Strawberry Jam

JT has been working on a unit based around the book The Giant Jam Sandwich by John Vernon Lord. In the book 4 million wasps come to the town of Itching Down and they come up with a plan to capture them using a giant strawberry jam sandwich. So of course we made strawberry jam sandwiches but JT also made the strawberry jam.

I read several recipes for strawberry jam before making a decision on how to go about making the jam. We had fresh strawberries but we also happened to have a carton and two containers of frozen strawberries so I wanted to use the frozen ones that way the boys can keep eating the fresh. We didn’t have much sugar and all the jam recipes called for a lot of sugar so since we were low on sugar we used the carton of strawberries. These are the exact measurements we used:

*1 cup frozen strawberries
*1 cup light brown sugar
*1/2 cup sugar
*1 or 2 tsp lemon juice

What I learned from reading the various recipes for strawberry jam is that if you don’t have pectin you need to add more sugar so I figured that for 1 cup of strawberries we would need 1 1/2 cups sugar. We were able to make almost a 1/2 cup from the white sugar we had and I only had 1 cup of light brown sugar so we used both. I do think that we would have been fine just using the cup of brown sugar though.

We turned the stove on high and thawed the strawberries first.

Next we stirred in the white sugar and then the brown sugar.

Then we squeezed in some lemon juice.

We tried to smash as much of the berries as we could and then let the mixture boil for a few minutes. I read recipes that said to boil only for 1 minute and others that said 15 minutes so I decided to go in between. Once I poured it out into the bowl there were quite a lot of big strawberry pieces on top. However, by the time it cooled the big chucks of strawberries seemed to have blended in.

I should have taken a picture of it once it was cool because it is still kind of bubbly in that picture.

Now onto the jam sandwich. In the book the villagers spread butter on the bread first and then the jam so that is exactly what we did.

Thanks for reading!