful when you do
this. Don't slosh the jam as any jam on
the rim will interfere with the sealing process. So you must lift, carry, and release the jar while it is
perfectly upright.
20.
Listen for the pop. That is the
sound of the jar sealing. Do not move
or touch the jars until that happens. I
thought the popping sound was pretty loud.
(Like microwave popcorn, not like a shotgun, but plenty easy to hear it
even if you're chatting with your jam teacher.)
The first two jars popped within
about five minutes. We waited and
waited, the third one didn't pop.
Finally, Mary marked the tops of the two jars that had popped and I was
going to pack it up and head home. I
was reaching for the third jar to put it in the box when it popped! I was really thrilled that all of them
popped.
We used lids with designs on
them. Regular lids have a circle in the
middle that will pop up when the jar has sealed, which is a lot easier to see if
there isn't a design on the top. Of
course, you know me; I was using jars that someone had given me years ago
rather than buying new ones.
21.
Store out a direct sunlight with the ring off. (The rings can get little bits of rust on them if they aren't
perfectly dry, and they have already fulfilled their purpose, which was to help
persuade the lid to commit to the jar.)
That
wasn't so hard.
And now I will have a
taste of summer whenever I want it!
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