Preserving – Plum Cooking.com

Discover How To Soften Strawberries & Save

William @ Plum Cookin' — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 17:47:06 +0000

Discover How To Soften Strawberries At Home And Stop Paying To Much

Once you discover how to soften strawberries at home and discover just how easy they are to make, storebought will just seem like you’re wasting your time and money.

Seriously, macerated strawberries are so easy to make that there is no reason to purchase sweetened and softened strawberries.

Making them yourself literally takes the same or even less time than thawing out a package of them from the grocery store.

What Your Going To Need

Strawberries. They can be fresh or frozen. As long as they are clean and the green stem and leaves have been removed, you’re ready to go.
Sugar
A bowl or two
A strainer (But only if you want to remove excess juice)

How To Put It Together

Add strawberries to a bowl.

Cover strawberries with sugar

Cover and let sit on the counter for a few hours or in the refrigerator overnight.

Drain off and freeze for later use, any excess strawberry juice you don’t want to use in your recipe.

Dessert Ideas

Farmers Markets In My Area

How To Easily Make Dark Corn Syrup

Karen and Denny's Kitchen — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 19:27:39 +0000

Make Dark Corn Syrup At Home In Just A Few Seconds

Instead of Running To The Store

So, you just pulled out grandma’s favorite pie recipe only to discover every ingredient is in your pantry except dark corn syrup.

Your first thought is probably can I substitute light corn syrup for dark corn syrup? (Answer) Yes and No!

For the most part, it will work but the flavor and color will both be off.

No need to run to the store, you probably have the two ingredients you need to make dark corn syrup in the pantry.

That’s right, just 2 ingredients.

This is truly one of those recipes that are so simple you’ll wonder why you’ve bothered to buy it premade all these years.

Why Pay More

The best part is once you realize the ingredients needed to make dark corn syrup have a shelf life of (literally years after opening) you can stop paying through the nose for the ingredients by purchasing in bulk rather than those tiny bottles that cost a fortune. per oz compared to per oz in bulk

Indefinite Shelf Life

If you don’t have these two simple ingredients in your pantry, perhaps it’s time to rethink your pantry. Did you know that things like light corn syrup, molasses, salt, and white rice, among many other common ingredients found in the average pantry, when stored properly, will keep for years, (Even After Opening)

More Handy Pantry Ideas

Farmers Markets In My Area

Best Ways To Preserve Garlic Scapes

Karen and Denny's Kitchen — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 17:16:00 +0000

Fresh garlic scapes are only available for a few weeks a year, so having a way to preserve them and be able to use them throughout the year is a must.

Preserving Garlic Scapes

Plus Great Recipe Ideas

So What The Heck Are Garlic Scapes Anyway

There are several varieties of garlic available that fit into two basic categories.

Soft Neck Garlic
Hard Neck Garlic

No matter the variety when you plant garlic, your goal is to grow big beautiful garlic bulbs.

Both categories of garlic have unique features of their own. In the case of hard-neck garlic, you also have a stem and flower bud growing from the center of the plant. This stem and flower bud are known as a garlic scape.

To focus the plant’s energy on growing larger garlic bulbs rather than on producing seeds, you’ll want to cut the garlic scape off the plant before the bulb begins to open. It’s a good rule of thumb to watch for the scape to curl over and then cut them off.

Why Don’t They Sell Garlic Scapes In The Store

First, they typically have to cut the garlic scape off the plant by hand, but you can find garlic scapes in some markets, especially farmer’s markets.
You’ll have to be quick about purchasing your garlic scapes because garlic scapes are a very short-season crop. If you find them at all, it will likely be in the last few weeks of June.

The First Problem, store-bought sour cream is cheaper because they reduce the cost of making the sour cream by adding regular milk instead of cream along with a lot of thickening agents, starches, and gums, among other more artificial ingredients.

