Oh, how I love summer time. Mornings packed with fun and hot lazy afternoons Sunday napping away. This years batch of strawberries will be ready to harvest soon. We spend our summers canning as fruit becomes ripe and goes on sale preparing to have a little bit of summer stored away come winter.
Our little homestead in the city is growing strong and I should have the new pantry built over the winter with fresh new shelves for holding all these jars of sweet summertime strawberry jam and other goodies like our mulberry jam and green beans from the garden.
This batch used only ripe strawberries found on sale at the local grocery store for $1 a pound. I just had to snatch them up but this means we needed pectin we would not have needed if we had about 1/2 unripe fruit.
I like to go with the flow and I don’t mind using store bought pectin to take advantage of deals like this. There is NO way we could have eaten all of the berries I bought before they went bad. Home canning is a great way to preserve extra food from your garden and foods you find on sale.
What you need for canning strawberry jam
- 5-12 oz jelly jars
- 3 cups chopped strawberries (3 one pound packs)
- 1/4 cup lemon juice
- 3 tablespoons of ball real fruit pectin
- 7 cups of sugar
Make your own sweet summertime strawberry jam
Start by slicing your berries to make them easy to mash. Place sliced berries into a ban adding the lemon juice, and pectin.
Mash lightly with a potato masher. Simmer over low to medium heat until liquid comes to a rolling boil.
Add in the sugar and bring back to a rolling boil that can not be stirred down. Boil for 1 minute.
Test for gelling. If strawberry jam gels well water bath can as usual in sterilized jars for ten minutes.
Making our own strawberry jam saves us so much money every year.
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