I love the fresh fruit of summer. This summer's locally grown fruit is just starting to appear at local farmers' markets. Right now, it's mostly locally Washington grown cherries and strawberries, but soon, peaches, and then the many sorts of berries Washington grows in abundance. I'll put lot of the berries and freezer bags and freeze them, but I'm also a fan of freezer jam. Unlike conventional heat-processed jam, freezer jam is cooked just enough to melt the sugar and activate the powdered pectin, which "jells" the fruit and juice, but then you put it in containers and keep it in the freezer until you're ready to eat it. It keeps about a year in the freezer, and about three weeks in the fridge, if you can wait that long to eat it. I mostly use it as a fruit topping or filling, instead of on toast, but my toast-eating peers tell me my freezer jam is great that way too.
The following recipe is pretty easy to adapt to other fruits besides strawberries, but strawberries are the easiest fruit to use, and right now, they're easy to find in Washington, Oregon and California. The recipe makes roughly six cups; this is not a recipe to reduce or increase. It works much much better if you make small batches. I like to use those plastic containers designed for the freezer rather than glass jars; they stack well, for one thing. This jam is lovely on scones, or toast, but I mostly like to use it as an ice cream topping, or as filling for a summer tart, or to use in cooking in the winter when I long for the tastes of summer.
Strawberry Freezer Jam
- 2 cups chopped or crushed fresh strawberries
- 4 cups sugar
- 1 package of pectin (1 3/4 ounce)
- 3/4 cup water
- You don't want to completely pulverize the strawberries, but you do want to have pieces that fall somewhere in the range of the size of a kernel of corn to a small lima bean, and you do want to have a fair amount of strawberry juice.
- Stir the sugar gently into the berries, mixing it in quite thoroughly, and let it sit for twenty minutes.
- In a small saucepan, combine the water and the pectin. Bring them to a boil, stirring, and let the solution boil for a full minute. Do not stop stirring it.
- Pour the pectin solution over the strawberries, and gently mix it so all the berries are coated, for about three minutes.
- Immediately pour the jam into the prepared jars or frozen food containers, leaving at least a 1/2 at the top.
- Cover the containers with lids and let them cool to room temperature, then freeze them.
You can use the basic recipe to make small batches of other fruit jams, too, by using roughly the same amount of crushed or chopped fruit. Always use fruit that is perfectly ripe that you'd be quite happy eating "as is." For apricots or peaches, you need to add a teaspoon of ascorbic acid to the sugar, or three tablespoons of orange or lemon juice to the crushed fruit, to prevent them turning brown. For raspberries or blackberries, you might want to press most of the fruit through a strainer to remove as many seeds as possible. I've had both very good luck with blueberries, and very bad—on two occasions, for no reason that I can see, the blueberries did not jell; however, it made amazing blue berry syrup, so I didn't bother with the traditional "fix," which is to bring the jam to a boil again, and add a little lemon juice. You can make fabulous mango jam this way, but the mangos have to be perfect in terms of flavor.