Monday, July 20, 2009

Jam

So Mama Bean and I made jam yesterday and today. 6 liters in total. It's awesome.

Yesterday we went strawberry picking, and picked 3 4L baskets that held a little over 5lbs each. It cost us $27 for almost 17lbs of strawberries plus the 3 or so pounds that we ate while picking. That's pretty amazing, and cheaper than we get them in the store. It took us about an hour to pick it all, and we had a lot of fun.

Yesterday we made 2 liters of no-cook freezer jam. It's nice because it doesn't use much sugar and you don't have to worry about sterilizing jars. We put them in 8 250ml jars.

Since we don't have a lot of freezer space, we decided to make cooked jam today. Mama Bean read about sterilizing jars in the oven instead of boiling them, which we chose to do and it worked quite well. We hulled the rest of the strawberries and cooked most of them and bottled them in 500ml jars, getting 4 liters of jam.

So now we have 6L of jam and it's so awesome. I'm excited about baking some bread and eating it with our fresh jam. :)

3 comments:

Billy said...

Also cheaper and also such a lot of fun, what more could one ask for :-)

And freshly made bread with homemade jam - yummy!!!

ICLW

WiseGuy said...

Awesome! Because it is homemade, it will also have a really special flavour!

Fiddle1 said...

Here from ICLW. Am currently OBSESSED with making jam and marmalade. I have a garden for the first time this year. So far, I've made cucumber marmalade, blueberry jam, and pepper jelly 9with some habaneros). I realized the hard (and expensive) way that making jelly/jam is no easy task. that was before i knew you had to have a very detailed recipe and follow it exactly. Now that i've finally figured that out (and keep enough pectin on hand), I'm on a roll. No telling how much I've spent on sugar and jars, but it's been worth it.