The Second Problem is, When you find a quality store-bought sour cream that doesn’t contain all the added junk, the price tends to become prohibitive. Therefore you do not save any money by making it yourself, so unless you’re just experimenting, you may as well have just purchased the cultured butter.

When, Where and How To Plant Garlic

While you can plant garlic in the early spring, garlic, people will usually plant during the cool of fall as temperatures begin to come down.

Zones 1-4 plant bulbs in late October – November.
Zones 5-7 September – October
Zones 8-9 November – December(In Zone 8-9) You’ll need to store your garlic bulbs in the refrigerator for at least a couple of months before planting them, allowing the garlic to go through the vernalization process of a cold winter.

To grow garlic in 1 year, you will want to plant garlic cloves instead of seeds.

You can plant 4-9 garlic gloves per sq. foot in a garden bed, raised bed, planter boxes, or even in pots, and the bulbs will grow throughout the fall, winter, and spring. I usually plant 5 leaving plenty of room for the bulbs to grow. Cover them with a few inches of leaves or straw for the winter and rake most of that back in the spring.

Buy garlic for planting here

When To Harvest Garlic Scapes

As soon as you see the garlic scapes curl around, you will want to cut them off or break them from the plant. Where I live in the north, the garlic scapes usually show up around mid-June to early July or about 4 to 6 weeks before the garlic bulbs are ready to harvest.

How To Preserve Garlic Scapes

Fresh garlic scapes are only available for a few weeks a year, so having a way to preserve them and be able to use them throughout the year is a must. Throughout the rest of this article, you’ll find several ideas for storing your garlic scapes and recipes for enjoying them year after year.

Storing Garlic Scapes Fresh

Countertop:

Add a few inches of cool water to a mason jar and place the freshly cut ends of a handful of scapes down into the water. Store on your counter for a few days to use fresh.

This is probably the easiest thing to do. If you change the water daily they will Keep 4 or 5 days!

Refrigerator Storage

Properly stored in the refrigerator, your garlic scapes will keep for up to a month or even more.

Good Method

Store them whole and unwashed and in a plastic bag with a damp paper towel in the bag. When stored this way in the “crisper drawer” of your refrigerator, they should keep up to 2 to 3 weeks.

Better Method

I’d have to say the FridgeSmart line made by Tupperware is hands down the best method I have ever found for storing most produce in the refrigerator, and garlic scapes are no exception. With the FridgeSmart setting on the half-open position on any shelf of your refrigerator, you should get 4 to 6 weeks out of those garlic scapes.

Freezing

Do not blanch your garlic scapes. Instead, wash and completely dry them before freezing them raw.

There are several ways to freeze your scapes.

One method is to chop them up by hand into small, chive-sized pieces, or better still, you can run them through the food processor until you reach the desired consistency. Place them into freezer-safe containers, or freezer bags and flatten to remove all the air from the bag before closing.

Storing these bags of summertime goodness flat in the freezer allows you to stack several bags into a small space in your freezer. Then when you want to use some in a recipe, you can just open a bag and break off what you need and then reseal the rest for later use.

Stored this way; your garlic scapes should keep up to a year.

Other methods of freezing garlic scapes include making and freezing things like pesto or compound butter. You can learn more about these methods in the upcoming recipes.

Pickle Your Garlic Scapes

You can make refrigerated pickled garlic scapes simply by using vinegar, spice, and salt, then placing the jar(s) in the refrigerator.
Or, you could go all out by water bath canning several jars at a time to make your pickled scapes shelf-stable and should keep on your pantry shelves for years.
They go great with grilled meals like burgers, hot dogs, and more, so serve them like any dill pickle.

Great Recipe Ideas For Your Fresh Garlic Scapes

Wrapped & Roasted Garlic Scapes
Garlic Scape Compound Butter – Coming Soon

How To Dry Potatoes For Hash Browns – Easy

Karen and Denny's Kitchen — Sat, 18 Dec 2021 20:16:02 +0000

How To Dry Potatoes For Hash Browns

Call them hash browns, hashbrowns, breakfast potatoes, or skillet potatoes, we all love those crispy golden hashbrown potatoes, especially with breakfast but have you ever thought about how to dry potatoes for hash browns?

