Fig-Strawberry Jam

by Stephanie

If you’ve been following us since the beginning (or if you’ve checked out the archive), you know that our first recipe ever posted was raspberry jam. We couldn’t believe how easy it was to make, how delicious it was, or how quickly our friends and family gobbled it up; we had to make more jam!

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Inspired by Jessica’s fig tree, we decided to make fig-strawberry (or is it strawberry-fig?) jam, a popular recipe combination we found. We used strawberries that we had frozen earlier in the season (which we bought on sale), figs that we bought at a fruit stand in Manhattan (since the fig tree, though inspirational, didn’t provide enough), and a recipe from pickyourown.org and the pectin package. It had WAY less sugar than the raspberry.

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Ingredients and equipment:

  • 6 cups mashed fruit, equal parts strawberry and fig
  • 2 1/4 cups of sugar
  • 1 1.74 oz. package of pectin (we used surejell)
  • Ball jars with lids and rings
  • Lid lifter (a magnet to lift lids out of the hot water)
  • Jar tongs
  • Jar funnel
  • A big pot (for the jam)
  • A smaller pot (to sterilize the jars and lids, and to seal them later)

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  1. Wash the fruit.
  2. Sterilize jars (just the glass part).
  3. Heat the lids (without boiling them) in a pot of water.
  4. Mix the pectin with 1/4 cup of the sugar and cook the mixture with the fruit until it comes to a full boil. Stir often, making sure it doesn’t burn.
  5. Add the rest of the sugar.That’s all it takes to make jam; now it’s time to preserve it:
  6. Fill the jars, seal them, and let them sit in a pot of boiling water for five minutes, until the lids pop in.

We actually had way more than 6 cups of mashed fruit, so we made two batches. But we didn’t have any extra pectin, so with a little bit of the first batch still in the pot, we added the rest of the fruit, some extra sugar, and a sliced apple. You see, pectin is a natural derivative of fruit, including apples, which is used as a gelling agent.

This time we used the three leftover 8-oz. jars we had from the 12-pack we bought last time we made jam, plus 12 4-oz. jars, and one 16-oz. jar.

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