Strawberries have arrived! However, they arrived a long time ago, but the organic ones just started to ripen. You can make anything of strawberries – jam, cakes, smoothies, you can fill pancakes, decorate any dessert …but the only “problem” with strawberries is that they stay fresh for a very short time, just a day or two. On Sunday, I saw wonderful local strawberries at a local market, and I bought the whole crate and decided to make jam. All right, we ate a little along the way. 🙂
I was thinking of making a “healthy” version without refined sugar, thought to put some artificial sweetener … but as I had a lot of strawberries, I used ordinary white sugar, because with any other sweetener it would not stand longer than a few weeks, even in the fridge.
To begin with, strawberries need to be cleaned from the stem and washed well, of course. This time I didn’t want to cut strawberries because I wanted them to stay whole in the jam, so I only cut the big ones in half. When you pour them out of water, add sugar and leave for an hour until the strawberries release their own juice. I had about 7 kg of strawberries and I used 1,5 kg of sugar. Try it during cooking and to see if it is sweet enough. Although, the fact is that, the more sugar you put in, the jam will last for a longer time and it will dense faster.
Put the strawberries at medium temperature, stir from time to time and add more sugar if you think it’s not sweet enough (neither should it be too sweet), and medium temperature is when the mixture is constantly “bubbling” like in the photo:
You can pick up this white foam at the end of cooking if you mind, although I did not throw anything, because it was not too much. How will you know when the jam is over? When the “amount” in the bowl is half than in was at the beginning, or if you don’t know how to determine it, then try pulling it out a little on the plate and cool it down, then try it with a spoon through the middle, so if you see the line in the middle and the jam thickens, it’s over.
Before you turn off the stove and remove the jam from the same, prepare the jars by washing them well and drying them, then put them in the oven and warm (without lids!) at 100 Celsius for 15 minutes, because if you put a boiling jam in cold jars, they would crash right away. As soon as you remove jars from the oven, pour the jam, put the lids and turn upside down because the jars will then seal so tightly. Keep in a cool and dark place, and after opening the jar, hold the jam in the refrigerator. And enjoy, of course 🙂
