‘Garnet red with a delicious flavour’: the best supermarket strawberry jams, tasted and rated

They’re a toast-time tradition, but which jars are the real jam and which are just a sticky mess?

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Jam is a simple product: it’s mostly fruit and sugar with added pectin and sometimes citric acid, and it needs little else, so I tend to avoid any with unnecessary additives. Legally, it has to contain a minimum level of sugar, so when manufacturers use fruit juice concentrate instead of sugar, they often fall below that threshold and have to call their product a fruit spread instead.

I tasted 10 jams straight from the jar, much to my teeth’s dismay, and then again spread on warm buttered baguette. Every product was delicious in its own right, but some really stood out as exceptional, with serious complexity and depth, and not overpowered by the sugar.