canning

reflections on the Can Jam

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I didn’t know about the Can Jam challenge until December, and it’s probably for the best: there’s no way I could have canned anything more than the three things I made last year. Reading through Local Kitchen’s summary of the challenge was interesting, though, as I realized that I’ve canned something in nearly every category at least once. Just for the heck of it, I sorted through my canning results of the past few years to see how they matched up to the challenge categories. In the process, I discovered that I was truly woeful at documenting the vast majority of these efforts, so I’ve annotated the list somewhat. I’m definitely not at the stage of making up my own recipes, so I’m excited to get back in the swing of things this year and try some of the hundreds of mouth-watering recipes generated by folks who actually participated in the challenge.


The canning larder. Top shelf: mincemeat, brandied peaches, pear mincemeat, pear applesauce, cranberry sauce, applesauce, cherry sauce. Bottom shelf: cherry conserve, quince jelly, apple butter, plum jam, pear jam, pear butter, apple chutney, onion relish, pepper jelly, pickled beets, lemon-garlic pickles, bread and butters, sweet and sour relish, pickled pumpkin, summer squash pickles.

  • citrus: Traditional Preserved Lemons, using Meyer lemons and a recipe from The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving [2008]: I was determined to make these, as I had visions of Moroccan dishes dancing in my head, and they were the last thing I did the night before we left for our holiday drive in 2008 (in the end, I only used them twice in rice and they mostly had to be thrown away when the went off; which won’t, of course, stop me from making them again the next time organic Meyer lemons are available); Sour Cherry Conserve [2009] (also stone fruit), from the Ball book: this was the only successful cherry recipe, and while it’s quite tasty it’s not the most appealing-looking which will teach me to only use the freshest cherries for canning (and to not go overboard at the market); Lemon Garlic Pickles [2009] (also cucurbits), from the Ball book: these were nice, but I think I vastly overestimated my capacity to eat pickles as we’ve only made it through the one jar we opened for Thanksgiving two years ago.
  • carrots: not a single thing (the only root vegetable recipe I made was Pickled Beets [2009], from the Ball book).
  • alliums: Onion Relish [2010], from an online recipe: I needed to use the onions that were piling up badly enough that I canned while 7 months pregnant during the hottest summer on record in years; I’m looking forward to eating this on sausages at the pool this summer.
  • herbs & flowers: Mojito Pickles [2009], from The Joy of Pickling: not canned, but preserved by freezing in order to retain the lime and mint flavors (also cucurbits).
  • rhubarb and asparagus: Rhubarb-Ginger Jam [2007], from an online recipe that I cannot for the life of me now locate: this was the second thing I ever canned after quince jelly, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t write about it because it was out of season (I used frozen rhubarb) and it relied heavily on candied ginger, both of which made it seem at the time like I was cheating (hah!); my dad loved this jam and he was the lucky recipient of most of it.
  • berries: Whole Berry Cranberry Sauce [2009], from the Ball book: this basic has been a favorite for the past two years, and something I’m happy to be able to contribute to other people’s holiday dinners.
  • cucurbits: Pickled Pumpkin [2009], from The Joy of Pickling: this did not turn out to be something that I liked, with the strong garlicky flavor (I made it because I was intrigued by what was described as a traditional Estonian holiday food); Pickled Summer Squash [2009], from the Ball book: sweet and tasty, this was more my style of pickle (with the advantage of using up some of the summer squash we were inundated with that year); Spicy Bread and Butters [2009], from The Joy of Pickling: I really need to start making egg salad sandwiches again to use these up.
  • tomatoes: Spaghetti Sauce [2009], using Barbara Kingsolver’s family recipe from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: making this sauce was a big project, made bigger by the fact that I used all Roma tomatoes that did not cook down, requiring me to add more ingredients as I went; as a result, I ended up with a double batch and we were able to eat this sauce for an entire year.
  • stone fruit: Brandied Peaches [2009]: we still have a number of jars of these, as I’ve forgotten to eat them at Christmas for both of the past two years; Spiced Golden Plum Jam [2010], from the Ball book: this was only the second time I used pectin in a recipe, and was a way for me to use some of the oodles of plums we received in our summer CSA this year.
  • chiles: Pepper Jelly [2008, 2009], from Simply Recipes: I tried this two years in a row, and both times it was a pain and never really came out right, so while I love the idea of it I am not sure I have it in me to keep trying; Sweet and Sour Pepper Relish, from the Ball book: I have yet to try this, but I plan to break it out to accompany our easy dinners of grilled sausages this summer.
  • pomes: Pear Butter [2009], from Simply Recipes: delicious, and a spice inspiration for the pear applesauce; Spiced Pear Jam [2009], from the Ball book: this was the first time I used pectin in a recipe; two types of Pear Mincemeat [2009] (also dried fruit), from the Ball book; Pear Applesauce [2009], totally off the cuff after making applesauce and pear butter; Apple Butter [2010]; Applesauce [2008, 2009]; Apple Pie Filling [2008]; Apple Chutney [2008, 2009] (also dried fruit and chiles), from Simply In Season: this has turned out to be a hit, and I plan to make it each year so we can slather it on our turkey sandwiches with abandon; Quince Jelly [2007,2008, 2009], from Simply Recipes: still a household favorite, so I make it any time the trees actually bear fruit and we hoard it through the year (although it never lasts past spring).
  • dried fruit: Brandied Fruit Mincemeat [2010] (also pomes), from the Ball book: fruit plus booze equals quintessential holiday food!

