Freezer Jam for Christmas and the lies we were told.

For at least the last 15 years I have made freezer jam. Most often I have made strawberry and about half as much raspberry.

The ingredient that makes all of the magic happen is pectin. Recently I discovered that pectin is a naturally occurring substance in most fruit and most of the pectin we use for jam comes from citrus. for some time I believed it was similar to what was used in Jello, but I was wrong.

One of my discoveries this year is that I can make more than one batch of jam at a time. I have been buying pectin in 1.75-gram packets and all of these packets come with instructions; these instructions say only do one batch at a time. Lies!! This year I bought ten pounds of pectin. That is equivalent to about 90 of those packets. I was hoping some of my neighbors would help me cover the cost and split the bulk. Sadly, no one has volunteered any desire for pectin.

So this has gotten me in a bind because pectin doesn’t last forever.

Because I like it so much I thought I would get into the spirit of Christmas and make some batches and give them away.

Because I have so much I wanted to save some time and experiment with making more than one batch. I first tried two packets from the store. And what do you know, they worked out fine.

My mother-in-law has made jam a couple of times over the last decade and hers never seems to set up properly. I have had problems too in the past and I suspect there are two areas where people might have problems:

The first is not putting enough sugar in the recipe. There is a lot of sugar in these jams, and probably the reason everyone likes them so much. I have never had more than a fleeting temptation to put in less sugar. So, I can see how the ascetics in the population, in an attempt to limit their sinful indulgence in sugar, would want to lessen the guilt by lessening the evil ingredient.

The second I believe is not cooking the pectin long enough. To really get the pectin to set properly it needs to come to a roiling boil and stay at that rolling boil for a full sixty seconds. This is where I have had problems in the past because I would start the 60-second count too early and the result would be more strawberry syrup than strawberry jam. Even if it’s thinner the result is still really tasty and I have never thrown out a failure.

A third reason may be because the pectin is too old. According to Karen Blakeslee from K-State as pectin gets older it is less effective.

Back to the five batch experiments. That’s right I attempted five batches at once. You have to realize this was 6 pounds of strawberries and almost 9 pounds of sugar. All mixed together it was over two gallons of jam. The six pounds of strawberries is a standard bag of Costco frozen strawberries. That is another lie I am debunking here, frozen fruit works just as good and no one, even the supertasters can tell the difference.

So if you think you are going into production mode use frozen fruit and remember you can do multiple batches at once.

I would also make sure that the pan you use for pectin is 1/3 full with water and 2/3s to the top. The pan I used for the five-batch-in-one pectin was barely big enough when the pectin started to boil and I had to pull it off of the heat a couple of times to keep a minimum from spilling out onto the burner. I was concerned about this especially after 20 minutes and the jam didn’t seem to be setting up. Many times when only doing one batch the jam would start to set before I could even get the jam poured. So it was concerning to me when the jam wasn’t setting up after 30 minutes. Fortunately, the next morning the jam had set up nicely. I have had batches that were harder than this batch but not by much.

Part of the reason I am writing all of this down is to make notes as an After Action Report for the next time I do a batch of jam. I have recently heard they do this in the military.