There certainly not limited to breakfast though. You can use them to make so many meals.

Cheesy hashbrown casserole
Any other casserole you choose to add them to
Add them to your soup
Breakfast burritos
Even sandwiches and so much more.

Have you ever taken the time to consider what you’re paying for those bags of frozen hash browns? Even the small pound and a half bags of generic branded hash browns are going to cost you $2.25 give or take. That’s a full $1.50 per pound for potatoes.

At the moment, a ten-pound bag of potatoes can easily be found for as little as 45 cents per pound and I’ve got to be honest here, I watch the sale papers and it’s not uncommon for me to spot them for 20 cents a pound or even less.

Why Pay More?

Why Dehydrate Them

No, you don’t need to learn how to dry potatoes for hash browns. You can prepare your hashbrowns from scratch and cook them right away. You could also prep them ahead of time and freeze them in small packages. You could even quick-freeze them so you can dip out as many frozen hashbrowns as you need but all that is quite a bit of work.

Personally, I’d rather save my precious freezer space for other things, and learning how to dry potatoes for hash browns, in my opinion, is easier to do than freezing. The nice thing about dehydrated hash browns is they become shelf-stable and don’t require any refrigeration.

Once you learn how to dry potatoes for hash browns you can store them in portion-controlled packages such as mason jars or in bulk, using large food-safe containers such as five-gallon buckets and a gamma seal.

How Do I Rehydrate My Dehydrated Hash Browns

Personally, once I learned how to dry potatoes for hash browns I discovered that I like to store them in vacuum-sealed jars. The sixteen-ounce mason jar seems to be the perfect size for my house. Then when I want to make hash browns I simply open a jar of crisp dry dehydrated hash browns and fill it just above the potato shreds with hot water. Lay the lid back on the jar and let the hashbrown potatoes stand for 10 or 15 minutes. Then I just drain any excess water off and cook them up the same way you would any other hash browns. What could be easier?

Share The Love

When you learn how to dry potatoes for hash browns or make you’ll discover it’s easy to dehydrate a great number of other things as well. Then you can create gifts that are uniquely you. Add your blend of seasonings and a recipe card, to a mason jar or other container decorated up for the occasion.

It’s easy to do, and you can rest assured no one else will be bringing the same gift.

Think It Can’t Happen Here

The Shelves Were Empty

– So Think Again

It wasn’t just a few things that came up missing from the shelves across America during the pandemic.

Panic buying caused shortages of everything from toilet paper to common sense. Canned goods, dried foods, meat, bread, and even pet food began vanishing from grocery store shelves everywhere.

It didn’t stop there either. Many things like bleach, rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide all became difficult to find. In some cases, impossible.

The scariest part. It will happen again, and it will likely be even worse.

The Least Affected

Were The Well Prepared

Before the pandemic, many people looked at the whole prepper thing as just a fad. History, however, tells quite a different story, and after the pandemic, the idea of becoming a prepper has gone viral.

The prepared were not the ones looking for bags of pasta or potatoes. They weathered the storm by opening their well-stocked pantries and storerooms filled with staples, canned goods, dehydrated foods, toilet paper, and napkins. They relied on their forward-thinking and well-laid plans. Our grandparents did it before we started shopping in supermarkets on practically a daily basis so why can’t we?

Store-Bought Convenience

Costs You More Than You Think

Another great reason for learning how to dry potatoes for hash browns, sliced potatoes, diced potatoes, and more is because there is always a trade-off between cost and convenience. Dehydrated hash browns are no exception to this rule. Store-bought convenience puts food manufacturers in charge of your family budget and well-being. Not to mention they add ingredients you would never add to the food you prepare for your family.

