Strawberry Jam (sans pectin)

Due to my busy schedule this summer, I wasn't sure I'd be able to pick strawberries and make jam.  The girls and I did it for the first time last year (on a rainy, cold morning), and Sophie especially enjoyed having homemade jam to eat all year long.  (Hannah doesn't care for jam, sadly.)

So Tuesday morning the local strawberry picking farm posted that they would have jam days that morning and Wednesday before shutting down for the season.  You have to arrive right when they open at 7:30 if you want a chance to get a decent picking, and since the farm is 40 minutes away and the post came on Facebook at 7am on Tuesday, we decided to get up early Wednesday to go berry picking.

It was a much nicer morning than we experienced last year, and we saw lots of folks we knew while there: some folks from school and some folks from church, too.  We picked for about an hour and ended up with two boxes the size of the one above, which turned out to be about 14lbs of berries.  At $1/lb on jam days, we walked away with quite a bargain!

I spent the rest of the morning washing and capping strawberries.

Sophie helped to crush some of them, which we mixed with a small amount of sugar and then stuck in the refrigerator to macerate overnight.  These became a low-sugar batch of jam that was cooked and processed into ten half-pint jars on Thursday.

Another few berries (some of the nicer looking ones) were flash frozen for later use.  This turned out to be somewhere between 1-2 quarts of frozen berries.

The other larger bulk of berries were made into a traditional jam/preserve using a recipe in the Mary Emma Showalter cookbook.  Last year I made my jam with low-sugar pectin and wasn't happy with the extra firm set that resulted.  This year I wanted a looser jam, so I tried going without pectin on both recipes.  This full sugar preserve set up quite nicely, and I ended up using the immersion blender to make it into a smoother jam (as opposed to the low sugar jam where I left the berries crushed).  In the photos below you can see the mound of 12 cups of sugar that went into the quadruple batch of full sugar preserve, along with the very foamy rolling boil stage of cooking.  This batch made 11 half-pint jars of jam.

And, at Sophie's request, we saved a few berries to eat fresh... because it isn't strawberry picking if you don't have some to eat in the end!  (Although Sophie ate quite a few during as well, her hands were sticky red when we returned from the strawberry field.)