Just a quick post to say that we made this year's strawberry balsamic jam yesterday. I made a triple batch, with a few adaptations as I failed to make sure I had enough sugar and balsamic vinegar before getting started. . . heh. This year, I followed her directions and canned the berries and syrup separately, with the intention of having a thicker jam for toast and then using the syrup for anything else (waffles, pancakes, cake, ice cream . . . ).
We're going to need a bigger pot
We ended up with 5 half pints of jam and 9 of syrup - and our little samples while cooking were quite tasty. I'll post an update in the winter with our thoughts on this years changes. The recipe, in case you don't care to reread last year's post is from here. Hooray for the beginning of fruit season!
A not great photo of the finished product (jam on the right)
My photo assistants
So Melina and I had just gone strawberry picking and decided to give this a try. I found the recipe online and followed it online with only a half recipe (4 cups of strawberries).
ReplyDeleteApparently if you are making half the quantity, the cooking time is much shorter. I cooked it for about 35-40 minutes, and what we got out ended up being super thick. Even the syrup is very thick and hard to spread without heating it up.
Oh well, I'll know for next time. It still tastes great, of course. Thanks for the idea.
So interesting! I will admit to having only weighed the berries both times I've made this recipe (and thinking that it looked like significantly less than 8 c./1.5 pounds). . . perhaps that's the big difference? I cooked this stuff forever this time (around 2 hrs.) and, while we haven't opened any of the jars yet, I can tell that the syrup is quite syrupy. Ah, the joys of kitchen experimentation!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing - I hope you guys are having a wonderful start to summer. If you have any berries left, or are thinking of getting more, I can't recommend these http://smittenkitchen.com/2009/05/strawberry-shortcakes/ enough.