Wednesday July 16th, 2008
It's jam season, with strawberries on sale 5 lbs for $5.00 I thought what a bargain let's make some strawberry jam. I spent a good part of one Saturday morning preparing the fruit by washing, coring and cutting them up - into chunks since I like good eating pieces in my jam.
J helped when S went to bed for her morning nap - we decided this year to follow the Ball blue book where you add sachet of pectin, in the past we made jam the ol' fashioned way where you cook the fruit for nearly an hour so that it forms a thick, squashy jam and if necessary add some lemon juice; this method has always worked for us.
I guess we wanted to do the quick method and have the jam form by cooking for only 1 minute after it boils then adding it into the jars. Unfortunately it didn't work at all and yes we did follow the recipe exactly and weighed out all ingredients. The jam is not setting instead we have strawberries floating in syrup.
After reading the how to fix it section - it mentioned to leave it for up to 2 weeks and it may form. I'm going to leave it but I doubt it forms. Looks like we will have to recook it till it sets in a weeks time. So lesson learned if it ain't broke don't fix it, the original recipe worked we should of followed that recipe instead of trying to take short cuts by following a new recipe. Oh well.
It's jam season, with strawberries on sale 5 lbs for $5.00 I thought what a bargain let's make some strawberry jam. I spent a good part of one Saturday morning preparing the fruit by washing, coring and cutting them up - into chunks since I like good eating pieces in my jam.
J helped when S went to bed for her morning nap - we decided this year to follow the Ball blue book where you add sachet of pectin, in the past we made jam the ol' fashioned way where you cook the fruit for nearly an hour so that it forms a thick, squashy jam and if necessary add some lemon juice; this method has always worked for us.
I guess we wanted to do the quick method and have the jam form by cooking for only 1 minute after it boils then adding it into the jars. Unfortunately it didn't work at all and yes we did follow the recipe exactly and weighed out all ingredients. The jam is not setting instead we have strawberries floating in syrup.
After reading the how to fix it section - it mentioned to leave it for up to 2 weeks and it may form. I'm going to leave it but I doubt it forms. Looks like we will have to recook it till it sets in a weeks time. So lesson learned if it ain't broke don't fix it, the original recipe worked we should of followed that recipe instead of trying to take short cuts by following a new recipe. Oh well.
We now have 18 jars of strawberry syrup!
1 comment:
Hi, I have stumbled on your blog, via The Tin House. I had a question about your jam. When you just boiled it up for an hour, was it equal quantities of strawberries to equal quantities of sugar?
Would it be possible to post the answer on my blog?
Great blog by the way.
Gill from Canada
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