I miss my canned salmon. Every year during dipnet season, i would fill the freezer with red salmon, then can about a hundred pints for winter. I could eat that stuff every day, and twice on Sunday.
Considering the tomatoes plus the amount of vinegar, the pH may well be sufficient to allow for water-bath canning. I keep pH test strips around for recipes of questionable safety.
Yeah, my wife pointed out my wrong-headedness when she read the recipe. She’s more up on the process than I am.
Mulberry Preserves
2 cups mulberries (leave the little stems in, they turn very soft)
1 cup sugar
Juice of half a lemon
One large piece star anise
Mix the sugar and berries over medium heat until sugar has melted. Add the lemon juice and star anise. Lower heat and simmer until it is a color and consistency you like.
I haven’t canned anything, but I stewed a big pot of tomaoes with onions and garlic and froze that, and tonight I made a couple of jars of refrigerator jam with peaches that weren’t going to last much longer.
I’m going to try to find someone to buy overripe or seconds tomatoes…I use so many through the winter I’d like to freeze a crate or two.
I picked some nice blueberries a couple of weekends ago (japanese beetles everywhere, gah!) and made some tasty blueberry lime jam. I’ve already done a few jars of sour cherry pie filling with cherries from my trees - alas not very many this year. I did some sweet cherry jam as well. Also a couple of batches of strawberry daiquiri jam (my favorite). I have some frozen apricots for butter eventually but I think it’s peach jam next. Maybe with some lavender from my flower bed out front.
I just came in here to be the one person who “misread” the thread title and made a comment about it.
:o I thought the title said, “Let the caning begin,” and came here looking for links to pictures from the Folsom Street Fair.
You may now chortle in amusement at my naïveté.
Actually related comment: my mom used to make the BEST apple butter. Her pickles and other preserves were pretty good too.
We’re starting to gear up for Extrava-can-za in a few weeks, the annual canning party that a friend throws. We’ll bring some of our own raspberry jelly and liqueur, and the group usually makes pickles, dilly beans, a couple salsas, and spaghetti sauce. Last year we had apple butter too.
At some point DH and I will probably can a bunch of plain tomato sauce ourselves, we use it a lot. Since we don’t have a big pressure canner, we add in some citric acid and water-bath it. Then when we open each jar we stir in a little baking soda to neutralize the acid and go to town.
BTW: Best Tomato Soup Ever (for wintertime grilled cheese)
1 pint tomato sauce
1/4t. each salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, oregano, thyme (or whatever other spices you like)
baking soda to cut the acidity if you need it
Open the jar of sauce, stir the spices in, and nuke until hot. SO much better than Campbell’s, and just as easy to make if you already have the sauce.
Can I revive this thread?
My boyfriend is from Michigan and just returned from a trip home with seriously about 6 bushels of apples. Curious as to his intentions for said assload of apples, he said he wanted to can them. Frabjuous day! My mom used to can when I was a kid and I assumed he had done it himself. Um, no. Never had- either of us.
Well, I bought all of the equipment for water bath canning, a book about it, and thank jebus I had my mother and also GingeroftheNorth on call for help if needed.
Was smart enough to get an apple peeler and corer/slicer so the actual peeling wasn’t too awful. I did apple pie filling first and while the prep was a lot of work, the actual canning was really not such a big deal. I fretted and fretted that I was doing something wrong, but all seems to have gone well and all of the seals worked great. I put the apples in raw and poured the hot sauce over them then canned, so I’m curious when we take them out if the water bath actually cooked them at all or if they will still be crunchy.
Day 2, I filled 3 crock pots full of apples and made sauce, then pureed one and chopped the other crock pots up so they had a coarse sauce. Reduced them overnight and made heavenly apple butter. Canned up the coarse sauce (the pureed only yielded 1.5 pints so we’re just going to eat that up) in 10 pint jars! So fun!!