Add the words no artificial preservatives, and the salt content goes up. Telling us it’s fat-free usually means more sugar. No salt added often means other preservatives were added. Armed with that knowledge alone was enough to make me want to learn how to dry potatoes for hash browns and how to dry every other vegetable I could find.

Of course, if you learn how to dry potatoes for hash browns as well as other food items yourself, you would be in control of all of these ingredients. The trouble is making these things yourself may seem anything but convenient.

My question to you is, why can’t we make learning how to dry potatoes for hash browns convenient? We build skyscrapers, fly around the world, launch people into space, and we’ve even walked on the moon, but we can’t make cooking homemade convenient? There’s only one reason this could be. Homemade convenience is not where the money is for corporations.

Dehydrating At Home

Should Be A Daily Routine

Dehydrating at home isn’t only how you dry potatoes for hash browns but it’s an excellent way to preserve fruits, vegetables, and with care, even meat. When stored in an air-tight container, dehydrated foods can keep for years in a cool, dry place, out of direct sunlight. Your needed storage space becomes dramatically reduced, and the food weighs a fraction of what it did before dehydration. Better still, there is no refrigeration required making them perfect for long-term storage, camping, backpacking, and so much more.

There are some excellent dehydrators available on the market today that will not only do a great job of preserving your food they’ll make it easy to do regularly. The right dehydrator can take the task of learning how to dry potatoes for hash browns or other dried foods as simple as and as routine as making breakfast.

A truly useful dehydrator should have more than one use in your kitchen. A box design with sliding trays rather than stacking on top of one another allows you to remove trays and use the machine as a proofing box, for example.

Dehydrating Ideas

Farmers Markets

How To Dry Potatoes For Slices – Easy

Karen and Denny's Kitchen — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 20:46:04 +0000

How To Dry Potatoes

Seriously, it’s your choice, you can pay dollars for boxes of dehydrated potato slices, or you can learn how to dry potatoes for slices yourself for just pennies. Have you ever tried it? With the right equipment, it is so easy to do.

How many types of dehydrated potatoes are there on the shelves at the grocery store? They come in a multitude of versions, with multiple brands of each. The obvious ones include Scalloped or AuGratin Potatoes. Other common varieties include hashbrowns and mashed, but the list goes on.

Not only can you learn how to dry potatoes for slices, but you can also dehydrate any other type you can buy in the store as well.

Have you ever stopped to think about what you’re spending your hard-earned money on when you purchase those boxes of almost prepared potato dishes? Sure, they’re convenient, and they certainly seem cheap enough, only a few dollars a box.

The truth is you are paying a few dollars for a few pennies worth of potatoes and “maybe” a tablespoon or two of flour, starch, and seasoning.

Discover How To Dry Potatoes Myself

You certainly can teach yourself how to dry potatoes for sliced potatoes, and if truth be told, when you dehydrate potato slices, shreds, chunks, and even tiny chips, regularly at home, it changes everything as far as your food supply goes.

When you have a good supply of dehydrated foods in your pantry ready to go, they are every bit as convenient and probably even more so than any of those little boxes or packets you’re going to find in the store. As a bonus, they become far less expensive as well.

As for convenience? Is it more convenient to learn how to dry potatoes for slices and scoop some out of a storage container when you need them? Or go to the store because you realized you were out of what you wanted for dinner?

As for cost? You already know the potatoes in the 10-pound bag are cheaper than the same potatoes in the 5-pound bag, but how many times have you tossed old rotting potatoes in the trash because you had too many?
So what happens? You end up buying less and paying more to keep from throwing the extra away.

Or you could learn how to dry potatoes for sliced potatoes at home and save some money by purchasing a large bag. You then save money a second time because you’re not tossing out old potatoes. Instead, you dehydrate potato slices right away when you buy the new bag.
Then, you save even more money because you can stop buying potatoes every time you go to the store. No need, since you dehydrate potato slices, you end up with gallons of dehydrated potatoes.

