To make the jam thick, you need to cook it for a certain number of minutes, and cooking each type of fruit / berry should take its own time. However, when cooking jam, you cannot rely solely on time indicators, because many factors (and especially the time of collection and ripeness of the fruit) can significantly increase or decrease cooking.
Why strawberry, cherry, blueberry jam turns out to be liquid
Jam from these berries can turn out to be liquid for several reasons, but the most important thing is insufficient steaming of the fruit. In order to get thick cherry, strawberry or blueberry jam, the dessert must be boiled after boiling for 25-30 minutes, and an exceptionally wide dish should be used for cooking so that excess water evaporates. Yes, boiling the fruit for half an hour deprives the berries of almost all vitamins, but without the use of additional gelling agents, it is impossible to get thick jam in another way.
Therefore, if it is necessary to cook not only thick jam, but also healthy jam, then in this case, when cooking fruits, you should add the juice of irgi, chokeberry to them. Thanks to the pectin, which is very abundant in the juice of these berries, the jam will have to be boiled down much less. For example, 100 ml of juice per liter of berries reduces the cooking time by almost half.
Also, important factors due to which the jam can turn out to be liquid are the use of overripe fruits (there is more juice in such berries), the lack of drying the berries after washing them. Therefore, in order for the jam to be moderately thick, you should use slightly unripe berries that keep their shape well, and always dry. That is, if the berries were picked in the rain or the fruits were washed, then they must be dried before cooking: spread in a thin layer on a towel / baking sheet and leave for a couple of hours in a ventilated room.
What to do if the jam is liquid
Almost all berries and fruits, when heated in sugar syrup, emit a lot of juice, and in order to get moderately thick jam, you must either cook the dessert for a long time or add gelling substances. However, when cooking apples, plums, pears, strawberries, cherries, it is quite possible to do without it.
The fact is that the above fruits and berries do not boil during cooking, so after boiling them for five to seven minutes, you can simply drain most of the syrup, and then darken the fruits a little over low heat.
