Tonight, I finished canning a batch of strawberry preserves, and I’m sad. I’m not sad that Sidhu Farms had some of the most fragrant, sweetest strawberries I’ve ever tasted at last Thursday’s farmers market. And I’m not sad that, during each step of the multi-day process of making these preserves, the samples that I snuck were increasingly luscious. No, I’m sad that the results of all the hulling and measuring and macerating and boiling and stirring and skimming yielded exactly five half-pints of darkly shiny strawberry goodness… and all five jars sealed almost instantly — ploink… ploink ploink ploink, ploink! — when I removed them from the water bath.
You know what that means, don’t you? That means I have no strawberry preserves to stir into yogurt tomorrow morning, or slather onto a piece of toast. That means I’ll have to decide to pop open a jar of preserves to see how I like the mint and black pepper I added (per Christine Ferber’s recipe). And that means you’ll have to wait to see the plump little berries suspended in glistening syrup, because I don’t have any leftovers to shoot and, well, the jars are just a fairly solid dark burgundy.
You’d be sad, too, if it happened to you.
Strawberry Preserves with Mint and Pepper
makes exactly 5 half-pint jars… *sigh*
3 pounds smallish, ripe but firm strawberries
3 3/4 cups sugar
Juice of small lemon
Six mint leaves
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Rinse the strawberries quickly, and hull them. In a ceramic bowl, layer the strawberries together with the sugar. Cover, and allow to macerate overnight in refrigerator.
The next day, transfer the strawberry mixture to your preserving pan. Bring to a boil gently, stirring until all sugar has dissolved. Simmer for 5 minutes. When mixture has cooled to room temperature, pour back into the ceramic bowl, cover, and refrigerate overnight.
On the third day (or the fourth if you get busy), pour the strawberry mixture into a sieve over your preserving pan. Bring the syrup to a boil, and skim foam from the pan. Boil rapidly, stirring regularly to prevent sticking, until syrup begins to thicken, and reaches 220 degrees on a candy thermometer (about 10 minutes). Add the strawberries, mint and pepper to the pan. Return the strawberries to a boil, skim if needed, and cook for 5 minutes, until strawberries look translucent. Let preserves sit for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally to distribute berries evenly in syrup.
Ladle the preserves into sterilized jars, top with cap and rings, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. After removing the jars from the water, listen for those satisfying ploinking sounds that indicate the caps have sealed. And if you’re so inclined, you can hope that one cap doesn’t seal.
Tags: 6 Comments
6 responses so far ↓
Love that first photo!
Aw, Kimberly.. Don’t be sad. You will be so happy come November. Trust me.
I have mint and strawberries up the wazoo. Thanks for sharing a recipe I will try to make.
Can I offer you a few pints of raspberries to console you?
I’m a little timid of that black pepper, but Bob is game and we’re getting prepared for a major jam-making session this weekend. Any interesting ideas for apricots?
Three or four days!?! No wonder canning and jammaking is a lost art.
For anyone you just intimitated into non-consideration of putting up some home-made jam, I’ve got to mention that the way I normally do it takes about 1 or 2 hours, including clean-up.
I lug home a flat of tasty strawberries, chunk them into nice size pieces as I clean them, throw them in the pot with a little lemon juice and pectin bringing to a boil and add a bunch of sugar and boil to a rolling boil for 1 minute - all while simultaneously sterilizing the jars. I en-jar the jam, keeping my workspace very clean and working quickly while the temperatures are still high - allowing me to skip the entire water-bath business which is almost-always unnecessary (tho a good idea if you don’t want to risk a potential catostrophic failure) - clean up and end up with a double- or triple-batch of simple strawberry jam which lacks sophisticated flavor notes, but which keeps the glory that is “strawberry” year-round. (Also, I’m doing this for kids who scarf it down in quantity!)
That said, I’m intrigued by the idea of bringing mint and pepper into the strawberry mix. I think those would enhance the flavor. And I may be biased, but I’m pretty sure the rasberry jam I made last year, and the apricot jam I made from a flat of apricots that was melting out of the bottom of the flat of culls that the vendor gave me for free could not be improved on from their most simple state.
I hope that last comment didn’t come off wrong - I wasn’t crticizing, mostly I meant to give a low, impressed-sounding whistle of admiration about the love and care that goes into your recipe while I just kind of bang out a bunch of jars of sugar+fruit. But then I got distracted talking about me. Yeesh. I should get my own blog!
@Janeen: Thanks. I worked on that focus!
@Naz: Oh, I know I’ll be happy to have strawberry preserves in the middle of winter. And you can offer me raspberries any time!
@Julie: I’ve only used pepper in blueberry jam before; it was great! Apricots? I’d add ginger.
@’mouse: I thought I remembered that you had a blog, and yes indeedy, you do! I’d make noises about you writing there more, but I’m not one to talk (except those rare months when I post every day). So, feel free to write over here whenever you wish.
And yes, this is a time-consuming approach to making preserves, but as with no-knead bread, most of the time involved is just waiting for the food do its thing.