And by ‘everyone’, I mean three people because there are only three jars of it.
I made strawberry jam!
I decided to make it because I couldn’t decide what to get my auntie for Christmas. We all have that one auntie who’s difficult to buy for, don’t we? She has everything she needs and when people have everything they need I just get them food. You can’t really go wrong with that, I don’t think. And, home made gifts are always nice aren’t they? I think they mean a bit more.
So one day I made strawberry jam. Here are my tips:
- Tip one: don’t make it if you’re in a hurry
- Tip two: don’t start making it at 9pm.
I used a BBC Good Food recipe (they have some good ones don’t they?). Except I didn’t really follow it because I didn’t leave the fruit to soak in the sugar overnight, I just chopped it up and put it in a pan with the sugar and lemon juice.
What can I say, I’m a rebel.
…I’m not, I’m just badly organised.
I also had to throw a rogue plum in there because I didn’t have quite enough strawberries, and the shops were closed as it was 9pm on a Sunday. See previous point about poor organisation.
While it was cooking I got a potato masher in the pan to mash the fruit up a bit because I don’t really like big lumps of fruit in jam. The plum effortlessly blended in amongst the mashed up strawberries… hopefully, anyway, or one of those jars of jam will be interesting.
In order for it to set when it’s cooled it has to get to 105. And it took FOREVER to get there. I mean… forever. For about five minutes it was stuck at 102.6 and every time I would move the thermometer even slightly the temperature started dropping. Then I turned up the hob to a higher heat to try and get the jam to 105, and it started sticking to the pan so I had to turn it down again. It was a stressful time.
EVENTUALLY we got there though and hit 105.
Then after testing to see if it would set, basically I put it in some jars and that was it.
I sort of want to make some more. My mum makes quite a lot of plum jam as she has a plum tree in her garden so she gets them for free. Apparently plum is a good fruit to use for jam as it’s higher in pectin which I think means it sets better. #science
But I’d quite like to try and make raspberry jam next. Can you make blueberry jam? Maybe I’ll give that a go. So actually, if I have a lot of weekends free between now and Christmas then maybe more than three people will be getting jam for Christmas after all.