Strawberry Jam - A How To

I grew up with the women on my mums side of the family making jam in the summer months. My gran would come around and the kitchen would air that smell of stewing fruit. This has been a tradition that I've wanted to continue - nothing tastes better then home-made jam and making it yourself is pretty easy once you have the know how. This recipe is partly what I remember from my family way of making and random recipes found via google. 

INGREDIENTS

• 2 lbs of strawberries - the fresher the better
• 4 cups of granulated sugar
• Juice of 2 lemons

You should have plenty of glass jars at the ready [the above amount makes just short of three jars] - loads of people buy brand new ones but I'm all for recycling old jars we've come across, just make sure they are nice and clean.

How you cut up your strawberries depends upon how lumpy you like your jam. While some people opt to blend the life out of them in a blender, I love knowing that my jam has real strawberries in it, so I love mine nice and lumpy - therefore I don't cut up the strawberries into tiny pieces. You should bare in mind that the boiling process does melt them down anyway. 

After all your strawberries are cut up, add everything into a large pan and set the temperature on low. At first you only need a low heat to slowly start boiling the mixture. Keep boiling until all the sugar has dissolved.

Once all the sugar's dissolved the strawberries will start strewing and you'll start getting a lovely strawberry juice mixture going. Whack the pan up to high so you start to get a roaring boil - you have to be careful because sometimes it can spit, but you need to keep the heat up. Keep stirring so you can tell when it starts to thicken.

Sometimes this can take 5 mins sometimes a lot longer - that's the luck of the game when it comes to making strawberry jam and the more you make it the more likely you are to know when it's looking good enough to start thinking about checking if it's set. At this point I always put a saucer into the fridge - it's an important piece in checking to see if you're jams ready. 

Taking a dribble of your jam mixture, drop it onto your saucer and leave by an open window for a couple of minutes. If you can then tilt the saucer and the jam doesn't run off, and or it has a crust forming over it [say like lava would] then you're ready. There's no magic way of  pouring from the pan into the jars and this point is one of the muckiest and somewhat dangerous part of jam making. What I've been taught to do it use a glass jug and scoop up the jam from the pan and then pour it into the jars.

 
Leave to cool and you're all done. It's best to keep the jam once you've reopened it in the fridge and they can last stored for months and months.

Have you ever made jam?