Once you learn how to dry potatoes you can dry potatoes for sliced, diced potatoes, and shredded potatoes and keep them in my pantry all the time. They’re incredibly versatile and can be used to make everything from Scalloped or Au gratin potatoes to soups and stews. You can even use them for fried potatoes.

Are you wondering how to dry potatoes for slices in bulk along with so much other food? Of course, you can use your oven or any style dehydrator. If you’re going to do this regularly and you want to make dehydrating an easy part of your daily routine, I would highly recommend a quality dehydrator along with a few other tools.

How To Use Dehydrated Potato Slices

You can learn how to dry potatoes for slices and use them in pretty much anything that requires potatoes. You can rehydrate them while baking like you do when using that box of Augratin potatoes from the store or right in a soup, stew, or even a pot roast. The possibilities are endless.

If you learn how to dry potatoes for slices and have a container filled with them and then have a few seasonings in your pantry, you can recreate any of the boxed potato dishes you’d find in the store and so many more.

Au gratin Potatoes
Scalloped Potatoes
Fried Potatoes
(Even) Potato Chips
Loaded Potato Slices
Baked Garlic Potato Slices
Cheesy Bacon & Ranch Potato Slices
And More

Share The Love

When you learn how to dry potatoes for sliced, diced, and more, among other things, you can create gifts that are uniquely you. Add your blend of seasonings, along with the dehydrated potato slices, and a recipe card, to a mason jar decorated up for the occasion.

It’s easy to do, and you can rest assured no one else will be bringing the same gift.

How To Dry Potatoes

While bringing a kettle of water to boil, peel and wash your potatoes. The number of potatoes will depend on the number of slices your dehydrator can handle per tray and the number of trays you have.

Fill a bowl or a clean sink with cold water. You can use a knife, but the more even the slices, the more even the drying. To dehydrate potato slices, I would recommend a slicer of some sort, such as a mandoline. Slice your potatoes about a quarter of an inch thick and place the potato slices in the cold water to prevent browning. (I usually cut mine just a bit thinner than that)

Once your water is boiling, place the sliced potatoes into the kettle and cook until tender but not soft or mushy. A wooden skewer works well for testing. If it pokes through the potato, you’re good to go.

Once cooked through, use a slotted spoon or scoop to remove them and place the hot potatoes into a bowl or sink full of ice-cold water to stop the cooking process. Let them cool completely before moving on to the next step.

Drain your cold potato slices completely and arrange them into a single layer onto your dehydrator trays. I have ten trays in my dehydrator, so when I want to dehydrate potato slices, I can do quite a few at a time.

Set your dehydrator between 125ºF and 150º, and run for 8 to 12 hours. Dehydrator brands, styles, and humidity levels vary and will affect drying time. When you dehydrate potato slices, they should be dry and crisp. If still soft or moist in any way, continue the process until they are dry.

How To Store Dehydrated Potatoes

Now that you have learned the secret of how to dry potatoes in bulk for slices, Place them into an air-tight container and keep them in a cool place out of direct sunlight. You can use mason jars for this. If you are, storing sliced potatoes in bulk, you may find it more practical to use food-grade buckets with gamma seals.

Of course, humidity and temperature can affect the storage life of your dehydrated potatoes. Under the right conditions, however, in an air-tight container, the shelf life of your potatoes should be from 5-10 years.

Need Another Reason To Dehydrate Foods?

The Shelves Were Empty

Learning how to dry potatoes is just the beginning. The pandemic wasn’t all that long ago and to many people’s surprise, it wasn’t just a few things that came up missing.
Panic buying during the Coronavirus Pandemic in 2020 caused shortages in The United States of America among other nations of everything from toilet paper to common sense. Canned goods, dried foods, meat, bread, and even pet food began vanishing from grocery store shelves quicker than Jimmy Hoffa after an ill-fated lunch.

It didn’t stop there either. Many things like bleach, rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide all became difficult to find. In some cases, impossible.

