My Berry Picking Adventure + Jam Making

It was another beautiful morning so after eating breakfast we decided that today we would go berry picking. Once everyone was ready to go, my host parents took me and our dog Laku out to their special berry picking place, in a more rural forest.

 As soon as we walked into the forest we found tons of Puolukka (Lingonberries). The season is over for blueberries and raspberries, although there still were lots of blueberries (Mustikka), but they no longer taste very good because they have gotten too much water (vesi).
I had a little container which I filled several times over from picking berries with my fingers, but my host parents are berry picking pros, so they had tools to help pick berries much quicker and in about five minutes or less they areadly had the amount that would fit in my little container.

 Lingonberries are quite sour and mostly eaten with meat such as beef and reindeer. But of course you can also make hillo (jam), puuro (porridge), mehu (juice), and all sorts of other dishes with them too. Haha, I like to give the information about things as I hear it, so I feel the need to also inform that they help with bladder infections, etc. (Sorry, too much information I suppose).

 We were in the forest for about three hours including a coffee break and mushroom hunting time too. Just look at how many berries we got! A huge bag and several big containers full. Most of the berries will be frozen and taken as needed throughout the year, but some of them will be used to make puuro and hillo.

 I was so excited to get to make jam! It is actually a really easy process, but it takes such a long time. First you have to get about 4 kilos of which ever type of berry you want to make the jam out of, in this cas lingonberry. We cleaned the berries off and I made sure there weren't a lot of twigs, and I took out the bad berries.
After that was done, we got out the bag of hillosokeri which is jam sugar (jam = hillo, sugar = sokeri). On the back were some directions to make the hillo.

 First you need to warm up the lingonberries. We put them on the stove at the same time we were boiling some of the mushrooms we had found and also making puolukka puuro (that's right, lingonberry porridge). Also, add 1 deciliter of water to the berries. 

 Next step is when the berries have begun to warm, add the entire bag of hillosokeri. I was quite surprised when I found out the whole bag was to be added, quite a lot of sugar, but you have to remember that puolukka is quite sour and that sugar is a great preservative for something like jam.

 I mixed the sugar around quite a lot and made sure that it got on all of the berries, then it was time to mix and wait for the berries to boil, and mix again.

 The sugar dissolved pretty quickly and then all that was left was to wait fifteen minutes or so while the berries were still boiling and being mixed. You don't need to crush the berries to make jam, because they break down a bit more with the heat and it's alright if they are still whole somewhat.

 After the jam was done, I tasted it to make sure it was okay. Whew! It was sure overpowering. I'm not too fond of lingonberries, but the more I ate the jam, the better they began to taste, and sure enough it was delicious. After containers were done being cleaned and everything had cooled down a little bit, I scooped the jam into some containers and then cleaned up the mess.

It takes a lot of time to make jam, but in the end I think it is worth it more than buying jam from the store, and it also gives you a new appreciation as to how people do make it.
Today was a great day and I am so glad I learned how to make jam! It is a great gift to give, delicious, and now I can cross that off of my list of things to learn to do here in Finland!