My favorite way to eat local strawberries is straight out of the green, molded-pulp pint basket in which they are sold. Sometime they’re gone before I’ve left the market. When I’ve had my fill of strawberries in the raw, I whip up the jam my uncle and godfather (born Giacomo Luigi Piacquadio) taught me how to make 40 years ago as a means of stretching the summer berry bounty into the colder months.

But in recent years, I’ve picked up this twinge of eco-guilt in my gut each time I pour into the pot all the white, granulated sugar required to make his jam. After all, white sugar is from away (pretty far away, actually) and is very highly processed.

Strawberry-Maple Butter

A peanut butter and strawberry-maple butter sandwich.

This recipe comes from Marisa McClellan’s latest preserving book, “Naturally Sweet Food in Jars.” I’ve not adapted it in any way because doing so would mess with the chemical balance and risk an unsuccessful outcome. Since bottled lemon juice comes in, well, a bottle, it’s not the greenest option for citric acid, but McClellan contends it’s the right product for this job as it provides a consistent level of acidity that makes the final butter safe to eat in the long run. I will, though, happily test her assertion that with this spread in the mix, any peanut butter and jelly sandwich is greatly improved. You’ll need a slow cooker to make this jam.

Makes 3 (1/2-pint) jars

4 pounds strawberries (about 5 to 6 pints)
½ cup maple syrup
3 tablespoons bottled lemon juice

Wash, hull and quarter the strawberries. Place them in a blender or food processor and puree. Pour the puree into a 4-quart slow cooker, place a lid on the pot, and set it at low.
After the first hour, remove the lid and give the berries a good stir. Vent the slow cooker by laying a wooden spoon or chopstick across the mouth and set the lid across it to allow the evaporating steam to escape.
Depending on the power of your slow-cooker, this butter will need anywhere from 8 to 12 total hours of cooking time. Check at least once an hour to track the progress. It should become as thick as ketchup and be spreadable.
In the final hour of cooking, add the maple syrup and lemon juice. To speed evaporation, you can turn the heat to high or transfer the mixture to a pan placed over low heat. Once it’s cooked down sufficiently (back to the ketchup thickness), blend the fruit butter with an immersion blender to ensure it is smooth.
Transfer Strawberry-Maple Butter to 3 sterilized pint jars, leaving 1/2-inch of head room. Apply rings and lids. Process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes.
If you don’t want to process these, store the jars in the refrigerator and eat the butter within 2 weeks.

I started investigating the possibility of making my heirloom recipe with locally available and minimally processed sweeteners like honey and maple syrup to better understand how the substitution might cloud my treasured taste memory.

According to Kate McCarty, a food preservation assistant with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, you can’t just do a one-for-one swap for chemistry’s sake. Firstly, both honey and maple syrup are, ounce for ounce, sweeter than white sugar. She strongly suggests following jam recipes specifically developed for natural sweeteners. Secondly, McCarty, who will be teaching a class on low-sugar jams at the University of Maine Regional Learning Center in Falmouth on July 7, says a canner must have some pectin in the mix to get a good set so that his jam doesn’t roll off his morning toast. She’s quite partial to Pomona’s Pectin’s recipe for Honey-Sweetened Strawberry-Rhubarb Jam.

And finally, McCarty warns that while these preserves are shelf stable if properly processed in a water bath to seal them, once they are open, they go off faster than those made with straight white sugar as the latter is a stronger preservative. She advises eating them within two weeks of breaking the seal on the jars.

Canning cookbook author Marisa McClellan recently released “Naturally Sweet Food in Jars,” which contains 100 recipes for jams, jellies, butters and syrups sweetened with honey, maple syrup and sugar, agave, coconut sugar, fruit juice concentrates and dried fruit. As a consummate jammer, she worried about her sugar intake. While these sweeteners are all still sugary in one of its forms (sucrose, glucose, or fructose), they are certainly less refined. McClellan adapted some of her white sugar favorites, like tomato jam, to taste very similar but also developed other recipes, like apple date butter, to specifically show off the deep undertones of the natural sweeteners. She says preserves made with them are flavorful, hold their quality over time and are far more welcome in her diet than those made from white sugar.

I still don’t think I’m emotionally ready to muck with my uncle’s strawberry jam recipe. Perhaps I’ll just make fewer jars of it this year and in the process cut back on white sugar overall. And I’ll fill the remainder of the preserves shelf in the basement with something like McClellan’s Strawberry-Maple Butter.

Christine Burns Rudalevige is a food writer, a recipe developer and tester, and a cooking teacher in Brunswick. Contact her at: cburn1227@gmail.com.