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digital scale, tared bowl, fruit weighed AFTER hulling

strawberries, hulled and weighed, then sugar weighed to 60 percent of that number — 2 kg of fruit takes 1.2 kg of sugar. The scale is the recipe, not a nicety. Crushed berries pack into a cup measure at wildly different densities depending on how ripe they are and how hard they were mashed, so a cup of fruit can vary by a third in actual mass, and the gel depends on the ratio of sugar to real fruit weight rather than to volume. Weighing after hulling matters for the same reason: hulls are 5 to 10 percent of a punnet and vary by variety. Sugar here is structural — it competes with pectin for water and lets the pectin chains bond to each other instead — as well as preservative, so this proportion is not a sweetness preference and cannot be cut without switching to a pectin that works differently