Around The Puddles I’m using wild strawberries for groundcover, and they’re doing an excellent job at keeping weeds at bay; in fact I think I’ll try to propagate as many runners as possible to use elsewhere in the garden. They have pretty little flowers in spring, and these days they are covered with tiny red berries that are absolutely delicious; slightly more sour than regular strawberries,
Unlike regular strawberries, the wild variety has white flesh, and the red colour is only skin deep. This means that in order to retain as much of the colour as possible I added a dash of vinegar; the acidity helps bring out the colour in the berries, and the taste is easily masked by the sugar.
The traditional recipe is 1 part berries and 1 part sugar, but with modern jam sugar you can reduce the sugar content without sacrificing the preservation period, so I tend to use as little sugar as possible; only enough for the taste to be sweet and jam-like. I add some water as well, just so the jam won’t burn, and then I simmer it for an hour or so until the berries are completely mushy and liquid sets quickly on a cold spoon.
I sterilise the jars with vodka. I could have used boiling water, but I’ve previously had jars explode on me when I poured in the boiling water, so now I use a dash of cheap and nasty vodka that we have sitting in the kitchen after a party some years ago; it’s not really drinkable, but it works well as a household spirit for all sorts of practical/cleaning applications.
Sadly, though, we only just had enough wild strawberries to make a single small jar of jam. Not exactly industrial quantities, so I re-used to pot to make a jar of rhubarb jam as well; the rhubarb crop this year is rather disappointing, and I suspect I should really give the rhubarb some sort of fertilizer next year so it will have something to grow on.
Since slugs ate most of my beans and my peas seem to have died during an extended dry period in late spring, this might be the only food to leave my garden. (Okay, so there will most likely be a few pears and apples and plums as well, but you get the point.) The strawberry jam will come back to Copenhagen with me today and be presented to my Mother-in-Law as a hostess present when we go there for dinner on Friday, and the rhubarb jam will remain in the Summer House for future breakfasts or afternoon tea. It might not be much, but there’s definitely a certain satisfaction in preserving a little bit of summer in a jar. And who knows; maybe the raspberries will produce enough berries for another jar, and in autumn there will be wild brambles in the forest…
I’ve only ever made jam one time and I loved it. I’ll have to do it again.
It’s so easy, and I’ve never had a bad result, so go-go-go! There’s nothing like a home-baked roll with home-made jam.
Your post makes me feel guilty about not having yet picked some wild strawberries. We have cultivated ones in the garden but the wild ones always taste so much better. It will soon be jam making time in a big way here as our favorite one is black currant jam and the currants will soon be ripe. Over the years I have increased the currant patch (soft wood cuttings of currants root very easily) an now we have enough to make jam for the whole year. Sterilizing with vodka is new to me, that must work quite well.
Black currant jam is perfect for pancakes… I planted a black currant in autumn, so this year it won’t yield much, but hopefully next year!
And sterilizing with spirits is only really practical for small batches of jars, but it works a treat. Just wash the jars and then swill the spirit around in the jar until it is completely coated and then pour out the spirit.
Both jams looks yummy!
And they taste as good! 🙂
I have also been picking wild strawberries from my garden — although I imagine mine are a different species (Fragaria virginiana) than yours. I love their eye-poppingly intense flavor. It is a lot of work, though, to pick enough of those tiny berries to amount to anything. I’m impressed that you got enough to make jam.
I made about 2 decilitres of wild strawberry jam, so it’s a deli-sized jar. Still, it should last my mother-in-law a while, as she doesn’t eat a lot of jam.
And it might be a hassle, picking enough berries to make anything, but it’s worth it, I think. And of course the plants also have pretty little flowers and attractive foliage, so I need to take lots of cuttings over the summer so I can cover another square meter or two next year.