Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Lorie Fangio with Around the Table. And I'm a food blogger and chef instructor. And today I'm in the kitchen showing you how to make fresh strawberry jam. It's going to be scrumptious. So lets get started. I'm at my cook top and I've got sugar, strawberries, and a lemon. And that's all we need to make fresh strawberry jam. So I'm going to go ahead and turn my burner on to about a medium. I'm going to add my sugar to my sauce pan. You want a heavy bottom sauce pan because you want the heat to be evenly distributed on the bottom. And i"m going to go ahead and add my strawberries and I'm going to go ahead and give this a stir. This is a great thing to make when strawberries are in season and they're fresh. You can also make strawberry jam from frozen strawberries if you like though. And now I'm going to add some lemon zest. And most of the flavor in citrus is really found in the rind or the peel. And so I like to use a micro-plane to get as much of the zest off of the lemon as I can and this gives the jam a really nice lemony flavor. You don't necessarily know that lemon is there but it just gives it kind of a fresh zest. And I'm also going to put the juice of the lemon in my sauce pan as well. And so I'm just going to squeeze it over my hand so I can catch any seeds that might be there and basically I'm just going to stir this up. And as soon as those strawberries start to get a little bit of heat on them they're going to begin to release their juices and basically we're just going to cook this over medium heat until the mixture kind of comes to a boil. And we're going to watch it very closely, stirring the whole time and we're just going to boil it until it comes to a congealed consistency. So we've been cooking our strawberry jam for about 10 minutes and you can see it's gotten really thick and almost kind of satiny. Just very, very thick. And so now we're going to go ahead and turn the burner off and we're going to fill our jar with our jam. Now if you're going to go ahead and enjoy this jam within the first few days it's fine, you can just put it in a bowl and eat it up. But if you want to keep it for any extended period then you need to be sure you're putting it into a jar that's been cleaned very, very well. So this glass jar I washed with hot soapy water and then I put the jar and the lid into my oven at 175 degrees for about an hour and I let it dry that way. And now I know that this is sterilized. You can also boil your jars if you want to. And now it's time to fill our jar with our jam and I'm just going to pour it in and you can see how nice and thick it's gotten. And the idea is to try to get it in the jar, not down the side of the jar. Okay, so we filled our jar. And you can see this jar is not all the way full. I used about a cup and a half of strawberries to a cup of sugar. And this is the amount of jam it made. It's going to be really delicious. And again I'm Lorie Fangio and we've been in the kitchen making fresh strawberry jam. I hope you'll take some time to get your family around the dinner table, see you next time.