How to Spend a Day With Friends-Make Jam!

Hello All! Today is going to be a bit different from most of my blogs as it's going to be a step-by-step of how to make jam! Let's take a moment to set up the cast:

Sara Be-That's me! If you get this blog, you probably know me. Probably?
PartnerPenguin-Readers of my blog know and love him, but not nearly as much as I do. He's my partner, we've been together for 9 years and still give people diabetes because we're too sweet.
The Ribald Tweeter- One of my best friends, she and I have known each other for what feels like forever but is, in actual fact, 3 years. She is small and mighty.
The Kinematic DM- The Ribald Tweeter's sigoth (significant other) who helped us in the late stages of the game.


HOW TO MAKE JAM:

1.  Decide you want to make jam. Talk about it with friends and family, make sure you have support. This is not a decision to make lightly. You will be spending the rest of your day, night and into the early hours of tomorrow doing this task. Choose wisely.
2.  Once you have decided to make jam, locate your nearest Sunday. On that Sunday, locate your nearest farmer's market.
3.  Attend your nearest farmers's market 30-45 minutes before closing. This is an important step so you have enough time to taste test all of the vendor's food.
4.  Choose your fruit for jam. This is very dependent on what's in season. You should look for a fruit that is plentiful with multiple vendors. Fruit should be day-of ripe. (This time around we chose strawberries.)
5.  Find a vendor with a lot of end of day stock. Haggle for all of it.
6.  Purchase fruit. Be sure to have cash on hand.

Organic strawberries, 24 quarts. Small size and very very ripe.

7.  Carry fruit home, praising yourself for going to the gym regularly. Trade regularly with PartnerPenguin and wonder the whole walk if you should get a car some day.

8.  Eat lunch.

9.  Review the documentation for the process:

Copyright 1969, produced by Ball Brothers Company

10.  Go to the grocery store and buy pectin, sugar, a lemon for additional acid (strawbs are low acid) and an underripe fruit (to contrast your very ripe strawbs).

My foolish ambitions of "necessary" ingredients

11.  Get home and read that each container of pectin is only good for 2 quarts of strawbs. Also that each 2 quarts require 6-7 cups of sugar.
12.  Decide to do two batches and start first right now.
13.  Friend shows up and everyone agrees that alcohol needs to be procured, post haste, for this venture.

A nice crisp Rosé for a warm day

Tools of the trade: Wine in mugs, paring knives and a computer with which to watch shows.

14.  Set up the cutting environment for two strawberry cutting robots. Place compost bin between robots (you and your friend) and receptacles for berries in your lap.

Our setup. Notice smiles and optimism. This was early on. RT on left, me on right.

15.  Cut berries by lopping off green part and quartering. When berries eventually turn into jam, you want to do as little smushing as possible. Because you're lazy and smushing takes work. Blenders also exist, but I'd caution against them because you could lose volume. When you shuck hundreds of strawbs, you DO NOT want to lose any of them.

Admire your strawbs before you murder them.

16.  Fill up your receptacle with quartered strawberries.

Fill up your bucket. Admire your thighs, they are beautiful.

Serious Recipe Note: We used 4 quart buckets of strawberries at this stage. Batch 1 has 4 qt strawberries, 2 boxes pectin, 12 cup sugar, 1 nectarine, 10-12 pods cardamom, crushed and about 2 tsp lavender. (I kinda gloss over what happened with Batch 1, focusing instead on Batch 2.)

Batch 1, adding the spices: 

This batch blissfully boiled down.

17.  Realize you have made terrible mistakes and underestimated everything in your life. Send out The Ribald Tweeter and PartnerPenguin for additional supplies for rest of berries. This includes more jars because Oh LORD did you DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH JARS.

18.  Watch GLOW and be grateful you are not the main character. I think GLOW captures a reality I knew (in the back of my mind) that I wanted to avoid regarding becoming a professional actress.

GLOW: Theoretically a show about women's wrestling. Mostly 80's hair and problematic situations.

