Some Days You Just Need To Know When To QUIT!

**WARNING - This is a whiny post because I had a BAD experience. So if you don't feel like 'hearing' me whine, please skip to a more pleasant post like the one from Mother's Day...


So recently I decided it was time to make jam again. I bought 15 lbs. of berries, 20 lbs. of sugar, 6 boxes of pectin - - I thought it was gonna be a breeze, afterall I had made jam before...

Here are all the red flags that should have signaled for me to be done making jam:
1 - When making the first batch, the berry/sugar/pectin mixture boiled over the pot, making a HOT, sticky, RED mess all over the stove...



the pot... AND the burners... Actually on the burner, in the drip pan and through that hole in the drip pan into the abyss... I was certain it was gonna start a fire (so i turned off the burner before I found out if it really would).


2 - The Froth was out of control in the first batch, but i didn't want to add butter to the jam (the recipe tells you to add like 1/2 tsp. to reduce froth). I do not remember adding butter to the jam last year so I didn't want to this year. So batch #2, I don't puree the strawberries as much, leaving a few chunks, thinking that would help - It didn't. So now I have 4 quarts of frothy jam. ew.


This jar on the left is last years' jam, the one on the right is this years'.

3 - I borrow bigger pots from my friend and try a double batch WITH butter. The butter really did help and if you are going to ever make cooked jam - JUST PUT IN THE BUTTER! So then the jam is to the water-bath stage... I put in all 5 quarts and start them off.

FYI - When I picked up these new bigger pots, I told my woes to my friend (who has also made cooked jam) and I ask her for any tips. Then I ask her about the water bath, because neither of us have a water bath, we just use a stock pot. And recently I had heard from a canning expert that if you do this, you need to have SOMETHING on the bottom of the stockpot or else your jars will EXPLODE.

My friend never changed her ways, but I have started putting a washcloth on the bottom of the pot (which is awkward as the pot is filled with water so the washcloth floats around while I'm trying to get the jars to sit on top of it...)

Back to my story, I put the 5 quarts in and no more than 5 minutes goes by and I hear a POP! Yeah, one of the quarts exploded... The jam exited the jar and turned the water bath into a jam bath. Luckily the one explosion didn't lead to 5 explosions. It was a less dramatic explosion than I thought, with a fairly clean break around the bottom of the jar, but this was the last straw.


I did no more jam after this and had to find something else to make with the 4 pounds of berries left - I ended up making strawberry sauce, which was OK, but not great.

Here are the things I forgot about jam making:

1 - Prepping the berries takes a long time. I felt like I was standing over the sink all day rinising, de-stemming, and cutting the berries into rough chunks...

2- It took almost 3 pounds of berries per batch to make only 2 quarts of jam...

3 - Hot jam splatters are painful!

4 - To make my goal of 10-12 quarts of cooked jam (about a years' worth), I would need to make 5-6 batches of jam!

5 - Washing all my bowls, spoons, knives, etc... after each batch gets old after - hmm - the first batch.

One of the biggest reasons for me to make jam last year was cost. I thought I could make jam cheaper than smuckers... I was wrong, it's about even.

So because it was not cost-effective, I vowed NOT to make jam again this year TILL we started trying to eat healthier foods - MOST store bought jams have HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) instead of sugar - and while sugar is not good for you, HFCS is worse, so I thought I would do my family a favor and make jam this year, BUT if you calculate in the time it took for me to make it, plus the heartache of rotten berries, exploding jars, and froth, it may just be worth buying a really expensive jam!!