It's been a bumper year for strawberries ... we've been picking for all we're worth and my jam pan has scarcely left the stove.
It's been a bumper year for strawberries on the Bathampton plot. Lizzy, Paul and I have been picking for all we're worth and my jam pan has scarcely left the stove.
We grow two varieties of strawberry: an early called 'Honeoye' and a later one, 'Florence', which is still yielding masses of fruit. The flavour of home-grown strawberries beats anything you can buy at the supermarket. The variety favoured by commercial growers is 'Elsanta', which is apparently robust enough to withstand rough treatment during the grading, packing and delivery processes.
Allotment strawberries don't have to cope with all this rough and tumble and taste infinitely better, although they probably don't keep as well.
We eat all the strawberries we can fresh with cream and sugar; I haven't tried this black pepper and balsamic vinegar business, as it just seems wrong! But there's still more than we can manage, so I set to, macerating the fruit with sugar overnight, then boiling it up with the juice of a lemon until it reaches 'setting point'.
This is the tricky part, as strawberries are a low pectin fruit and therefore quite difficult to turn into a nicely set jam. I gave up trying a few years ago and now settle for a really fruity conserve (or runny jam).
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