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world's best strawberry jam

This year I discovered what I consider to be the world's best strawberry 
jam.  It is made by Columbia Empire Farms from 100% Oregon-grown Totem 
strawberries.  Furthermore, all the berries are prime fully ripe #1 
berries.  The ingredients are: strawberries, sugar, pectin, and citric 
acid.  Period.  

There are no artifical flavorings in this jam.  Yet this is the most 
intensely flavorful jam I have ever had.  So it not only provides us 
with a delicious treat.  It provides a standard for comparison as to 
what is possible with natural ingredients.

My impression is that traditionally, homemakers preserved using the most 
prime ingredients.  Fully ripe fruit would be canned or jammed.  It 
might have bruises or blemishes that could be cut away, but it was 
otherwise prime.  The pattern for commercial preserving seems to be to 
use underripe, undersize, and otherwise cull fruit, and to use 
artificial flavorings to try to make up for using the inferior 
ingredients.  I have been noticing and wondering about this pattern for 
a couple of decades.  This jam is a confirmation for me that using prime 
ingredients really does matter.

Columbia Empire Farms sells through Your Northwest stores.  There isn't 
one in Corvallis, so I buy it on the internet from:   
http://www.yournw.com/   I love their Marionberry too.  The Kiwi 
strawberry isn't so good, and has sugar instead of strawberries as the 
first ingredient, so it figures.  The applebutter is great too.

As a gardener and cook, I am always looking for the ultimate tastes, the 
standards of comparison.  So I thought I would pass this one along.  I 
don't, by the way, own stock in CEF.  I don't even know anyone there.  

Carol Deppe
Author of BREED YOUR OWN VEGETABLE VARIETIES:  THE GARDENER'S AND 
FARMER'S GUIDE TO PLANT BREEDING AND SEED SAVING (See table of contents, 
excerpts, & reviews at http://www.chelseagreen.com.)  

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