The scariest part of it all was not the rumors, the ever-shifting blame game, or even the censorship of our own words by social media companies across the free world.

The scariest part is, we know sooner or later, not only will it happen again, it will more than likely be even worse.

The Least Affected

Were The Well Prepared

Before the pandemic, many people considered the whole prepper thing a fad. History, however, tells quite a different story, and after the pandemic, the idea of becoming a prepper has gone mainstream.

The prepared ones were not the ones looking for bags of pasta. They weathered the storm by opening their well-stocked pantries and storerooms filled with staples, canned goods, dehydrated foods, toilet paper, and napkins. They already knew how to dry potatoes and relied on their forward-thinking, well-laid plans, just like grandma and grandpa did before we started shopping in supermarkets on practically a daily basis.

Store-Bought Convenience Is More Expensive Than You Think

There is always a trade-off between cost and convenience. Store-bought convenience puts food inc in the driver's seat, and in the name of profit, they add ingredients you would never add to the food you prepare for your family.

Add the words no artificial preservatives, and the salt content goes up. Telling us it's fat-free usually means more sugar, no salt added, and often means other preservatives were.

Of course, if you learn how to dry potatoes and other food items yourself, you would be in control of all of these ingredients. The trouble is making these things yourself may seem anything but convenient.

My question is, why isn't it convenient? We build skyscrapers, fly around the world, launch people into space, and we've even walked on the moon, but we can't make cooking homemade convenient. There's only one reason this could be. Homemade convenience is not where the money is for corporations.

Dehydrating Should Be A Daily Routine

Dehydrating at home is not only an excellent way to learn how to dry potatoes, but a great way to preserve fruits, vegetables, and with care, even meat. When stored in an air-tight container, dehydrated foods can stay in a cool, dry place, out of direct sunlight for years. Your needed storage space becomes dramatically reduced, and the food weighs a fraction of what it did before dehydration. Better still, there is no refrigeration required making them perfect for long-term storage, camping, backpacking, and so much more.

There are some excellent dehydrators available on the market today that will not only make it easier to learn how to dry potatoes for sliced potatoes regularly but do a great job of learning how to preserve your food they'll make it easy to do regularly.

A truly useful dehydrator should have more than one use in your kitchen. A box design, with sliding trays rather than stacking on top of one another, allows you to remove trays and use the machine as a proofing box, for example.

Dehydrating Recipes

Farmers Markets

Delicious Old Fashioned Strawberry Jam

Karen and Denny's Kitchen — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 03:54:36 +0000

Old Fashioned Strawberry Jam

Summertime In A Jar

What’s better than opening a jar of strawberry jam that you purchased from the local grocery store shelf? How about opening a jar of homemade old-fashioned strawberry jam you made yourself?

When you open up that jar of strawberry jam in December and smell the real strawberries from inside or taste that first bite of strawberry jam, it’s like opening a container filled with summertime.

Where To Get Fresh Strawberries for Strawberry Jam

If you want to start totally from scratch, you certainly could grow strawberries in your yard, and with the right-gardening method, you might be surprised just how little space you need for a sizable crop of the little red gems.

The most popular varieties are June bearing which will bear all their fruit at one time, but there are everbearing varieties also. Everbearing will produce the strawberries slower, over an extended period. This everbearing plant is a perfect variety for making small batches of jams, jellies, or preserves at a time or just eating them one by one as they grow. I like the June bearing the best myself, so I can get done and move on to the next project, but it’s just a matter of choice.

You can grow strawberries in flower pots or other containers as well as growing them in the ground. Flower pots and containers are perfect if your space is limited and you only have a patio or balcony to garden. Whether you garden on containers, raised beds, or in the open ground, using the Square Foot Gardening method for planting, you can plant four strawberry plants per square foot.

With proper care, each plant will grow between 6 and 12 inches in height, and during a good growing season, each strawberry plant should produce between 1 1/2 to 3 pounds of tender, juicy strawberries.

