03/24/2026
So what do you do when you find an amazing price on good looking strawberries? Make a sh*tload of strawberry jam of course!
We found some "lightly bruised" strawberries at a discount store near us that looked like they had some mishandling during the packaging process, which happens. But do you know what food doesn't matter if the fruit's bruised or not? That's right, jam!
I'm talking just slightly bruised fruit with a couple soft spots. If the berries were moldy or smelled like fermentation, they were discarded of course. That ended up being maybe 5% of the berries. So we turned 24lbs of fresh berries into about 50 half pints and 20 pints of fresh strawberry jam. We also dried 8lbs and just straight consumed another 8lbs, but we're not gonna talk about that.....
My jam recipe uses less sugar and pectin than normal recipes since I don't like the sugar content to overpower the berries and we're making JAM, not SYRUP.
5 lbs berries
4 cups sugar
8 tbsp pectin
Chop the berries roughly and place into a pot large enough to fit them and eave a little space to boil/foam, cause it will.
Add the sugar and pectin right after the berries and use a potato masher or immersion blender to mash them up a little and get the juice out of them. You can blend them as much or as little as you like. If you like smooth jam, blend more, if you like chunks of fruit, blend less.
Bring the mixture to a hard boil, stirring the entire time to make sure it doesn't burn onto the bottom of the pot. Once boiling, set a timer for 1-5 minutes and stir/boil the entire time. If it gets too frothy, remove from heat if needed. If you're using the right size pot, it shouldn't be a problem.
Once boiled, remove from heat and leave to cool while you grab your jars. It's important that the jars are warm or even hot when you put the jam into them as glass can fracture due to thermal stress if the glass is 75F or more colder than the mixture that's going into it. Trust me, it doesn't happen often but you definitely don't want to deal with hot sticky liquid mixed with broken glass that shatters and spills all over the place.
Ladle the jam into the jars, filling to within about an inch of the top of the jar. Overfilling will result in potential material stuck in the seals and unsealed jars.
Once filled, wipe off the top rim of the jar with a set paper towel to ensure a clean land for the lid which will result in a better seal. tighten the lids to "finger tight" as you want some of the air in the headspace of the jar to escape, resulting in a vacuum when the jars are cooled.
With lids applied properly, put the jars into a water bath canner and process according to your locale's altitude and time. For me, near sea level, it's 10 minutes. Always put the jars into a warm, not yet boiling water bath (thermal stress again), and always start the timer when the bath reaches a boil, not when you put the jars in.
Once finished, take the jars out of the bath, (there are special tongs i use with silicone on the ends to make it easier to pick them up) place them on a flat surface and leave undisturbed for 24 hours. The next day, check the lids, if any of the buttons on top of the lids did not suck down onto the jar with the resulting vacuum, take them and put them into your fridge, these are the ones you eat first. As they do not have vacuum and hence, an intact seal, they will spoil quickly outside of refrigeration. All the successfully sealed jars can have their rings removed and given a rinse before going into the cupboard or pantry.
It sounds like a lot, but we processed all these strawberries and several other batches of jam, (mixed berry and raspberry) within about 4 hours. Once single batch like I outlined in the recipe above should take maybe an hour or two from start to finish.
Happy Spring, happy canning!