19.  PartnerPenuin and Ribald Tweeter return from outside adventures with food for dinner and secondary supplies. Batch 1 is doing well and is almost ready to be canned.

20. Can the all jam.

About canning:

Whenever you are canning anything, it is SUPER important to wash your hands all the time and straight up don't participate if you're sick. Cans should be submerged at least an inch, preferably 2, under water when sealing. If anyone wants to buy me a special canning pot that would accommodate my bigger jars I would really love that. 

Sub-set of Instructions for Canning

1. Wash all jars throughly with warm soapy water.
2. Dry.
3. Pick up jar with canning tongs and hold, mouth down over boiling water for 2 minutes to sterilize. Steam is what you're aiming for, not the water itself. (Sterilizing pot different than canning pot)
4. Remove from steam and place jar upright close to jam. We used a secondary bowl to re-arrange tongs for this step.
5. Ladle jam into sterilized jar immediately.
6. Sterilize lid and band of lid. Lids (or hats, as we call them) can be purchased separately from jars if your old lids go moldy or something.
7. Wipe top of jar with fresh paper towel with hot water so lid band does not stick. 
8. Place lid firmly on top of jar.
9. Place band on lid and tighten completely. Then loosen the band 1/2-3/4 turn so the band wobbles and there is room between the lid and the band.
10. Pick up jar with canning tongs and submerge in canning pot with boiling water. My pot fits 4 jars and only when all 4 are inside does the water cover the lids 100%.
11. Water boiling has bubbles but watch for bubbles coming directly from lids. This is the seal becoming air-tight.
12. Once seal is air-tight (about 4-5 minutes), gently remove jars and tilt excess water out from between the lid and the band.
13. Place of flat surface.
14. When cooled slightly, tighten band.

Canning looks like this: 

And we now return to your regularly scheduled shenanigans:

21.  At this point it's 8 pm and you are hangry so the rest of the party makes dinner while you finish canning and soaking pots for the next round.

22.  Come back from dinner and resume beheading a million strawberries. Watch American Gods because Ibis and Jaquel are the cutest couple in the history of television.

I mean, just look at them! So dapper! Match made in Aaru!

23.  Wash a million dishes. Scrub hard.

24. Assemble Batch 2: 12 quarts of quartered strawberries, 5 boxes of pectin, 10 lbs and 1 cup sugar, 2 underripe nectarines cut into inch cube-ish pieces and 1 and 1/2 lemon, juiced. Spices: 25ish pods of cardamom and 3 Tbsp lavender.

25. Mix together strawbs and sugar. I was very wrong on my calculations (in vid), there were 12 quarts of strawbs, not 6. Here is a hilarious video of me trying to dissolve 10 pounds of sugar into strawbs.

26.  Mix together everything in Batch 2. Pot got VERY FULL.

All the fruits and sugar and pectin and spices added.

27.  Decide it's time to split into two pots. Stir both constantly because viscosity is a bitch.

Sad Sara trying to stir all the pots.

28.  Remember you have multiple stirring utensils in your house.

Stir-Crazy Sara, Master of the Jams.

29. Play with the heat and be careful of multiple burners because your jam will pick up heat from all places.

30. Test jam done-ness by keeping plates in the freezer then dribbling a bit of jam on the plate and returning it to freezer for 2 min. When done, it should look like this:

Note that the jam does not rush to fill the void of a finger. Means it's done.

31. Repeat sub-set of canning instructions. Remove all the pickled carrots from mason jars to a take-out container and picked beets to tupperwares. Pray that you have enough jars.

32.  FIN! You have successfully made 2.5 gallons of jam, deepened your friendship and also probably will have a sleep debt. Brava!!

All the jam, 2.5 gallons

Me, the Ribald Tweeter and ALL OUR JAMS!

Brava us! We got through it!

Obviously our song for the week is "Jammin'" by Bob Marley

Additionally, I want to introduce you to the best summer anthem this year!! It's called "Thunder Thighs" by Miss Eaves