Making strawberry preserves

Don has slowly been painting the outside of our house, one side at a time. During the course of this project, we needed to move our chest freezer (located on the back porch out of direct sunlight) away from the wall so he could paint behind it.

This meant emptying the freezer of all its contents. This wasn't a bad thing, since it allowed us to sort, group, organize, inventory, and discard as needed.

Which is how I found myself with bags and bags and bags of sliced and frozen strawberries. For the last couple of years, any strawberries that I picked and which I didn't use immediately, I sliced and froze. Many of these bags had somehow migrated to the very bottom of the freezer. Time to do something with them.

I'm not a big fan of jams or jellies, so those are not my go-to options when it comes to putting up fruit. However the exception is strawberry preserves. These are easy to make, dense with strawberries, and require only three ingredients (strawberries, lemon juice, sugar).

This is actually a Martha Stewart recipe, one of the few recipes she has that isn't a logistical nightmare to follow. (You know the kind of Martha Stewart recipes I mean: "Fly to Madagascar and harvest three fresh vanilla bean pods. Hang them to dry for several weeks, then condition them for six months in closed boxes. Steep the pods in 35% ethanol for two weeks. Use one teaspoon of this vanilla extract to...")

Anyway, back to preserves. First step: Let all the bags of strawberries defrost overnight.

Then I drained all the juice with a colander.

I planned to cook down the strawberries in my water-bath pots (which are very large). First I needed to get the tare weight of the pot so I could determine the weight of the strawberries.

This is the pot, full of strawberries. Weight of the fruit: Eleven pounds.

According to the recipe, for every 2 lbs. of strawberries, I needed 3 1/2 teaspoons of lemon juice and 1 cup sugar.

Because I had 11 lbs. of strawberries, I had to do a little of the good ol' cross-multiply-and-divide technique to figure out how much lemon juice and sugar I needed.

(Side note: This is possibly THE single-most useful mathematical trick I remember from high school. I use it constantly.)

I added the lemon juice to the strawberries...

...then let the fruit cook over a low heat for about 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. This releases the juices.

Meanwhile I had the necessary amount of sugar pre-measured.

I poured in the sugar after the strawberries and lemon juice had been stewing for the requisite amount of time.

Stirring in the sugar.

At this point, the fruit mixture needs to come to a boil over medium heat. I used a thermometer to check the temperature. Notice the foam on top. This gets skimmed off after the strawberries reach the required temperature.

When the fruit reached 210F, I turned off the heat and let it cool down, a process that takes a couple of hours. When it was cool, I spooned the preserves into colanders over bowls to drain excess juice. (This keeps the preserves from being too runny.)

Filling the jars.

Into the water bath.  The preserves are processed for 15 minutes at a rolling boil.

Final tally, four quarts and one pint.

The processed jars of fruit preserves were so pretty, I almost hated to move them out of the kitchen. After admiring them for a day or two, though, I finally labeled and dated them, and tucked them in the pantry.

Man I love canning.