Still apples left and I think we’re going to do one more big batch of pie filling (we’re fans of apple pie). He’s already looking for more fun stuff to can (or watch me can, he seems fascinated by it but a little nervous to try it himself) and I’m terrified of what he’ll bring back next year.
Would like to do some pickles but don’t know if I can find any pickling cukes this time of year or not. I don’t yet know what dilly beans are but I’m intrigued. My mom says I should get a pressure canner so that I can do the lower acid foods as well.
Quick question: mine was, so no worries, but does food have to be hot when you can it? I did a lot of reading and while the recipes I found all had you can right after the food was done cooking; is that to retard any bacterial growth? Or so that the jars don’t crack when you put them in the water bath? Any other tips for a newbie? I enjoyed doing it and can see more in my future.
Hot food in hot jars – that’s what mom always told me.
I’ve only canned tomatoes. I don’t have a pressure canner, and tomatoes can be done safely in the hot water bath, so that’s all I do – tomatoes.
To get hot jars, I use tongs to dip the empty jars in boiling water for a minute or so, then fill them immediately with the hot tomatoes.
A friend makes apple butter, so consider that if you’re getting overloaded with applesauce and pie filling.
Yup, if you started canning with cold food, you may crack the jars, and you also may not cook it through enough to kill any anaerobic-loving bacteria before canning finishes. You’d end up with some happy bacteria left inside a jar with tons of food to eat and no competition.
At first I was relieved that the title said “canning” instead of “caning”. Then I remembered my Summers O’ Fun as a kid sitting by the blazing hot wood stove for hours on end moving pressure cookers from the one part of the stove to the other, trying to maintain an constant temperature.
Can we make this thread about caning, instead?
This thread is making me sad. Because of stupid life stuff getting in the way, I was only able to make two batches of strawberry jam this year. No tomatoes, no peach or apricot jam, no berry jam. And my coworker whose dad has a guava tree just informed me that the tree only produced about a tenth of the usual number of guavas, which means I won’t make guava jelly this year - not that I have time for that anyway. Maybe if I plan right I will be able to make some marmalade around Christmas.
I haven’t really preserved anything this year, but I’ve got several jars in the freezer and fridge right now.
I had a bumper hot pepper crop this summer, so I’ve got multiple quarts of hot sauce going (mosty tabasco peppers), 1 additional quart of pepper vinegar (serranos), and several cups of Sriracha and Chinese chili sauce. They have all turned out excellent, with the tabasco sauce coming out very, very potent.
I also picked all the basil in the garden Tuesday night before the first frost, and have frozen several small containers of pesto. I probably have close to a quart, total. (Anyone want some pesto?)
I also made a quart of shitake pickles on Sunday, which have turned out to be just delicious.
Also, I have enough ground cayenne and New Mexico chile powder in my pantry to last me a long time. The dehydrator was going like crazy in the late summer.
I only managed to put up 8 pints of salsa this year, 4 peach and 4 tomato.
By the way, I have to recommend Marisa McClellan’s book Food in Jars: Preserving in Small Batches Year Round for smaller-volume canners like me. She’s also releasing in March a very small-batch-focused book, Preserving by the Pint: Quick Seasonal Canning for Small Spaces.
Well I am finishing my apples tonight and considering doing pickles. Anyone do pickles here? It seems pretty straightforward.
I forgot to mention, I used this recipe for my pie filling and it was DIVINE.
Also. Question for jelly makers: if you’re canning jelly, how can you be certain that it will be the right texture when it’s opened? In other words, assuming you are canning the fruit hot with pectin/thickener, how do you know it will set up ok? I would hate to realize after all that work that it’s a bust and it didn’t turn out (which happened to me making freezer jam). Do you just use “tried and true” recipes?
ETA: in case you’re wondering I’m in south FL and our growing seasons are a bit different.
I misread the thread title and thought that that stupid kid had gone to Singapore again. Redirect Notice