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This northern berry is best eaten freshly picked. To prolong the use for the whole year, it is dried or boiled. But blueberry jam is a special delicacy. In addition to healing, it brings great pleasure.
Useful Properties
Everyone knows that you need to eat a lot of blueberries to keep your eyesight, but its benefits are not limited to this. Vitamins C, A, group B strengthen the immune system and maintain a healthy state of the nervous system. The optimal combination of calcium, manganese and magnesium has a positive effect on heart function and hematopoietic function. Fresh berries and dishes from it are advised to eat with problems of the gastrointestinal tract. Often such advice is given by dermatologists to people with problem skin.
This medium-sized black berry can stop severe diarrhea, relieve discomfort during gastritis, and normalize the work of the stomach after any trouble. Traditional medicine uses not only fruits, but also leaves and roots. But a delicious sweet berry is much more pleasant to be treated. Jam from it can save you from seasonal respiratory diseases if you regularly feast on it on cold winter evenings.
Video “Blueberry jam for the winter”
From this video you will learn how to make delicious blueberry jam for the winter.
Jam
For the winter, blueberries are dried and frozen, but more often compotes, marmalades, jams and marmalades are made from it. There are many recipes for every taste. Someone likes to eat whole berries, someone likes a homogeneous mass more. One needs to pour ice cream with liquid jam, and the other needs to spread thick jam on toast. Since the berry is very sweet, sugar is usually not used too much. The fruits are selected fresh, whole, fully ripe.
“Five Minute”
This recipe for healthy blueberry jam requires a short heat treatment to preserve as many of the healthy ingredients as possible. A five-minute boil will allow you to store it for at least a year at room temperature, unless, of course, sterilized jars are rolled up with lids. Under nylon covers will have to be stored in the refrigerator.
For 1 kg of ripe berries, it is enough to take 500–700 g of sugar. Blueberries are carefully sorted out, putting aside green, spoiled, crushed fruits, removing all accidentally fallen leaves and twigs. Then they wash it carefully – for this, the berries are poured into a colander, which is dipped several times in a deep bowl of water, or watered from the shower (the pressure should be weak so as not to crush the ripe fruits). After washing, let the water drain, then dry the blueberries, scattering them on towels. The latter are better to take paper ones, since the juice is not easy to wash off.
The prepared berry is laid out in a bowl for cooking, covered with sugar, left for 4-5 hours so that it starts up the juice. Then put on low heat, gently stirring with a wooden spatula or spoon, bring to a boil. When all the sugar is dissolved, the fire is increased. Boil exactly 5 minutes, not forgetting to stir. It is desirable to remove the foam. After 5 minutes of boiling, the finished dish is laid out in jars, rolled up with lids. It is better to slowly cool the inverted jars covered with a blanket – this will guarantee good storage.
From frozen berries
From frozen berries, you can cook jam in small portions so as not to store it for a long time, but eat it in 1-2 tea parties. This is usually done by people who should not consume sugar, since it is he who acts as a preservative in traditional harvesting methods.
Frozen fruits are poured with boiling water, get rid of excess water, then transferred to a saucepan with a thick bottom, heated over low heat to release the juice. The whole mass is brought to a boil, after which it is removed from the fire.
To obtain a thick consistency, use gelatin, pectin or gelfix (it is enough to take 20 g of powder per 1 kg of berries). The thickening powder is poured out after boiling, the dishes are immediately removed from the fire, the whole mass is quickly mixed so that the powder is evenly distributed and dissolved.
Ready-made jam is usually prepared in small quantities and stored only in the refrigerator, although it can also be poured into a sterilized jar, rolled up with a lid, and put away in the pantry.
Thick
Fans of thick jam can add the same gelfix at the end of cooking (0,5 packs per kilogram) or cook thick jam, gradually adding sugar. If 1–700 g of sugar is taken per 800 kg of blueberries, then it is divided into 4 parts to be added gradually.
Prepared berries (sorted, washed, dried) are poured into a dish convenient for cooking, the first 200 g of sugar are poured onto them. You can simply leave it for a while until the juice stands out, or you can crush some of the berries, which will speed up the process and provide the desired consistency for the future jam.
Put the dishes on fire, bring to a boil, boil for 5 minutes with constant stirring. Pour the next 200 g of sugar into the boiling mass, stir, boil again for 5 minutes. This procedure is repeated twice more. Boiled 5 minutes after adding the last sugar, the jam is poured into prepared jars, corked, cooled.
In the multivariate
The easiest way to make jam is to use a slow cooker. This wonderful invention allows the hostess to deal with blanks without standing over a bowl of boiling potion, armed with a spoon. After all, if you cook blueberries without water, then you need to constantly stir it, preventing it from burning – this is what the slow cooker completely frees from.
Washed and slightly dried blueberries are placed in the bowl, sugar (500-700 g per 1 kg of berries) is added, the “Jam” or “Stew” mode is turned on for 1,5 hours. The dish is cooked at a constant temperature without air access, which allows you to preserve the nutrients as much as possible. After the specified time, the finished jam is laid out in jars.
Without cooking
It is believed that berries without heat treatment retain all their magical benefits, so those who have space in the refrigerator try to make the blank without cooking. To do this, take the same amount of blueberries and sugar. Blueberries are sorted out especially carefully, only whole intact ripe berries should remain. They are washed, poured out to dry on a towel.
Dry clean berries are crushed to a puree state. This can be done with a pastry pestle or, much more conveniently, a blender. You can use a meat grinder, but when berries are crushed with metal devices, vitamins disappear (destroy), significantly reducing the benefits of this delicacy.
Sugar is added to the resulting mass, stir it until all the crystals are completely dissolved (a blender will also help here). You can combine sugar with berries from the very beginning, and then beat them with a blender to the desired state.
All kinds of blueberry jams are delicious on their own, but they can be used to create different desserts.