Honey-Sweetened Strawberry Chia Seed Jam Recipe -

This honey-sweetened strawberry chia seed jam recipe is an incredibly delicious alternative to normal strawberry jam, especially if you aren’t interested in the time-consuming process of water-canning, or if you are out of pectin, or you want to avoid lots of sugar.

I am a planner person (ahem: garden evidence). I am super organized and I am not known for spontaneity. It works great for me, since I love both gardening and cooking healthy meals, and both of these hobbies are easy to do if you like to plan things.

But sometimes, I like to “live it up” and do something unplanned. I get all proud of myself for “being wild” but I’m sure it’s still pretty tame compared to other people.

For example, yesterday, I was at the local strawberry farm, buying fresh strawberries in order to eat local seasonal fresh fruit. And there it was, a table full of “second strawberries”, for a super cheap deal.

(By the way, here are my tips on growing your own strawberries!)

I had no recipe in mind and no idea what ingredients I had in my pantry, but I couldn’t pass on that deal. So I let my inner wild-child out (seriously, this is about as crazy as I get) and impulsively bought a huge basket of mushy strawberries.

And then I went home and stared at them and also at Pinterest, trying to figure out how I could salvage them into something edible.

Honey-Sweetened Strawberry Chia Seed Jam: The Ingredients

I decided right away that I wanted to make jam. But then I started reading the strawberry jam recipes. Holy monkeys, I had no idea that so many homemade jam recipes had so much sugar in it! I’m not against sugar necessarily, but I don’t have a sweet tooth (I prefer sour and bitter things) and I like to keep my diet as clean as possible.

I also found that many jam recipes used pectin. Well, since this was an impulse strawberry purchase, my home was sorely lacking of the Pomona’s pectin that was used in a lot of the more healthy strawberry jam recipes.

Fortunately, I found some great recipes for honey-sweetened strawberry chia seed jam. I had all of those ingredients on hand. Yay! I often use chia seeds to make puddings for breakfast since I’m a picky breakfast eater (check out my Pinterest board as proof!), so I had those available.

If you don’t know much about chia seeds, they aren’t like raspberry seeds and get stuck in your teeth. They are used as a thickener in recipes, and you don’t really notice them in the recipes. Read more about the health benefits of chia seeds.

The Downside of Honey-Sweetened Strawberry Chia Seed Jam

I was super excited that I had the ingredients needed to make a healthy and quick and easy version of strawberry jam. However, it was a bit of a bummer to learn that you probably can’t/shouldn’t do a water-canning process on chia seed jam.

I was searching all over to try and figure out why all the chia seed jam recipes were preserved in the freezer. I have limited freezer space, but plenty of space in my pantry, so I was really hoping to do some traditional canning of my strawberry jam. If you check out the ‘how to preserve chia seed jam’ section of this article (about halfway down), she explains why chia seed jams should be stored in the freeze and NOT canned with the traditional water canning.

So the downside of this honey-sweetened strawberry chia jam recipe is that you will need to store your extra jam in the freezer. Sigh…sorry about that. In the fridge, your jam will keep for about 2 weeks. But you can freeze the extra (or give it as a gift!).