Canning goals for 2011 include blueberry jam and more spaghetti sauce, in addition to the usual apple suspects. Plus whatever else looks absolutely irresistible from the Can Jam entries!

reflections on the Can Jam

food : apple time is here again

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As in previous years, I could not resist the allure of apples in season. In deference to my dramatically diminished ability to process and can, we only picked sixty pounds of apples rather than the hundred-plus pounds that we typically bring home from Larriland Farm. Sadly, this was not a good year for local apples, and we weren’t able to get any Granny Smiths. Truthfully, we were only able to pick Pink Ladies and ended up buying some Stayman from the stand to complement the flavors (in order to follow the rule of always using at least two kinds of apples in any recipe). We still ended up with a fair number of apples, as we receive a bag of assorted eating varieties each week from the fruit share portion of our CSA.

What I usually do with all these apples is can a couple of batches each of sauce and chutney. This year, though, we don’t need sauce as we’re still working our way through a half dozen quarts from last autumn, and I don’t have the time to make chutney, what with all the chopping and stirring that entails. Instead, I’m making pies and muffins for the freezer and crisps for us to eat. We probably don’t need such a steady infusion of baked sugary goodness in our sleep-deprived state…oh, wait, of course we do! I plan to make a cake or two, possibly also for the freezer, but the big addition to the apple roster this year was apple butter. I used my crock pot for only the third time in ten years to slow cook the apple butter, which made it super easy to deal with. The canning is not onerous, now that we have all the supplies and have been through the routine dozens of times. With the slow cooker it’s not necessary to stir the pot constantly to keep it from scorching, and we set it up to cook overnight. I did end up letting it cook with the top off for an additional two hours, as it was still pretty runny in the morning. It’s delicious; I’ve been having it on toast and will probably make another batch this week. Once that’s done, the rest of the apples will be for eating; the beauty of the Pink Ladies is that they keep in the fridge forever and provide something fresh for my partner’s bag lunches for most of the winter.

As an aside, the chutney recipe I use is from one of my favorite cookbooks, Simply In Season. When I went looking for it online, I came across a person who spent last year cooking all the recipes in the book. She blogged about it , and it’s fun to read through and see how recipes I’ve made or thought of making turned out for her. I have to say, it’s also nice to see one of these make-everything-in-a-cookbook-in-a-year blogs that uses a regular cookbook rather than a coffee table book from a gourmet restaurant. Not that there’s anything wrong with those, they’re just not ever going to be what I use in my kitchen.

food : apple time is here again

food : even more winter canning

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I don’t have a picture to share, because I am too lazy to pull all the jars out of the cupboard and clear off the dining room table to take one, but I have even more canning to report! Once the Granny Smith apples came into season, I was able to make the traditional brandied mincemeat that I’d been drooling over in The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. We now have eight quarts of it, which should last us a good long while; for one of the batches I used the pear brandy made by the German uncle of my partner’s coworker’s wife. It’s good stuff, but only my father and one of our friends has ever been able to drink a full cordial glass of it, and we suspect that our friend was just being polite. There’s still a bit in the bottle, but there’s more in the mincemeat! At any rate, we should be set on mincemeat for at least a couple of years.

Those apples also went into the Simply In Season chutney, which was the same as last year except I used dried cranberries instead of golden raisins (you’re given a choice in the recipe, I didn’t just make substitutes willy-nilly!). One batch turned out as I remembered it last year, and one batch seemingly spontaneously scorched caramelized so it’s quite a bit darker and thicker. Still good, but not quite as nice-looking in the jar. When I acquired more apples, I also acquired more pears, so I made two batches of pear butter using Elise’s recipe that a friend pointed out to me. I didn’t cook either batch long enough, but the second batch came out slightly darker and thicker than the first. They’re both delicious, just tilted more toward runny and away from sticky.

