Have you ever tasted a truly sweet strawberry straight from the garden?
You pull on your floppy straw hat each morning along with your shiny rain boots and you dutifully (but of course ethically) keep all of those damn birds out of your patch with ribbons of carefully constructed chicken wire. And in the middle of the growing season you can walk into your garden and taste the bounty of your hard work. The truly sweet strawberry, picked at perfection and enjoyed on-the-spot. Unspoiled by the invention of mass and industrialized crops where your fruit is picked green and magically arrives at your store in jewel-toned red and with half the flavor.
For the rest of us unlucky folk, there is freezer strawberry jam. It doesn't look like regular cooked jam and it certainly doesn't taste like it. Instead... It's even better! Enhanced with twice it's weight in sugar (oh yes, please don't be naive, why else would it be so good??)!! This jam is what the Stepford Wives would be bringing to your doorstep, if there ever was such a thing. And you too can have your own piece of strawberry heaven, or should we say, A TRULY SWEET STRAWBERRY, sitting in your freezer patiently waiting until the dead of winter when you can no longer stand another ounce of pumpkin and you crave memories from the days of summer...
On with the recipe --
I normally use Sure-Jell but have been trying to step away from stricter methods and find a pectin process that allows me to be more imprecise. Recently I tried this kind and I'm quite enjoying the outcome. I end up using less sugar than the Sure-Jell and MCP brands but the results are even better. The jam is not quite as loaded with sugar which lets a peak of the natural tartness of the natural tartness through which complements each other very well and boosts the fresh strawberry appeal. However, the final product is not quite as tightly-jelled as other brands and methods that I've tried and it does result in a looser, softer jam.
The biggest difference in my freezer strawberry jam compared to the recipes on the pectin is that I DON'T finely chop my strawberries. Instead I soak them in a vinegar and water bath to clean them, drain, then slice off the tops. Then I plop them into a food processor and pulse until everything is at a borderline puree. This results in a smooth jam. But if that's not your thing then by all means, finely chop them.
Once you have your strawberry puree, measure and keep track of how many cups you have and set aside. Two pounds yielded me four cups.
Then measure the same amount of sugar that you have of strawberry puree. Did you end up with 4.5 cups puree? Then add 4.5 cups sugar. Measure the sugar into clean bowl and then add in the pectin. I measure about 3 tablespoons pectin to 1 lb strawberries.
Mix the sugar and the pectin first.
Then add the fruit and stir for three minutes.
Pour into your jars and let set for 30 minutes.
Ta-da!!! Enjoy on toast, pancakes, oatmeal, peanut butter sandwiches as well as in the tiny nooks and crannies of the emotionally-empty spaces in your mind.