Jam

[georgiemum]

I made some lovely jam last week. It was strawberry and I just added sugar (half the weight of the strawbs) and a tiny bit of water.

After looking at my recipe books I find that you usually add lemon juice and a lot more sugar.

Is it better with more sugar and lemon? I thought mine was nice - very fruity.

I think the lemon juice contains the pectin which helps with the setting ....

My jam recipe is 375g of sugar to 500g of fruit.

I am assuming that it was OK because of the high fruit content. I was just wondering...

I think if you only added half as much sua
gar as fruit it will be lovely yes, but it won't keep as long and will be more suseptable to mould growth so best stored in the fridge.

Fortunately, the jars are quite small (I will be selling them at the school fete) so hopefully they won't last long enough to go mouldy!

You can put lemon juice to help the jam set.

The sugar is the preservative. It will not keep without the right amount - make sure the purchaser knows this.

I am not happy . This is how I spent my Saturday night...

Stupid recipe, stupid jam, stupid overflow all over my hob, stupid taking over an hour to cook... stupid scraping toffee-like substance off my hob... burnt fingers... everything in the kitchen sticky...

I shall stick to my original recipe:

Chop up strawberries
put in pan
Add sugar (half the weight of the strawberries) and a little dash of water to get things going
Bring to boil and simmer for 20 mins
Eat
Yum

Proper jam with lots of big soft pieces of strawberries and not red goo with seeds in it.

Hurumph.

The jars will need to be kept cool and the contents eaten within a month or so as there is insufficient sugar to preserve the jam for a longer period.
Classic strawberry jam recipe - you don't need water normally for strawberry jam as strawberries have a very high water content.

It did come out very nice though. Very tasty. If you make small batches it keeps fine. One large (400g ish) punnet will make 3 125ml jars.