Cooking In Boone ... Staunton: Strawberry Jam!!

This is quite possibly the easiest recipe I’ve ever made. So, look at it once, then go make it. So… it’s going to be mostly pictures… just because there’s not much to say about this one.

Ingredients:

32oz Strawberries
Cup Sugar
1/4 Cup Lemon Juice

That’s it. For real.

Step 1. Rinse and hull all of your strawberries

Yeah… it’s kind of a lot of strawberries. But, slice al of your berries and chop them up a little bit.

Toss them into a big glass Pyrex measuring cup (4 Cups or larger) or something similar. (Non Coated, Non-reactive) Fill the measuring cup 75% to the top and mash the berries up a bit with your favorite potato masher.

All of the berries won’t fit in one round (or they didn’t in my 4 Cup Pyrex Cup) so mash, then add, then mash more, then add more.

When you’ve mashed them all, you should end up with about 4 cups of mashed berries.

Ok… here’s where the recipe gets hard. Take your berries, sugar and lemon juice and toss them all into a large pot.

This is some sort of “Dutch Oven” pot…. in retrospect, I should have used a stock pot…. you want something with taller sides on it. Toss the pot of everything on the stove, turn the heat on low, and mix until the sugar is melted in nicely.

Now, turn the heat up… crank it up to high and stir with a wooden spoon continuously.

Put a candy thermometer into the pot and continue to stir. You’re looking to get 240 degrees on the thermometer… although, I don’t understand how you would ever know the temperature on the thermometer, as soon as you put it into the mixture, it fogs up, and is unreadable. So.. I got it to a good rolling boil, kept stirring it, and kinda played it by ear. I was getting readings of 215-220, but it just wouldn’t go any higher. So, it’s either a garbage thermometer, or I have some sort of magical stovetop that won’t get anything hotter than 220… I think it’s the thermometer.

Once it’s hit “240” or, in my case been at a rolling boil for “what-I-consider-to-be-long-enough” turn off the heat, and ladle it into your containers. … on that note… I seem to have lost the majority of my mason jars in the move… so… this recipe made one mason jar, and one Pyrex bowl.

The jar is… 16ish oz? I think? and the bowl is probably 24-ish oz… in any case, put the jam in your containers and toss them in the fridge… Don’t worry that the jam isn’t super sticky… it’ll thicken up in the fridge.

The end result is a bit sweet… but, without pectin in it, the sugar is the main thing making it sticky… so, I’d be really hesitant to mess with the amount of sugar in it. But… this jam goes awesomely with some good home-made sweet Awesome-O Bread…. (Recipe Below)