Showing posts with label freezing strawberries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freezing strawberries. Show all posts

Friday, June 20

Freezing Strawberries in Syrup

As promised in my earlier post on making strawberry freezer jam, I am now showing you how I froze the remaining strawberries after the jam was done.  This method comes from Suter's website, and is an old family recipe.  However, the instructions were a bit vague, so this is my attempt at making it work.  I won't know if they turned out alright for a while, but I'm thinking that these strawberries might be best used for recipes that require cooking the berries, like in a pie or sweet bread.  If you've tried this and had success, please let me know!

Suter's recipe:
"Boil together 1 1/2 cups sugar and 6 cups water.  Add 1 large packet of strawberry gelatin.  Cool.  Pour on berries."
Directions:
"Wash gently in cold water, drain and remove caps. Slice or crush berries in a large bowl. Use 1 cup sugar to 7 cups berries, or sweeten to taste, then freeze. We use ziplock bags."


Now, boiling the sugar and water together wasn't hard, but I also wasn't sure if it should boil for a certain amount of time.  I brought the sugar water to a boil and just added the gelatin at that point.  I also wasn't sure if the mixture should boil for any length of time after the gelatin was added, so I just mixed the gelatin until it was completely dissolved and then let the liquid come back to a boil.  I then turned off the burner and removed the pot from the heat.  I set it on a cooling rack to help the liquid cool faster.  As a side note, then strawberry liquid never really thickened, but it did have a good flavor, like strawberry Kool-Aid.

While waiting for the gelatin liquid to cool, I commenced washing and slicing the remaining bucket of strawberries, which gave me eight cups of strawberry slices. 
I emptied the slices into a large bowl and added a cup of sugar and mixed it all together.


At this point, the liquid had sufficiently cooled to slightly warmer than room temperature, so I began pouring it over the berries.  Then I decided that I didn't want to do it that way.  I do that a lot.

I decided to measure out two cups of berries per quart freezer bag, then added enough strawberry liquid to the bag to submerge the slices.  I ladled it into the bags, and it might have been about a cup of the liquid in each bag.  


Doing it this way, I had enough to fill three bags with two cups of strawberries and then add the juice.  If anyone has a different method for this or has done this in the past, I'd love to hear from you!

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