Last week, I hosted a canning workshop with my CSA… and it was a great time! We learned how to make strawberry lemon preserves, perfect for this time of year. It was a small turnout – 4 people plus myself and the teacher – but that made for a nice intimate gathering. We all learned a lot, and even after three years of canning, even I learned some important tips (and some in hindsight that seem like no-brainers). Canning 101 techniques are always good to revisit.
AJ had already combined the strawberries, lemon, and sugar and let them macerate for a day before the workshop. He mentioned that the CSA strawberries he used made a huge difference in the end product – they were far superior to supermarket strawberries. Of course, the strawberries we got from Hepworth Farms were simply incredible, and were probably the best strawberries I’ve eaten outside of the ones my grandfather used to grow in California.
This collage shows the strawberry-lemon mixture from the initial draining, to the resulting juice that will boil down to a syrup, to the fruit cooking in the syrup.
The kitchen sure smelled amazing during this whole process.
This collage shows the processing of the preserves, from spooning them into the sterilized jars, to screwing on the lids, to processing them in the hot water bath. I’m fortunate to have a nice big pot for processing – a 16 quart stockpot! It gets used pretty much in the summer only (I bought it years ago on sale).
This is the final product:
This was one delicious batch of preserves. And look at that color! I loved the pure strawberry flavor combined with the tang of the lemon – it’s definitely not too sweet. And that’s understandable with the proportions in mind – 3 pounds of strawberries, 2 whole lemons, and only 1 1/2 cups of sugar. One can get away with a relatively low amount of sugar because pectin isn’t being used in this recipe.
This recipe makes about five half pint jars worth of preserves, but sometimes it can come out to 4.5, which is what happened to our batch. We ate the .5 amount, yum. AJ was an excellent teacher and I’m hoping we’ll see more workshops led by him in the future.
To learn how to make the preserves, head on over to AJ’s blog, Handjobs (For the Home), for the full recipe for strawberry lemon preserves. For a few more pictures, as well as full sizes of the images in this post, check out my photoset on Flickr: CSA Workshop – Making Strawberry Lemon Preserves.
