Monthly Archives: June 2012

It’s high strawberry season here, and the local strawberries are gorgeous.

These are Hoods. They are smaller, softer, and sweeter than your grocery store variety of strawberry. They wouldn’t travel well, which is why we just have to enjoy them locally. I bought a half flat of berries to make strawberry jam.
Et voila! I used the reduced sugar version of MCP pectin, which set up nicely.

If you look at the two jars, you can see that the fruit is floating in the jar on the right, but the fruit in the jar on the left is evenly distributed. I didn’t water process the jar on the left because I was going to use it this week. Hmmmm. Why does the fruit float in my jam? I went on an internet hunt for some answers, and I found these: There was air in the fruit because I chopped it instead of crushing it (no, I only crushed it), or I didn’t cook it long enough for it to be thick enough to keep the fruit from separating (but this would only apply to the long cooking used for jams without added pectin, which mine was not).

I guess I don’t really care WHY the fruit floats; I just want it not to float. It tastes great, but I want it to look pretty as a gift. I don’t want to tell the recipient to stir it to distribute the fruit after opening it. I also want the jam to not have the bubbles from the foam. Here are my options for prettier jam:

1) Add a bit of butter to the jam while cooking, to reduce foaming.

2) Stir and skim for 5 minutes to allow the jam to gel a bit more before before putting it in the jars. The skimming would eliminate some of the foam, which tastes fine but isn’t pretty. I don’t think this stir and skim will keep the fruit from floating, though; the high temperature of the water bath processing keeps the jam more liquid than the non processed jam, and the fruit will still be able to float through the jam until it is cool.

3) Invert the jars a few times as they cool, to move the fruit around as the jam thickens. I think this is going to be the solution to the fruit float. I just have to make jam before midnight so I don’t have to babysit it all night long to do the inversions! Next time I’ll add some balsamic vinegar to make it strawberry balsamic jam. It seems to be the hot new flavor combo around here; I just saw strawberry/honey/balsamic/black pepper ice cream at Salt and Straw.

Just like sweaters; sometimes you have to do things twice to get exactly what you want!

(please excuse the lazy picture; it’s raining out and gloomy inside!)

I just separated the sleeves from the body on my Raspberry Vodka Lemonade, and tried it on. I’m going to go back and add 4 more rows (2 more YO rows) to make the armscye a tad deeper, and the body just a little bigger. I’m between sizes, and chose to knit the smaller size, but an extra 2 sts on the fronts and 4 sts on the back should give me the fit I want. This pattern is a very fun knit so far, simple enough to multi-task, but enough going on that it’s not boring. That makes it a perfect knit for me.

What’s your perfect knit? Mindless? Follow a chart every moment? Somewhere in between?