my strawberry jam is all "gluppy"

[hamster]

I've made a lot of strawberry jam this year, I find it helpful to give the jam about 10 or 15 mins rest before potting, so that the lovely strawberries don't all float to the top. It's up to you how you like your jam, but the mixture will reduce by quite a lot, and as folks have already said you can always reboil if its not how you like it. What ever you decide I'm sure it tastes great! I love making jam, sometimes it doesn't always go as I want, like the time I forgot to add the lemon juice to the apricots, but it still tastes nice, and its better than the supermarket which is definately gloop! This year I made some marmalade, I didnt realise that its double the sugar, so I made 25 jars, instead of the expected 12 but it tasted fantastic, and its going down so fast, OH eats it off the spoon when I'm not looking! So don't give up!

[Madmac]

I alwasy understood the butter was to prevent a scum forming - which you lose a fair bit of jam in getting rid of. No substitute for a big jam pan.

It also helps with the foaming, if you wait until it foams up then drop a nob of butter in you'll see what i mean. I blagged 3 punnets of strawbs the other day and turned them into jam.

1.3 Kg of or prepped strawbs,
and an equal amount of sugar,
4 tbsp lemon juice,
nob of butter.

Jam pans are excellent, wouldn't think of using anything else. Got mine from Lakeland. A bit pricey but will eventually pay for itself.


Sliced diced the strawbs,
mixed in sugar and juice
left to stand for 4 hours
Boiled to rolling boil
added butter
once setting point reached left to cool for 30 mins
wisked the jam, VERY CAREFULLY as it's still hot blended in what looks like scum, but I reckon it was the pectin. Because my jam is so stiff you can almost cut it into cubes, wisking also helps to reduce the size of the chunks.

[Alison]

Scum is just air bubbles so I don't worry about it.

[SarzWix]

If you're using the sugar with added pectin ('Jam sugar') then it should only need 4 minutes at a full rolling boil to reach setting point. So it sounds to me like you're either not keeping it boiling enough, or, you've over-boiled it and lost the setting point. Might be a good idea to just tip out one jar into a pan and reboil it to see if you can get a setting point. Once it hits the boil, check after a minute or 2 and then every minute after that. If you get a setting point, you'll have some idea how long to boil the rest for, and if you don't you'll know to leave the rest as it is. Good luck

Oh, and as the others say, a proper jam pan is a worthy investment - even very big stock pots don't have the sloped sides of a maslin pan and they make all the difference.