Why is strawberry jam bitter and what to do?

Strawberries are good fresh - no doubt. But still, many people often need to preserve it.In this case, serious mistakes may be made, due to which the quality of the stored product is lost.

Especially often this problem overtakes people when making jams from wild berries. Judging by the reviews, the most bitter are strawberry fruits grown in a pine forest. Even cooking by itself does not cope with an unpleasant aftertaste. For some consumers, this property associated with the chemical composition of pits does not pose a problem. But others still would like to cook strawberry jam without bitterness.

The simplest option is to use a combination of strawberry berries and fruits from other shrubs. The aroma and taste is difficult to find the best solution. Allowed to bookmark and blueberries and red currants. The latter is introduced in a small amount and is added directly during the cooking process. From older methods, use a silver spoon (it is put at the time of cooking).

There is another old-fashioned way: put a cleaned carrot on each basin with a capacity of 2 kg or a little more. Then the vegetable will also need to pull out. Cooking with carrots continues until the berries turn dark and the foam disappears completely. There will be no recipes that can be implemented in 5 minutes. Usually processing takes about half an hour.

But even with strict observance of all principles, a bitter aftertaste may still appear. And it happens regardless of the variety used. Whatever kind of strawberry is used, it can be digested. In such cases, it is usually found that bitter jam is obtained. Preventing this fact is quite simple:

• in the absence of experience, one must act carefully and follow the dish;
• strictly follow proven recipes, and not try to improvise;
• try to cook everything in one go.

To be less interested in how to remove the bad taste, it is necessary to strictly follow the standard requirements. To begin with, the berries are picked and cooked with the utmost care. The collection is carried out on a sunny day, while it should be dry. Fruit storage in open containers is allowed only at a temperature of about 20 degrees. Harvested berries must be used within the next 24 hours.

Before cooking the berries must be thoroughly sorted. Reject all immature and over-ripe fruit. Get rid of the deformed part of the crop, throw all the tails and other garbage. Even this does not end the treatment: the strawberries are washed under running tap water and poured into a colander. Only after this is boiled sugar syrup.

These techniques allow you to get rid of the sharp, unpleasant bitterness. However, the natural taste characteristic of strawberry itself is not removed in this way. Additives of other berries immediately radically change the taste of cooked jam. The classical method, which allows you to really cook a sweet for 100% jam, was placed in the manuals of a century ago. We are talking about the use of a silver spoon - but this must be done correctly.

This spoon is used for stirring preheated jam on the stove. The earliest foam can not be removed, if its color is the same as that of the processed fruit. Remove the foam begin, as soon as the light part of it, represented by extremely small bubbles. Every time the pelvis is shaken a little. And only after shaking the foam is collected.

Connoisseurs recommend processing berries into jam as quickly as possible. Recommended 24 hours storage experienced culinary specialists reduce to 6 or a maximum of up to 8 hours. It is advisable to divide the fruits of strawberries into layers, each of which is sprinkled with sugar. Additionally, you can reduce the risk of bitterness by adding some strawberries.

A few more subtleties:

• washing strawberries before cooking is unacceptable;
• you can fill it with water only for a short time;
• before preparing the jam, the berries are kept in sugar for several hours, so that they give out the juice;
• stirring when cooking should be continuous, and add red currants can be no more than 1/6 of the total.

More information about how to cook strawberry jam, you will learn from the following video.