A better way to visualize this is each strawberry plant should yield between 1 and 2 quarts of fresh ripe whole strawberries. That amounts to between four and eight quarts of strawberries per square foot. So a 4×4 patch (16 square feet) could yield over a hundred and twenty quarts or more than a hundred and ninety pounds of strawberries. It takes about 3 pounds or 2 quarts of whole strawberries to make a batch of strawberry jam.

As a bonus, when growing strawberries, they are perennial, so with proper care and a covering of straw for wintering, you could get several seasons of strawberries from just a single planting.

If being the envy of the neighborhood for growing a beautiful strawberry patch in your yard doesn’t sound like the kind of challenge you’re up for, then purchasing fresh strawberries is probably your best option.

A Costco or a Sam’s Club are great options for big beautiful strawberries, as well as hunting them down when they are on sale at your local supermarket. If you look around when they’re in season, you’ll also find fresh, delicious strawberries at fruit stands and farmer’s markets all over the country.

U-Pick It For Some Family Fun

If you’re looking to make a few memories with the kids and the freshest strawberries around, a U-Pick Farms near you might be your best option. You’ll get to wear the kids out a little, crawling around picking fresh strawberries, and you might even get to enjoy a hayride to and from the strawberry fields.

If you’re taking the kid’s or grandkid’s strawberry picking, then keeping the kids from eating the strawberries before they hit the basket should be the only real job you have while you’re there. You’ll want to be sure to take your cell phone or a good camera with you as well because a photo of the look on a toddler’s face when they pick and eat a fresh strawberry, priceless.

Not Enough Hours In The Day

When great-grandma used to make strawberry jam, she didn’t add pectin but would spend the day crushing fruit, adding sugar, and slowly boiling it down over low heat and a lengthy amount of time. Only when it passed the gel test would she put up jar after jar up in the pantry.

What’s the gel test?
Remove the cooking strawberry jam from the heat and drip a small amount onto a plate. Place this into the freezer for just a minute or so. If the liquid on the plate gels, you can move on. If not, put the jam back on the heat and continue to cook down until it passes the gel test. You’ll want to use this test any time you make jam or jelly without added pectin.

In today’s fast-paced world, few of us have time to commit hours upon hours to cooking down fruit and then canning large batches of strawberry jam. One way to beat this time crunch is to prepare freezer jam. It’s quick to make and simple to pack into small containers and toss into the freezer. This method works well for small batches.

That’s all well and good, but I have bigger fish to fry “or store in this case,” so I don’t wish to waste my precious freezer space on strawberry jam. Also, speaking from personal experience, digging around the bottom or back of a freezer looking for a container that I haven’t seen in three months buried under a pile of hamburger packages doesn’t sound like all that much fun to me.

I’d much rather take an extra few minutes, in the beginning, to do some water-bath canning with my strawberry jam and create a shelf-stable product that will keep undisturbed even for a few years without spending a penny on refrigeration.

What You’re Going To Need

I know some of you are reading this and saying you don’t need to do a water bath when canning jams and jellies because my grandma has always just turned the filled jars upside down on the kitchen counter, and they’ve sealed just fine.

In the case of strawberry jam, there is probably enough sugar (if you’re making full sugar jam) to guard against any spoilage. That said, not all recipes call for sugar, and even if they do, you’ve gone through all the trouble of making a wholesome product for your family, heck you can even pronounce all the ingredients. Why not take the extra step for safety and do the job right. Using modern methods will help to ensure your jars seal, stay sealed, and don’t spoil for years.

What Is A Water-Bath Canner

Do I need to buy a water-bath canner? Not necessarily.
All you need is a pot large enough to hold the number of jars you wish to work with that is also deep enough to cover the jars over with a couple of inches of water.

