Can You Make Jam from Freeze-Dried Fruit?

Last week my parents made a whirlwind trip from their home in California’s Central Valley to ours in Northeastern Nevada to bring us a piano.  And since they had room, my dad offered to bring us some strawberries.

Now these aren’t just any strawberries.  These are the Hmong berries.  The Good Stuff. (Many Hmongs aided the CIA in Vietnam and Laos and became refugees at the end of that war, with most settling in the US.  And a lot of them became strawberry growers in California.)  The variety Dad brought us last year were the best ever—red all the way through and full of intense strawberry flavor.  This year’s flats (we got nine) held humongous berries (often only four could fit in a basket) that weren’t quite so flavorful, but still very good.  Better than anything you could find in a grocery store.

With that many berries to process, I was pretty busy.  Invariably I’d get a call from a friend while hulling and slicing the berries, and then saying they were going to be freeze-dried, and a couple asked, “Can you make jam from freeze-dried fruit?”

And you know, it had absolutely never occurred to me that people would want to make jam from freeze-dried fruit for a couple of reasons. 

The first is that freeze-dried fruit is expensive, especially when store-bought.  I couldn’t imagine using expensive food to make jam, which really is pretty inexpensive.  The second is that it takes a lot of time, effort, and money to prepare freeze-dried food, and a lot less to make jam.  It’s just easier to make jam in the first place. 

However, jam does have a shorter shelf-life, especially if it’s a low-sugar jam.  So I suppose you could have a can of twenty-year-old freeze dried fruit and a hankering for some homemade jam. 

Because the strawberry grower was so interested in the prospects of freeze-drying some of his berries, I sent back samples of last year’s berries, this year’s berries (because they were different varieties), and then a few commercially freeze-dried berries that I’d gotten about 12 years ago.  I had the rest of that open can to use.  And, for your information, the latter berries, like happens with all store-bought v. home grown food, taste nothing like the Hmong berries that we freeze-dried.  Night and day difference. 

So I had this open #10 can of less than fabulous tasting freeze-dried strawberries.  I figured I could cook them up and find out whether indeed jam can be successfully made from freeze-dried fruit. 

Drumroll, please.

“Yes!”  You can most definitely make jam from freeze-dried fruit.  Here’s what you need to know about the process.

My #10 can of freeze-dried strawberries from Provident Pantry held a net weight of 6 ounces of freeze-dried berries.  Volume-wise, it looked like a lot of berries.  I had only removed about ¼ cup to send the grower as a sample.  So it was basically a full can.  The jam recipe called for 5 cups of crushed fruit.  By the time the strawberries rehydrated, the volume was reduced to about 5 ½ cups of crushed fruit.  One batch of jam from a pretty expensive can. 

I wanted to make sure the berries were fully rehydrated before making the jam, so I let them sit in the water for about an hour, stirring frequently.  I didn’t want to add too much water, so after I added the initial amount to start rehydrating, I just added a little at a time until the consistency looked right.  With commercial product, you’ll just have to guess at how much water to add.  If you use home freeze-dried product, you can check your records for how much water you removed.  (Assuming that you kept records and can find them years later.)

Last night I cooked the berries into beautiful jam.  I generally don’t add butter to my jam to reduce foaming—the kids all say they like the foam, and I figure, why waste the foam and calories if I’m not entering the county fair.  So my homemade jams all have foam in them.  However, the jam from the freeze-dried berries didn’t foam at all.  So that was interesting. 

This morning I checked the jars to be sure they sealed and taste-tested the one I didn’t put in the water bath. (Why can one that we’re going to eat right away?)  It’s really good strawberry jam—much better than anything store-bought, but not quite as good as jam from the Hmong berries.  I also used the dregs from the pot last night to make strawberry milk, and that was really good.  I think the texture is a little off, like maybe I needed to let the fruit rehydrate a little longer, but really, it has good flavor and tastes fine.  Aaron and I had the jam with fresh bread as part of dinner Tuesday night, and we both ate more than we probably should have.

Yes, indeed, you can make jam from freeze-dried fruit.

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