Thanks to the participants in my canning class who’d learned to make strawberry jam yesterday. It was a relaxing few hours of learning about safe canning techniques, stirring, tasting, adjusting and not dropping hot bottles of jam on the floor.
Instead of doing a traditional strawberry jam we did a dehydrated strawberry jam. Why dehydrate? Because strawberries are a low pectin fruit with a lot of water content. So you end up boiling them for a long time, which destroys a bit more of the strawberries’ flavour compounds and bright colour than you’d like. I learned about this concept at the Modernist Cuisine lab where they use a rotary evaporator at a precisely set low temperature to do exactly this. It’s also kind of like using a slow-cooker with the lid off as a friend I did for thumbprint cookies once (and I copied for apple butter), but the temperature is less precise and you can still burn your fruit by accident. Mind you, sugary things in the rotary evaporator are an awful nuisance to clean, apparently, but as one of those costs a fortune you probably don’t have to worry about it. By dehydrating you evaporate some of that water at a low temperature, preserving more of the true berry taste and bright red colour.
I borrowed the idea from a canning book called The Preservation Kitchen, given to me as a Christmas present. It’s a gorgeous book, chock full of not-your-average jams, jellies, preserves, pickles, and fermentations. I may not use it extensively this canning season, but for anyone interested in beer-rhubarb jam, check it out.
Dehydrating is usually done nowadays in a home dehydrator, but you’d need a lot of racks to dehydrate all those strawberries. You can also do it in the oven set to the lowest possible temperature with the door slightly ajar, though the temperature is less precise and it takes forever. My oven doesn’t go that low so my dehydrated berries were somewhere between dehydrated and roasted, which worked better than boiling the heck out of them for way too long. The other trick you can use to retain more of the colour and flavour of the berries without dehydrating is to soak the chopped berries in the sugar for at least an hour (overnight is great) and then sieve the juices into a pot, reserving the berries. Then reduce the juices by about half before adding the berries and continuing with the recipe as per usual: cook to jam stage with lemon juice, taste, adjust, can, process.
The Results:
Hand-picked organic berries, dehydrated, sweet-and-sour balance, bright red, lovingly canned.
If you want to be part of my next canning class in Montreal send me an email at amie @ midnightpoutine.ca or leave a comment below. I’ll be giving classes almost every two weeks as the summer progresses and different fruit come into season. And if you want to make pickles or sauerkraut, we can do one of those, too. See my “Canning and Cooking Classes” tab above for more info.
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