In a jam...

My jam doesn't look like this!

Last night I thought I would experiment with making strawberry jam. Remember all that fruit we picked on my birthday last year? (if not, click here, and scroll down...) Well quite a lot of it ended up in tubs in the freezer, taking up room that we need for less permanent storage... I vowed to do interesting things with it all over the Christmas break, and of course ended up doing nothing of the sort. But the inkling was kindled (is that a mixed metaphor?) and all the empty jam jars we'd been saving were getting in the way, so I rashly decided to defrost a tub of strawberries.

Having never made jam before, I had previously done some consulting, principally of my parents, who swore that pectin was the thing you needed. Also that you need equal quantities of sugar and fruit. I decided to further consult some of the many recipe books we never seem to look at often enough, and ended up following not just one but two, slightly different, recipes for strawberry jam. Perhaps therein lay the mistake.

One of them (Apples for Jam by Tessa Kiros) did not advocate equal quantities of sugar and fruit, but it did suggest the juice of a lemon (important for the pectin you see) and seemed to have good advice on sterilising the jars and on the consistency I needed to aim for - so I mostly followed that recipe, except for levelling out the quantities.

I was boiling boiling boiling this sugar and strawberry concoction (while talking on the phone to my sister) and nothing very much seemed to be happening in terms of the consistency so I added the lemon juice. Then at about 20 minutes of boiling and stirring, the consistency and colour started to change, so I hung up, and tested a teaspoonful on a plate as advised. It seemed right so the time had time to spoon the jam into the jars...

This ended up taking so long (and after all that only managed to fill two jars!) that it was cooling fast by the time I was halfway through the second jar. It was around this time that I noticed the wooden spoon I had been stirring the jam with was stuck hard to the plate I had put it down on in an absent moment. Also that my test gloop had pretty much solidified... It seems that, in fact, I had made strawberry flavoured toffee.

I persisted with following Apples for Jam in its advice to let the jam-filled jars cool upside down, so they form a vacuum which preserves the jam for longer. Problem with this advice is, when I thought I might have toast and strawberry jam for breakfast this morning, I discovered the lids were welded shut.

I currently have them both standing in a bowl of boiling water to see if they will ever open again... If they do, though, I'm not confident that I'm not going to break a knife on this toffee-jam!

Still, it was an experiment. And fun at the time. And there's a bit more space in the freezer.