Week 51: Strawberries!
Yum! Strawberries are in, and they mark the beginning of my busy summer canning schedule. Even though I get the summer off, I keep plenty busy putting up produce for the winter months. Tomatoes, peas, corn, all kinds of berries, and applesauce in the fall. The start of the canning season is always – for me – big ripe strawberries.
We always buy these berries locally, and this year I bought two flats’ worth. For the two of us, this gets us through the year if I dole out the berries a bit stingily. If I was rich, I would buy hoards of summer fruit – it’s a challenge for me to save the berries rather than eat them all at once.
Anyway, today was strawberry day. It took me four hours to deal with two flats of berries, but the results were well worth it: strawberry jam, fruit leather, dried strawberries, frozen berries, strawberry shortcake, and some berries left over for eating. Though I do this every summer, and though I usually feel pretty “green” afterwards, what with buying local, organic produce and all, I looked at the process a bit differently this year. My usual garbage-free lens found me encountering yet another one of those “environmental catch-22s” I often write about.
This catch-22 had to do with the jam-making process. I feel that making homemade jam is WAY more environmentally friendly than buying the grocery store stuff that’s laden with high fructose corn syrup (and it’s probably healthier, too). But, while I could buy jam in completely recyclable glass jars with metal lids, I couldn’t make jam without producing just a smidge of garbage.
Jam is made with pectin (a thickener derived from apples), and pectin can be bought in two forms – gel form or powder form. Traditionally I have used the gel form, but this is squeezed into the jam from a foil and plastic composite pouch. So this year, I went with the powder pectin because it is packaged inside a paper pouch in a cardboard box. Well, since I’ve never used the stuff before, I didn’t realize the paper pouch is also lined with plastic, much like Jell-o packaging. Bummer. So, I added a little garbage to the shoebox but got 9 jars of jam out of the deal. Plus, I can comfort myself with the fact that, while I created a little garbage, it’s likely nothing compared to the garbage created upstream in the jam-making factories (not to mention the fossil fuels burned during jam transport).
Old pectin versus new. Both produce some garbage, but in my mind, homemade is always better than store-bought.
Strawberry jam - yum!
The other place I would normally make garbage on strawberry day is when I actually freeze the berries. These normally go into Ziploc freezer bags. Well, I’m not buying freezer bags anymore, so I had to be more creative. Whole washed berries went into plastic containers or quart-sized glass canning jars. I left a little head room for expansion in the freezer, labeled the containers, and presto – garbage-free frozen berries.
Looking to freeze berries without freezer bags? Here is my solution.
***
Somehow, we are only a week away from the end of Year 1 of the Green Garbage Project. Now, it’s not like we are going to wake up on July 7 and start throwing things in the trash can, but this is still a landmark week for us. During the home stretch, be sure to check back each day for new blog updates – I have a lot to talk about as we reach the end of our project. As always, rest assured – we’re not nearly done acting as environmental advocated.
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check this out – homemade pectin…hoping to try this out myself as i know what you mean about the papery/plasticky packaging!
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-live/homemade-pectin-recipe/index.html
Amy — No need for pectin with strawberries, peaches, a bunch of other fruits. There is enough in them naturally. Recipes abound for making them without pectin. I go to an old Joy of Cooking and my Blue Ball cookbook a lot in the summer.
(Just be careful with using older tomato recipes. Since the 50s they determined that some acid needs to be added to them.)
depends on the consistency. a jelly without pectin = syrup
There’s no need to buy pectin when making jam! Pectin naturally occurs in high levels in certain fruit. e.g. whole apples and citris fruit. Just add an apple to your jam or some citris peel and that will do the trick. People have been making jam long before the companys who manufacture commercial pectin came along…
Here’s a description of how commercial pectin is made (hopefully it puts you off!):
The main raw-materials for pectin production are dried citrus peel or apple pomace, both by-products of juice production. Pomace from sugar-beet is also used to a small extent.
From these materials, pectin is extracted by adding hot dilute acid at pH-values from 1.5 – 3.5. During several hours of extraction, the protopectin loses some of its branching and chain-length and goes into solution. After filtering, the extract is concentrated in vacuum and the pectin then precipitated by adding ethanol or isopropanol.
Alcohol-precipitated pectin is then separated, washed and dried. Treating the initial pectin with dilute acid leads to low-esterified pectins. When this process includes ammonium hydroxide, amidated pectins are obtained. After drying and milling pectin is usually standardised with sugar and sometimes calcium-salts or organic acids to have optimum performance in a particular application.