STRAWBERRY JAM

I've never made jam before and I kinda winged it this time too. I guess the recipe was adapted from Maggie's Harvest, which describes an apricot jam. Well I didn't have kilos of apricots, I had a kilo of strawberries though!

Ingredients:
1kg over-ripe strawberries
150ml water
300g caster sugar
Juice of 1/2 a lemon

I cooked the strawberries in the water for about 10mins until all the strawberries were sufficiently mashed up. I then added the lemon juice and sugar gradually and stirred until it was dissolved. I cooked this for about 40mins total, at first on a high temperature, then on a low temperature. Basically you just want it to be as viscous as possible.



While the jam was cooking I sterilized the jar I wanted to use (i.e. the only jar in our household not filled with random spices.) Just for your info, I did this by washing the jar in warm soapy water, rinsing, then putting it in the oven at 120C for at least 15mins.

I put the jam into the jar as soon as it came out of the oven... so it was super hot. I'm not sure if that was a good idea, but I wanted it to be as sterile as possible. To cool it down you can run a closed bottle under cold tap water. I'll just wait then pop it into the fridge before bed