We found a recipe last season on the web that was eh.. It was decent but it had A LOT of lemon in it and I don't care for an overwhelming lemon flavor in jam. My intention last year was to re-evaluate the recipe and make it better this year. My husband loved it though, so I knew that we wanted it to be similar but with significantly less lemon. I set off first thing this year to find a recipe that we both would enjoy.
Let me use this opportunity to share this little Pinterest gem. We saw this on Pinterest last season so I won't cheat and count this as one of my projects for this year. This is one of the coolest little kitchen tricks that I have learned recently.
Core a strawberry with a straw. Sounds easy enough. Let me tell you - the person who invented this - super genius! If you have ever cored more than five strawberries you know that you either end up wasting a lot of the top of the berry by cutting it off or you end up leaving some of the unpleasant tough part of the core in because you can't get it all. The only tool that you need is a straw. We use one of those hard plastic straws that come in reuse able drinking cups. I have never used a disposable straw so I don't know if that works the same way or not. Here is a pic of ours:
Simply hold the berry in one hand and the straw in the other with your thumb over one end of the straw. You then press the other end of the straw into the bottom of the berry like this:You continue to press until the straw comes out of the stem end of the berry. It will press the stem and leaves up and should be able to be pulled out of the straw in one easy piece. Your berry will now have a hole all the way through and the tough core will be removed!
This stopped me from having to do a lot of excess cutting and saved all of the berry that normally gets removed if you just chop off the entire top of the strawberry.
Now let's get to the jam.
Strawberry Jam
3 pints strawberries
3 cups white sugar
1 whole lemon - juice and zest
Chop your strawberries. I leave about half of mine in larger pieces like below because we like a chunkier jam. If you don't, you can either chop all pieces fairly small or you could run your cooked mixture through a blender, food processor or use an immersion blender.
Zest and then juice the entire lemon. Add both to a large saucepan with the 3 cups of sugar. Heat over medium until the mixture is melted together.
Add the berries to the saucepan and mix thoroughly.
At this point, the cooking time will vary according to several variables like how ripe your berries are, how hot your stove gets, etc. Ideally you will need your mixture to boil (a gentle boil and not like the insane boiling such as pasta water) for at least 15 minutes or until it passes the chilled plate test. Just as a note: ours had to boil like a little more than 30 minutes to pass the test.
The chilled plate test. It sounds like some sort of a secret code, but it really is as simple as it sounds. You put a small non-plastic plate in the freezer or a really cold refrigerator. Once chilled and you think that your boiling berry mixture is done, you put a few droplets on the plate and tilt it to where it's almost vertical. Once your mixture is done, it won't run down the plate and will remain firm in the same location that you put it. (No pictures of this part because I got distracted.)
Once you pass the chilled plate test, remove the pan from the heat and cool. We cool ours for a small period of time and then pour it into a warmed mason jar to cool the rest of the way. We don't currently can ours so if you are interested in that, this is where you would start that process.
We ended up with a large mason jar full of the most amazing jam ever. This is a perfect balance of the acid of the lemon, the sweetness of the sugar, and the natural sweetness of the berries.
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