I Made Strawberry Preserves Today!

Hi Steemit!

I know, I know it's been a month since my last post. Life got a bit more busy than normal with going back to work, spring/summer lawn and garden chores and running my business in my spare time. I still love this community however and want to stay engaged so here we go.

Speaking of gardening, my garden is in full swing and strawberries have been coming in daily. Here's a pic of yesterday and today's harvest.

Since they're coming in faster than my wife and I can eat them, I decided to try to make preserves today. I used a recipe from Epicurious

My Ingredients

• 21 oz. Strawberries (give or take)
• One skinned shredded apple (I used a "Pink Lady" but you can use whatever you have I think)
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 tablespoon of lemon juice added at the end of cooking

To be honest it was as easy as it reads. I still steamed my jars and lids to sterilize them and plan on eating this jam within the next 2 weeks.

Step 1 - Rinse the berries

Step 2 - De-stem and cut the berries into a skillet

Add your sugar so it can start to extract the juice from the berries. I had about 21 oz. of berries and planned to use a cup of sugar. I accidentally added about 1 1/3 cups , but everything still tasted great. Just a bit more sugar than I planned on.

Step 3 - Peel and shred an apple (for the pectin)

Sorry, no pictures for this one. The apple contains pectin which aids in thickening the mixture. I liked this approach vs using store-bought processed pectin. The shredded apple dissolves pretty quickly into the mixture once it begins to simmer. It's nice to know that all of the ingredients in this recipe can are natural (yes even the obscene amount of sugar I used).

Step 4 - Heat, simmer on medium low, and stir for 10-15 minutes (until thickening begins)

My thickening didn't begin until 15 minutes in, but once it started, it thickened quickly. Make sure to stir frequently and keep it simmering, not a rolling boil. While it simmers you'll see foam forming at the top, similar to when you can tomatoes if you've ever done that. Skim the foam off with a spoon (it's delicious BTW).

Step 5 - Stir in lemon juice and seal in jars

When I "eyeballed" the amount of berries + apple + sugar, I really thought I'd fill 2 twelve ounce jars, but was surprised that it cooked down to only one 12 oz. jar. Now that I think about it, that makes sense. We began with about 24 oz of ingredients and boiled away almost 12 oz of water concentrating the sugars and flavor.

Well - that's it! Another adventure under the belt. Next time I'll add less sugar, but the recipe seemed to work very well! Go try to make some and enjoy!