Not-my-mother's strawberry freezer jam

I have a lot of posts that I've been meaning to make that I haven't gotten around to, but I wanted to write this one down before I forget. Anyway, when I was growing up, my mom had a huge garden and canned and froze enough veggies and fruit to last the whole year. I've already tried and failed the garden thing (although I do intend to give it another try when I have more time to devote to it), I have never canned anything, and we have a decent sized deep freezer that's mostly empty. This year my goal is to fix the last one. This weekend I attempted to make strawberry freezer jam for the first time, and I'm happy (and surprised) to report it was mostly a success. Someday I'd like to make the normal cooked and canned jam, but I do not have that much faith in my cooking skillz to not give everyone food poisoning or something. So freezer jam it is for now.

First, after reading that once you thaw out freezer jam, it only keeps in the fridge for a week, I decided to get a dozen 4-oz canning jars that can go in the freezer. I figure 4 oz of jam is a reasonable amount to eat in one week, but 8 oz might go to waste.

We have a U-pick strawberry patch (Brookside Berry Farm) right down the road from us, which is where we picked the berries, and their website has a recipe for strawberry freezer jam that uses Pomona's Pectin. The recipe that my mother uses requires 4 cups of sugar per quart of berries, which seems like a lot considering how sweet the berries already are. But this pectin only requires about a cup of sugar or honey.

So here's what I did, pretty much following the instructions in the box of pectin:

Washed the berries, hulled them, and mashed them up until I had 4 cups of mashed berries.



Mixed 1/2 teaspoon of the calcium powder (in the pectin box) into 1/2 cup of water and kept it in a jar for later. Mixed 1 cup of sugar and the juice of about half a lemon into the berries. Mixed 1 tablespoon (might have to check this) pectin powder into 3/4 cup of boiling water with the handheld mixer until it was all mixed up and jelly-like consistency, and then poured this mixture into the berries and mixed it all together. At this point, it started looking more like jam. Then put 4 teaspoons of the calcium water into the jam to get it to "gel." The instructions say to keep adding calcium water, a teaspoon at a time, until it gels, but mine looked about right after just 4 teaspoons, so I left it at that. Then I filled the jars up to 1/2 inch of the tops, put on the lids, and put them in the freezer. That was it!



I should mention that I haven't actually checked the ones in the freezer yet to make sure they didn't explode or anything. But the jar we kept out tasted quite good, and was spreadable on bread, although maybe not quite as firm as the kind you buy at the store.