Seeing as strawberries are still outrageously cheap, I decided to overcome the lack of conveniently available preserving supplies and make some damn jam.
I'd been hearing for a while that black pepper and Balsamic vinegar were great complimentary flavours to Strawberries but I'd never tried making anything with this supposed Holy Trinity (actually, there's a fourth ingredient that apparently works well with all of the above but I'll save that for a later post...)
I was itching to make some jam and the frustration from not being able to find supplies to do so easily finally became to much and pushed me on in spite of a lack of proper accoutrements. I couldn't find any pure pectin at the store so I settled for CSR's Jam Setting Sugar. It's a blend of sugar and 0.7% fruit pectin, which is a fairly good ratio that won't result in anything too sweet if you're just making one of the straight up fruit jams they provide recipes for. I had no intention of anything so simple. This complicated things somewhat.
When making jam you need to find a good balance between acid, pectin and sugar. Too much acid and your jam won't set properly. I was working with a fixed ratio of pectin and sugar here, so I didn't have as much control as I wanted. Unfortunately, adding the Balsamic Vinegar (read: Acetic Acid), was enough to push it over the edge and resulted in a bit of a sloppy jam. The taste was all there but it didn't set quite as well as I'd hoped.
The other issue I faced was finding affordable jars to seal this deliciousness into. Back home this is no problem. There are violently cold and hateful winters there in which nothing grows, so an annual preserving and hoarding of food has been the norm for several hundred years. This means re-usable jars and lids are everywhere and affordable. Second home does not have this problem. It's mostly hot here and close to the coast where 98% of us live, various things are growing all the time. So preserving hasn't really ingrained itself into the culture, which means getting cheap jars and lids ain't that easy.
Happily, in our house we save just about every jar we use. They make excellent storage containers for dried goods. You can reuse glass jars as many times as you like but you're not really supposed to reuse lids. They have a tendency to degrade and not provide a perfect seal, which can be a food hazard. Screw it though, I'm not paying three bucks for a new jar and lid. I picked the best looking and ones and sterilized them once in the dishwasher, then again the oven and packed the jam into them. Fortunately the seals held (little button popped down!).
In terms of flavour, the end product was pretty ace. All delicious strawberry and spicy pepper but there wasn't as much Balsamic vinegar evident as I'd hoped. Adding any more would have resulted in an entirely liquid mess though. It's definitely worth trying again if I can track down some 100% pectin to control the ratio. I'll shell out for some proper Balsamic Vinegar in that case too. A word on the stuff: Balsamic Vinegar 'of Modena' (ie, 99% of what you get in the store) is an imitation intended for salad dressing. The real, good, prized stuff is always prefixed 'Traditional' and is D.O.C. protected.
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