Strawberry Preserves
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Cap and pick the strawberries carefully.
Weigh an equal amount of granulated sugar.
Preheat jars to prevent breaking when adding hot fruit.
Make the preserves
In a preserving kettle, combine the sugar with enough water to start cooking.
Boil the mixture until it cracks like candy when dropped in water.
Add the strawberries and cook until they look flabby and no longer float.
Jar and seal
Fill jars to the top to eliminate air, then seal quickly.
Use self-sealing jars for best preservation.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Granulated sugar
- Sweetens the fruit and, boiled into syrup, helps preserve it and set its texture.
- Fresh strawberries
- Provide the fruit, flavour and body of the preserves as they cook down.
- Water
- Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a syrup.
The step that matters
Boiling the sugar syrup to the candy-crack stage. Sugar must reach a high concentration to preserve the fruit and set well. Undercooked syrup leaves preserves thin and more prone to spoiling, while overcooking can make them stiff or scorch the sugar.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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