Strawberry jam for the winter - 3 cooking recipes

The best option for preparing this dish is without heat treatment, when the berries are only ground with sugar and kept in jars in the refrigerator. The proportions are usually standard: one to one. No liquid is added. To enhance the taste, you can add a little citric acid or pour in one or two tablespoons of lemon juice.

Garden and wild strawberries also behave differently in jam. The first one, being more tender and loose, can quickly boil over. The second, dense and small, can remain hard when cooked and cannot be chewed. If you choose a recipe where you really need to cook the jam, it is better to do it carefully. First, make sugar syrup and cook the berries in it in several stages with intermediate cooling. Although this advice is only suitable when you are dealing with plump strawberries. It’s still better not to pour syrup on very juicy ones - it already has a lot of juices.

Another important point for berries collected in the forest. You need to pay attention to their cleaning: rinse in running water several times. Whether to remove the tails from the berries or not - here each housewife decides for herself. Many people think that jam looks prettier with ponytails. Moreover, if you have collected a lot of berries, peeling them all is another challenge. Just remember that the sepals do not particularly affect the taste (after cooking), but rather the aesthetic appearance.

You definitely need to sort out the strawberries, separating the berries of different sizes. The cooking speed will be different for them, and the resulting jam will not be harmonious and homogeneous. And very small ones can completely ruin the dish, turning into hard, rubbery ones.