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Bottled Strawberries

Bottled strawberries

With a glut of British strawberries this summer we’ve taken great delight in having an ‘excuse’ to support local strawberry farmers and go ‘pick your own’ing.

Well, with me, hubby and three children able to pick (the 3 month old is probably just too young…next year for him)…you can imagine that of course we came home with more than we needed.

Pancakes made topped with strawberries and devoured, cupcakes made and decorated with strawberries and devoured and generally a couple more punnets just devoured I was left with a couple of punnets that were left over and not going to last too long I decided to bottle some. It’s something we’ve done before, really simple and they lasted well in the bottles. Great to have British strawberries in the winter long after the season is finished.

There are different ways to do this but either way you need an equal weight of sugar and water to make a syrup, sterilised jars and strawberries. That’s it!

Method 1 – Bring sugar and water to the boil for about 5 minutes, make sure the sugar has dissolved. Add the strawberries and simmer for about 10 minutes until soft. Put the strawberries in the pre-sterilised bottle/jar and cover with syrup. Seal and leave to cool.

Method 2 – Pack warmed jars with fruit and cover with syrup solution (as above with sugar dissolved) Leave jars/bottles with lids but not closed/sealed in the oven at 150 degrees C for about an hour.

Bottled strawberries

(You can pre-sterilise jars/bottles by putting them in the oven at about 120-150 degrees C for 10 minutes before hand – no need to do this with method 2 but better if the jars are warmed before you put the fruit in or they might crack when you add the warm/boiling syrup).

When eating don’t throw the syrup away! Either spoon over a pudding (ice cream is great), put in a glass and top up with fizzy water for a lovely drink or use some gelatine and make into strawberry jelly. I’m guessing if you boiled it up you could get it to set as there is probably enough natural pectin but I’ve never tried this. Would love to know if anyone has tried this.

The fruit does rise to the top but that’s normal.

Now, anyone for tennis?

If you liked this – you might like to make waffles to go with your strawberries.