Rebecca July 29th, 2007
How do you turn this
into this?
Well, how much time do you have on your hands?
Home canning is fairly easy, but it’s definitely a project that can take up the better part of an afternoon or evening. However, it’s worth it on a cold January night when you can open up a jar of pickled asparagus or raspberry jam and taste the fresh vegetables and fruits of summer. If you love to cook or bake, I hope you’re inspired to try canning after reading this post.
I have a sour pie cherry tree in my backyard. I’ve lived in this house for nearly four years now, and until this summer the crows and wrens always got to the cherries before I did. This time I was prepared (meaning not on vacation over the Fourth of July holiday; that’s when the cherries are usually ripe) and managed to pick a gallon of the gorgeous fruit. A coworker brought me another gallon from her family’s orchard. I can’t eat that much cherry pie without lapsing into a diabetic coma, so I decided to make jelly. If you’ve got a fruit that has a fairly inedible skin and/or a pit (like cherries or plums), jelly is the way to go. You don’t even have to use a cherry pitter or cut out each plum pit; you can just boil the fruit and mash it through a strainer to extract the juice. Some even say leaving the pits in while cooking ultimately enhances the fruit’s flavor.
What do you need to make jelly? First, buy a box of pectin at the grocery store. Each box contains a bunch of recipes.
Pectin helps your fruit set up into jam or jelly. Without it, you’ve got a sauce or (with the addition of garlic, onion, spices and vinegar) a chutney. The above recipe calls for “prepared juice”. I’ve been canning for several years now, so I’m pretty comfortable with striking off on my own when the need arises. In this case, that meant not removing the pits and chopping the cherries, but simply simmering them whole until they were ready to render their juice.
There’s about a gallon of cherries in that pot. I brought them to a boil in a Dutch oven on my stove top, then turned the heat down to a simmer, and mashed them with a potato masher every so often to break up the fruit completely. After fifteen to twenty minutes there were no more whole cherries. I took the pot off the heat, let it cool for a bit, and started to strain the juice into a wire mesh colander that was lined with cheesecloth (for better straining and ease of cleaning) and placed over a large glass measuring bowl in my sink (so I didn’t have to lift the pot very high or spatter juice all over the kitchen counter top). I didn’t pour all the fruit, pits, skin and juice at once into the cheesecloth-lined colander; I worked in small batches. Once I poured each bit of cherry slurry into the colander, I used that same potato masher to push the juice down into the bowl. I wanted everything left in the colander to be somewhat dry, and fit for only the garbage can or compost pile. I ended up with four cups of cherry juice. The recipe calls for three-and-a-half cups. Perfect!
The trick to canning–whether it’s pickling or jam and jelly making–is to have everything ready. Your jars, rings and lids need to be washed. Sugar needs to be measured. Pectin box opened. Ladles, spoons, and jar lifter need to be on the counter top. Kitchen towels out. The water in the water bath canning pot (usually a big granite ware pot; I use my stockpot) needs to be boiling. The kitchen needs to look like this:
and this:
I slipped the clean jars, rings and lids into eight quarts of boiling water in the big stainless steel stockpot for ten minutes. This sterilizes them and gets them ready for the (soon to be) boiling cherry juice. If everything is hot, nothing cracks and shatters.
Between the jar lifter there on the stove top, and a pair of tongs, I pulled everything out of the boiling water (draining any excess water back into the stockpot) and set it on the clean kitchen towel to the left of the stove. Then I put the cherry juice on the boil on another burner, and slowly added the contents of the pectin envelope, stirring until the pectin was dissolved into the juice.
All you really have to do is closely follow the recipe directions. Once the juice and pectin came to a full rolling boil, I added four and half cups of sugar (pre-measured, of course; this is not the time to be rummaging around the kitchen) and kept stirring. The juice has to come back to a full rolling boil. At that point, I set the timer for one minute and stirred continuously until BZZZZT! The timer went off and I was at the next stage: filling the jars.
Hot tip! The boiling fruit, pectin and sugar will create a foam on top of the hot jelly or jam. Leaving the foam in the final product is considered bad form by jelly and jam experts. Either way, you’re going to have to scrape it off the top before ladling the finished jelly or jam into the jars. To prevent this from happening, put a pat of butter into the mixture just before it comes back to the boil. The butter will be a super hero to the rescue, preventing Emperor Foam from blowing up the Earth mucking everything up.
Filling can be tricky. Patience and good aim are required. I’ve found it’s best to use a big soup ladle to transfer the cherry jelly from the pot into each half-pint or pint jar. The recipe tells you how many jars to use and what size; you can use math and personal aesthetics to decide if half-pints (perfect for gift-giving) or pints (for personal gluttony) are to be used. I’ve also found that any recipe I do makes one extra jar of jam or jelly. So, instead of sterilizing five jars, as per the pectin recipe, I sterilized six. And, as usual, I was right. I got my jars lined up at the edge of the counter, brought the pot of jelly over, and used my ladle to slowly fill each hot jar to within a quarter inch of the top. I made sure to gently wipe the bottom of the ladle on the edge of the pot before pouring. Once I filled each (and, as you can see, had a few hiccups here and there), I cleaned the tops of the jars with a damp washcloth (sticky jelly on the edge of the jar will prevent the lid from sealing completely) and gently set the hot lids on top.
Once the lids were in place, I tightened the rings (lefty loosey, righty tighty…not tighty whitey, yuck). The jars were extremely hot at that point. I used that damp washcloth to hold them so I could tighten the lids without getting second-degree burns on my hands. Then it was time for the final water bath.
There has to be at least one to two inches of water covering the tops of the jars. Otherwise, they might not sterilize and seal safely. So, if some water has evaporated away while you were pouring the jelly into the jars, add a bit more water to the pot and make sure it all comes back to the boil.
I lowered the jars in, using the lifter, three at a time, and set the timer for fifteen minutes. When the timer went off I pulled them out carefully, set them on the kitchen towel, and lowered the other three into the boiling water. In the meantime, I used a second kitchen towel to cover the hot jars just out of the water bath. If a cool breeze happened to waft through the kitchen at that time I could have a shattered jar of cherry jelly and one hell of a sticky mess on my hands.
Once the other three were done, I slipped them under the towel ever so carefully, turned off the burner, and found my way onto the couch in my living room, TV remote in hand.
Really, at this point, you can either clean the kitchen or curl up with a good book; either way, you’re now about to begin a waiting game. You have to listen for the POP! of the lids. If you’re one of those talented people who can make a popping noise by clacking your tongue against the roof of your mouth or running a finger along the inside of your cheek, you know what sound to listen for. It’s the sound of a perfect seal. It’s the sound of, well…
…music. Cherry jelly music. The kind of music best heard by a piece of buttered toast first thing in the morning.
The POP! will happen anywhere from five minutes after you take them out of the water bath to a full day later. You can even speed up the process after a while by gently pushing down on the top of the lids. Once you’ve heard it, the jelly or jam is ready to be given away, consumed the next day, or saved for a long winter’s night. If you have any left over in the pot, or were only able to fill the last jar halfway, just put that extra goodness in a container in the fridge for later (as in later that evening) consumption or spread it on some good bread right there and then. Like I said, you can’t beat homemade jelly, jam or preserves. Homemade tastes far better than anything you would ever buy in the store. It makes a perfect holiday gift (ask my friends and family). Best of all, after making a batch you’ll feel completely self-sufficient, talented and competent, even if you are a big fat ball of doubt, fear and helplessness like the rest of us.