In addition to the canned products, I used more of the apples to make and freeze three apple pies, one of which we had at Thanksgiving. I used the recipe from the Williams-Sonoma Pie and Tart book that I always do, with just a bit of extra corn starch to help it gel up. The pie baked up well and tasted great, but the crust didn’t survive being frozen and then driven 12 hours in a car. To be fair to the pie, the crust was having some cracking problems even when I was rolling it out, and a large part of the crust looking bad was the apples compressing much more than usual when they cooked (I assume due to the consistency changes from being frozen). So, it had a definite pandowdy ambiance, even more so since it started with a rustic whole wheat flour look. Still good, though; we won’t be throwing the other two in the trash. We still have some apples in the fridge, so there may be more pies coming down the pike.

The last canning I did was a batch of quince jelly. We managed to scrape very few quinces from our yard this year, just enough for two batches of jelly (to contrast, I think I made five or six the first year we learned what they were, and had enough to give some of the fruit away to friends). We may be able to scrape another batch, if we get lucky and the few I have remaining are not rotten at the core. With all the wet weather this year, the fruits that weren’t knocked out of the trees by the high spring winds were largely rotten. Hopefully we’ll have better luck in two years, and maybe even a light year in between.

Besides the jelly, I may can some cranberry-orange relish, but I might also just make it fresh for Christmas. Despite having just acquired many more small jars through the generosity of my parents and grandmother (who I believe thinks I did her the favor!) that will probably be all the canning I do until spring. In the meantime, I have tourtières to make (and freeze) and cookies to bake!

food : even more winter canning

food : summer canning

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Lemon garlic pickles, spicy bread and butter pickles, brandied peaches, sour cherry-walnut conserve, cherry sauce (with rum), and canned cherries, with pickled summer squash in front.

Now is as good a time as any to report on the canning I did this summer. I had big plans to make cherry jam, or even cherry preserves, however my stubborn refusal to (a) follow a recipe or (b) use pectin landed us only with jars and jars of variations on cherry sauce (something like 13 half-pints in all). I am sure that if we ever make pancakes or eat ice cream it will be delicious, and we have a many year supply now on hand. I did follow a Ball recipe and made 7 half-pints of sour cherry-walnut conserve, which turned out more sour and more grainy than I’d imagined. I’m not sure I like it; I’ll let you know where I stand when we make it through the remaining jars.

Besides the cherry experiments, pickles were my main focus. Using produce from our CSA and the farmers’ market, I made several types of pickles: 7 pints of lemon garlic cucumber pickles, which included sliced red pepper and are canned with a whole garlic clove and lemon slice in each jar; 6 pints of spicy bread and butter pickles, with less sugar and more red pepper flakes than the traditional recipe; 2.5 pints of pickled summer squash, a sweet pickle that’s combined with sliced onions; and 2 quarts of lime-mint cucumber pickles, which are a freezer pickle that I am very much looking forward to thawing this winter. All of the recipes, most of which were from The Joy of Pickling, turned out well; we particularly enjoyed the lemon-garlic pickles, and once I became used to the kick of the bread and butter pickles I ate them regularly on sandwiches. I’m looking forward to using them all (in combination with the pickled beets) for a pickle platter at our holiday party.

Just before we went away on vacation, I also made a batch of brandied peaches using the New York Times recipe. Despite some issues with generating way more liquid than needed, they were delicious and we are hoarding the remaining three pints for the dreary days of winter. We’re forecasted to have a cold wet season here this year, so the alcoholically preserved fruit concoctions should be quite the ticket.

food : summer canning

food : autumn canning

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Applesauce, tomato sauce, pear mincemeat, and pickled beets, with spiced pear jam in front.

A couple of weeks ago, we spent an afternoon at Larriland Farm, where we picked our own bags of Stayman apples (48 pounds), beets (20 pounds), and Roma tomatoes (30 pounds). I also bought three smallish pie pumpkins and a box of pear seconds. This last was from Catoctin Mountain Orchard, where we’d hoped to pick apples and were disappointed to discover they were only sold pre-picked from the store (thus the trip over to Larriland). My plan was to turn all of this into canned goods, that we’d eat through the winter while marveling at my foresight and dedication to our tastebuds. Okay, maybe not the last bit, but making the food last a good long time was definitely the plan.

