JAMMING WITH STRAWBERRIES IN JANUARY

Winter is a great season for making strawberry preserves. This may sound counterintuitive but hear me out.  

In the process of testing recipes for a new edition of Artisanal Preserves, I purchased a pound of half ripe strawberries at the supermarket.  They were too sour to enjoy eating raw, but my intention was to cook them and check their pectin strength.  To my pleasant surprise they had enough pectin to form a jell with the right amount of added sugar and a little lemon juice. Even more surprising was their intense flavor of summer strawberries. Who knew? 

This discovery has simplified my summer preserving calendar. I will be content to make a softer, looser jam with ripe summer strawberries that have very little pectin. Past attempts to produce a firm jelled preserve with them always meant concentrating juices, losing flavor and texture in the process. The alternative course of forcing a jell by adding tablespoons of commercial pectin resulted in preserves that were too sweet.  

I'm finding the process of preparing Artisanal Preserves for a 40TH anniversary edition to be a challenging adventure.  You can follow my progress in my blog posts and in my online cooking classes. There are benefits to making cooking discoveries after 50 years of practice. One is the pleasure of spreading fresh Strawberry Preserves on a homemade English muffin on a Sunday morning in January.