Making Strawberry Jam

One of our summer projects every year is to make strawberry jam. On Ben’s birthday, we stopped by our favorite fruit market and picked up a case (8 quarts) of Michigan-grown strawberries.

Aren’t they beautiful?

After setting aside a couple of quarts for other purposes, we set to work making the freezer jam. I find it very helpful to pull out everything we will need before we even touch the berries. That way when my hands are sticky and strawberry parts are littering the counter, I don’t have to go digging for utensils.

Our first step was to wash all of the strawberries and pull off the tops.

Then the twins hulled them and chopped the large berries in half.

We love to use our little food processor to chop up the berries. It’s so much easier and faster than hand-mashing them.

We like our jam a little bit on the chunky side.

The least-favorite job was stirring the pectin on the stove. It was a hot and sweaty job! But we tried to keep cheerful attitudes about the task.

Then we mixed everything up according to the instructions.

Next it was time to ladle it into the jars. We used a mix of glass jelly jars, Tupperware® containers from last year, and little containers we had sitting around.

We ended up with 24 containers of jam from 4 or 5 batches.

That night, we used 2 cups of the mashed berries we had set aside to make delicious strawberry bars for dessert. You can find the recipe here.

We also froze a quart of berries to save for smoothies later on in the year.

The last quart was left over for eating out-of-hand. They were delicious! *Did you put up any strawberries this year? If so, how much? We’d love to know!*