The first day, I made tomato sauce from Barbara Kingsolver’s recipe from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The sauce was tasty (we had enough left over for a meal that night), and I have 10 quarts of it to look forward to eating over the next year. I have 10 quarts of it because…well, because the 30 pounds of mostly Roma tomatoes I picked were apparently much denser than the 30 pounds of tomatoes she calls for in her recipe. So I had two big pots of sauce simmering down, which were then combined into one big pot, which was then augmented with another 1/2 recipe of spices, and finally simmered down to 10 quarts. It’s not only that my 30 pounds was more voluminous than her 30 pounds, it was also that I puréed the tomatoes by putting them fresh into a food processor, not by cooking them and straining them and then putting them into a food processor. So whatever liquid was in the tomatoes was in the pot waiting to be cooked off. Nothing I’ve read says that the way I did it was wrong, and I still had a half recipe more than projected, so I’m thinking the larger factor was having all Roma tomatoes. At any rate, come on over for pasta!

After the tomatoes were dealt with, I proceeded on to beets. Over the course of the next three days, the 20 pounds of beets became 19 pints of pickled beets (technically 21 pints, as two went into the fridge and we ate it right away). While this works out to about one pound per pint, the recipe was in cups of sliced beets so it was a bit…exciting…to figure out how many were needed for each batch. In the end, I just boiled pots of beets, skinned them in cool water (much easier than peaches, or tomatoes for that matter), and stored them in the fridge until they could be sliced and pickled in 10 cup increments. I used the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving recipe, and had to double the amount of liquid to fill the five pint jars per batch. (I found that if I stored the extra beets and liquid from the first batch, and added them to the pot at the end of the second batch, two batches made 11 pints.) Don’t ask me why; maybe my pot had too much surface area, maybe I boiled it too vigorously for too long. Whatever the reason, I needed more liquid (which is how we ended up with 2 pints in the fridge in the first round). Before I started I considered making a variety of flavors of pickled beets, but in the end I stuck with the regular kind, figuring that everyone knows and likes the familiar taste so why mess around with it. So, come on over for pickled beets!

The other major effort was turning the apples into applesauce. These Stayman weren’t particularly great, sort of mushy and not as tart as I remember from previous years, so my plan was to combine them with a few Empire apples (from my market friends at Harris Orchards) and make them all into sauce. About 12 pounds of apples goes into four quarts, and with the combination of the two kinds I had plenty for four batches with some left over. I started off following the Ball recipe, but quickly abandoned it as it uses far more sugar than I like. (It also calls for a tablespoon of lemon juice for each quart; I forgot to add it for one batch, which led us to do some research and learn that the USDA does not require lemon juice for canning apples, as all apples on the market are acidic enough to safely can using the water bath method. I still added the lemon juice to the last batch, but don’t worry if the recipe you have doesn’t include it or you forget.) The first batch I made with half the amount of sugar and some cinnamon, and it came out way too sweet (I’m sure my partner will slurp it up like the candy it is). The second batch I made with only 1/2 cup of sugar, the way I like it, and the third I made with more cinnamon (2 teaspoons) and 1 cup of sugar (which still made it a very sweet dessert sauce). The last batch was back to the 1/2 cup, and the apples were old enough by that point that even the added lemon juice couldn’t keep them from browning up quickly. It still tastes fine, but doesn’t look as nice in the jar (which destines it for early consumption). Now that the sauce is out of the way, I’m looking forward to another round of tart apples (such as Granny Smith and Braeburn) to make into other things, like chutney and mincemeat.

Speaking of mincemeat, that’s what I made from the pears. Two kinds of mincemeat (one with rum and currants, and one with port and regular raisins) both from the Ball book. The pears were overripe and very juicy, so I’m not sure that the consistency is quite right on the mincemeat, but they both tasted delicious (if a bit overly sweet; for a person with a sweet tooth, I seem to be at the low-sugar end of the range). I’m sure they’ll be a hit at Christmas, and their beef-free status makes them worth their weight in dried fruit. These two recipes were also by volume (10 cups of chopped pears each) rather than weight, and I neglected to weigh the fruit ahead of time, so I don’t actually know what we acquired for our six dollars. Enough to make 8 pints of mincemeat and another 7 half-pints of jam. The jam was the first attempt at using pectin, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, the jam gelled up beautifully. On the other hand, the jam seems cloyingly sweet to me, although that’s somewhat cut when it’s actually on toast and not just being taste-tested from a spoon. It’s a nice recipe, though, with cinnamon and dried cranberries for a bit of a spicy-tart undercurrent. Of course, as soon as I’d used all the pears this way, a friend pointed out that Elise put up a pear butter recipe at Simply Recipes, so I’m tempted to get another box of pears and make pear butter next week. The downside is that it involves cooking the pears then putting them through the food mill, a process that I generally dislike. The upside is that it looks delicious!

Now, I just need to cook, purée, and freeze the pie pumpkins and the kitchen dining room will be cleared and ready for the next round of apples. Just as soon as I find a place to store all the filled jars.

food : autumn canning