Strawberry Jam!

Today was entirely spent making strawberry jam. We were up at 7:30 am and out the door to pick our own strawberries. Unfortunately it was not a good year for strawberries. We had some hard rain this last week that destroyed a lot of the crop and made it hard for picking, but I ended up with 18 quarts of strawberries. Then we headed to the grocery store for a whole lot of sugar and pectin! I bought 45 lbs of sugar but only used about 20. I was really unsure of how much was needed and I didn't want to go back.

Here are all of the strawberries I ended up with. I am starting to cut and haul them in this picture.

Each batch was done with just 4 cups of crushed strawberries and yielded about 4 pints or 8 jelly jars.

I added 7 cups of sugar and a little lemon juice to the crushed strawberries and then brought it to a rolling boil.

After it came to a rolling boil I added 1-1/4 boxes of Pectin and brought it to a boil again and boiled for 1 minute. Then removed heat and skimmed the foam off the top.

Meanwhile I got all of the jars and lids ready by washing and sanitizing them in boiling water. There are a lot of websites that explain the canning process better with pictures so I will leave that to them, as I am no where near an expert in canning.

Here is my final yield of 23 Pints and 8 jelly jars. I ended up doing 7 batches total. I prefer pints because we go through jelly so fast in our house. I made the jelly jars for gifts and will be using the Preserves Cricut cartridge to spruce them up later on.

It is now 7:30 pm, I am exhausted and my legs hurting from standing in the kitchen all day, but it is done and I can't wait to eat them all year long!

I ended up trying a few different methods. I ran out of pectin so I did a batch without it. I also did some batches without lemon juice and some with more pectin then others. I will update when I have tried each one. The thing I like about using pectin is that it yields more jam per strawberry, but that is because you use a lot more sugar. It is also a shorter boiling time so you keep more nutrition from the strawberries.

It comes down to:

Pectin = more sugar and more jam


No pectin = less sugar, less jam, more boiling, more WORK