SCK Tries… Homemade Strawberry Jam

It’s another edition of SCK Tries and I’ll be making homemade strawberry jam! This was my first time cooking jam, so I was pretty excited, to say the least.

The Original DIY

I followed the recipe from the Little Country Cottage: A Spring Treasury book. This is also my second time trying out a recipe from the book, as I also made Easter egg chicks when I reviewed it last year.

Ingredients & Equipment

The recipe uses metric measures and is fairly straightforward in terms of what you’ll need. Your must-haves would be strawberries (of course), lemon juice, honey, a saucepan, and a jam jar. I didn’t have a potato masher on hand, so I used a fork in place of it.

The original recipe uses 1 kg of strawberries, but I tailored mine to a much smaller quantity. I used 330 g of strawberries, 1 tbsp of lemon juice, and around 4 tbsp of honey.

Process

I chopped the strawberries as finely as possible so that it would be easier to cook and mash them. Next, I poured the strawberries into a saucepan under low heat, then added the lemon juice and honey. Around this time, I started mashing the strawberries even further using a fork. The photo above is what the mixture looks like a few minutes after it simmers.

The original recipe says to continue cooking the jam for about an hour. Since I used a much smaller quantity, I cooked the jam for a third of the time. I continued stirring until the mixture had smaller bubbles and become much thicker. By the end of it, this is how the mixture looked like.

The End Result

Once the mixture is cooled, you can pour it into a clean jam jar. I didn’t have any smaller jam jars available so it doesn’t look like much, but I’m sure it’ll last me for quite some time.

I used the jam to spread on a couple of slices of bread and had them for dinner along with some chicken and gravy. It was definitely comfort food.

As for the taste, I ended up really liking it! I plan on using it for pancakes and making jams from other fruits such as blueberries. I’d like to note that the jam I made was a bit tart, so if you’d like something sweeter of the same quantity then you can try using 6 tbsp of honey instead.

Along with other books in the Little Country Cottage series (also known as Little Homesteader), A Spring Treasury is available from Amazon (UK/US) and Bookshop (UK/US). I wasn’t able to review the Summer Treasury book last year as it got lost in the mail, but thankfully, I was sent a replacement. I’ll be reviewing the Summer Treasury book and recreating a recipe from it soon, so keep posted! :)