You’re also going to need something to hold the jars off the metal bottom of the pot so that they are not in direct contact with the heat from your stove. You want a little water to get underneath the jars. However, you don’t need anything fancy to do this. When in a pinch, I’ve placed a small towel in the bottom of the pot of water, and it has worked just fine.

Using a water-bath canner will make the job much easier, so I do recommend you have one.

Altitude chart for water-bath canning

Mason Jars

Canning jars are a must. There are numerous brands of canning jars out there that you can choose from, but no matter which brand you choose, what you want is a rugged canning jar that will last for years and stand up to the heat and pressure of the canning process over and over again.

In North America, the most well-known of these would be Ball, Kerr, Bernardin, and Golden Harvest. There are other brands sold, but these four brands, in my opinion, are the best and most durable canning jars on the market. As for me, I’m going to spend my money on the most durable products I can find.

Lids

When you buy new mason jars, they come with two-piece lids attached to each jar. Again, there are other types you can buy, but generally, you’re going to find the two-piece to be the easiest ones to use and the most dependable when it comes to creating and holding a seal.

The two-piece lid consists of both a reusable screw-down band and a single-use flat seal. Yes, under the right conditions, you can use the flats more than once, but once they are bent, dinged, or otherwise compromised in any way, the odds of them actually creating and holding a seal drops quickly. I recommend using old flats for other purposes or put them in the recycling bin.

Jar Lifter

You’re going to need a way to lift your full jars in and out of the canner. If you own an actual water-bath canner, it came with a wire basket that holds several jars and allows you to move them in and out of that canner at one time. It also rests on the rim of the canner, holding the hot jars above the water until you are ready to work with them.

Other Helpful Tools You May Want To Consider

Other tools that aren’t vital to the process but make the job easier include:

A de-bubbler or non-metallic stick to move air bubbles out of the jar before adding the seal
A magnetic stick for lifting flats out of hot water
A large Ladle for filling the jars, preferably with a lip that’s formed to help guide when pouring
A hot pad designed for your hand and wraps around the hot jars are handy when moving them from place to place.
A mat or pad to set the hot jars on your counter while they cool for 24 hours. (Pro Tip) Don’t set the hot jars of jam directly on your counter. They are very hot and will leave a mark.

Canning Strawberry Jam

To preserve your strawberry jam, follow the recipe provided. Always follow the guidelines provided by the National Center For Home Food Preservation.

When you remove the hot jars of jam and place them on the mat on your countertop, you’ll hear the ping of the flats as they begin to seal. (One of my favorite sounds.)

Let the jars of fresh strawberry jam sit undisturbed for 24 hours, remove the screw bands, and check the seals. If the seals are properly seated, then you won’t need the screw bands anymore. They can be washed and stored away for the next canning project.

Next, you’ll want to wash the jars of strawberry jam with a dishcloth and warm soapy water to remove any deposits. Then, use a marker on the flats or a label describing what’s inside. Trust me, you may know what’s there now, but six months from now, not so much. Be sure your label includes the month and year you made the jam as well.

How Do I Store My Homemade Old-Fashioned Strawberry Jam

Once your jars of strawberry jam have cooled completely, it’s time to store them away until you’re ready to open a jar. We’ve all seen people store jars of canned food stacked on top of each other, with the canning rings screwed down on the jars.

There’s A Better Way To Store Homemade Strawberry Jam

One advantage of the two-part lid is that if the flat does not seal, the center will move up and down when pushed. The same applies to six months later. If you go to use a jar, you want to check the seal before opening the jar. If you discover the flat is no longer sealed, then what has likely happened is a gas created by the spoiling food inside the jar has pushed up on the sealed flat from the inside and broken the seal. Throw the food out and wash the canning jar for next time.

If you store your food with the screw band on the jar, then don’t screw the band down tight. Leave it loose enough to wiggle around with your fingers so the flat can pop off if something spoils.

Also, don’t store jars of strawberry jam or any other canned food stacked on top of each other. Put them on the shelf in a single layer, so that the flat is free to pop off if there is an issue.