Now these fruit are giving way to…

… this. Melons and watermelons are in sight. I love the fact that the fruit and vegetable trucks are going around in suburban, even urban streets.

Not only fruit and vegetables, but also fresh milk and eggs are delivered to your door every morning. The sight always makes me smile, and thanks to my smartphone, I get to take instant street shots like these, for which I appreciate the perks of the technology nowadays.

Now many people might be making or have already made strawberry jam so I’m rushing to share with you this amazing recipe that doesn’t require pectin. These days many people don’t eat as much fruit conserves as in the past because fresh fruit are dispensable and above all, they are more aware of the white sugar. With everything else we can eat more often, we have to compromise somewhere and for me, it’s white sugar. I do eat it but try to substitute for brown sugar or honey whenever possible. But never for my pure white butter cookies.

Toss 2 kg of strawberries in 4 cups of brown sugar and 1 cup of white sugar ( Mind you that the normal ratio of fruit vs. sugar is 1:1 so it should be 8 cups of sugar in total) and let it sit for an hour or overnight. I prefer not to cut or blend them because I’d like to eat bits of strawberries in the jam and I was told not to by my chef mentor.

Mr.O loves my strawberry jam because it’s not too sweet and also it’s got more fruit in it than traditional Turkish jam. There is something so comforting about strawberry jam and perhaps it’s because it’s one of the first and the most common sweet food you ate as a child. I still remember vividly the taste of strawberry jam sandwich my mum used to pack as a school snack, and what I used to make when I come back home from school, feeling peckish, and mum wasn’t home. My mouth is salivating in this very moment, thinking of it.

This is the second batch and is the best strawberry jam I’ve made so far. Both batches had brown sugar and didn’t contain pectin, but what I did differently with this batch is this. Ta dah!

A persimmon…. I’d read somewhere that persimmons have a high content of pectin so I added it in addition to lemon juice. How did I get a persimmon in the middle of summer? Ha ha! That’s why a well-stocked pantry is crucial for an intrepid cook like me. When I visited Korea, I noticed many people were eating a persimmon sorbet or persimmon smoothie. Basically, you freeze a whole persimmon and eat with a spoon just like an ice cream. It was so good on a hot summer day. My mum was feeding it to my then 3 year-old nephews and I saw how they loved it.

In Turkey or in Europe in general, people don’t eat persimmons as much but they are healthy fruit and it’s a shame that they are left for birds.

As it was frozen, it just melts away. So I pour it into the pot with strawberries and boil, skimming off the foamy gunk on the surface. When it boils down to the jammy consistency, you can do the proper bottling, which I did,  for a long-term storage to be able to enjoy it throughout the winter.

The reason I make my jam less sweet is so that I can adjust the sweetness to my mood and different occasions. I sometimes use jam for making sauce or cooking, and when I eat toast, I spread honey and top it off with strawberry jam sometimes. What I want in my jam is the fruit taste, not the sugar. It was so delicious that I was indulging while talking to my nephews, who now write better Korean than me, and I remembered the technology and took a photo of the remaining one-bite of toast and sent it via a chat app.

They said it looked delicious, too. 🙂 Children never lie, therefore it must be really good! You might wonder if there’s even a slight taste of persimmon, but not at all. It just enhanced the jelly texture and I was very satisfied with it. I know a woman who takes her 5 year-old daughter to markets and let her pick cheese and fruit. She says the cheeses her daughter likes always turns out to be the best quality.

Anyway, I don’t think I need to write up the recipe for the jam, or do I?