My Favorite Apple Butter Recipe

As you read in my post yesterday we are up to our ears in apples.  Free apples nonetheless.  What’s the best about free things is that you can experiment with new recipes and don’t have to worry that you are wasting your money in case you don’t like it.  So we tried three different apple butter recipes and I have combined them to create my favorite.

We tried Overnight Apple Butter from Martha Stewart and Amy Traverso, a spiced cardamom Apple Butter also from Martha and Classic Apple Butter from The Art of Preserving.  All were great but I combined the best of each to create my own and here it is.

My favorite Apple Butter Recipe 

Makes 5 half – pint jars or 2 pint jars (with a little extra)

4 lb apples, peeled, cored, and cut into rough 1 inch chunks

1 1/2 cups sweet apple cider

2 cups sugar

1/2 cup lemon juice (shhh, I cheat and use bottled)

2/3 tsp ground ginger

1 cinnamon stick

1/3 tsp ground cardamom

1/3 tsp ground nutmeg

small pinch ground cloves

Combine all ingredients in a crock pot and set to high for 1 hour, then turn down to low and simmer all day or all night.  You are looking for consistency more than timing.  You want it to be brown and thick.  It usually takes me overnight and then several hours in the morning to cook down sufficiently.

After several hours cooking you can crush apples with potato masher to speed the process along.  We like ours chunky so I don’t bother putting through a food mill but you could do that.  It’s just one more thing to wash though.

Remove cinnamon stick, ladle into jars and leave  1/4″ headspace.  Process the jars for 10 minutes (high altitude 20 minutes) in a boiling water bath.  If you don’t can often check out a canning book to learn the detailed process of preparing jars and lids, etc.

Some more tips:

A large crock pot will hold a double batch.

Borrow a neighbors crock pot like I did to make your canning efforts more efficient.

I realize that there are no 1/3 tsp measuring spoons, we scaled this recipe down from another.  Just estimate the amounts.

I use Penzey’s spices and I always need to use less than called for on spices because theirs are so fresh and strong, especially the cinnamon.

Cardamom is my new favorite spice, so don’t leave it out!

Half a cup of lemon juice seems like a lot but we used sweet apples and I don’t like it really sweet.

Thanks,  Courtney

Using the Tattler Canning Lids

Over this past weekend, we tested out the Tattler Reusable Canning Lids for the first time while making our peach jam.  The worked like a charm.

You start out placing the rubber rings and plastic lids in scalding water, just like you would if you were using the traditional metal lids.

Put the lid and the rubber gasket together and place on top of the jar.  Then screw on the ring the same way you would with the metal lids.

Process as your normally would and then you’re done.   I must say, it is hard to tell by looking whether they are set or not.  With the metal lids, you can usually glance at them and determine quickly if one of the seals failed.  The Tattler lids are thicker and more rigid.  I had to take the rings off to tell if I had a good seal.  All were good!

Thanks, Robert.

Eating food that’s alive

I’m not getting all vegan, raw food crazy here but I am starting to think about an idea I read about in Four Season Harvest.  And that is eating fresh food, not embalmed food.  You’ve probably seen my review of the book but now I keep revisiting the idea of eating fresh food all year.

A quote from the introduction of the book sums it all up.  “We adore fresh food, what we call “real food,” the fresher the better. We have never considered the many-month-old embalmed remains of last summer’s harvest, whether canned or frozen, to be real food.”

Yikes, that seems radical and somewhat offensive to us canners doesn’t it?  But I have to admit that I agree.  This is an idea that has popped up in my conversations with Robert over the last year or so.  Should we be using our time and resources to can our food or should we be choosing crops that store better in their natural state, potatoes, carrots, squash, parsnips, wheat, etc.  Robert has shared examples with me from blogs he follows about those who never can their summer harvest.  In fact they avoid growing tomatoes, scandalous I know.  It always seemed impossible but now that I have read Four Season harvest I am beginning to think again.  Instead of growing 27 tomato plants, yes we did that, use the ground to plant more sweet potatoes and devote some space to the winter garden or cold frames.  Don’t worry I could never give up tomatoes and I find they are the most used and rewarding canned vegetable.  But I am considering altering how we plant our garden, which foods we grow and how we store them.

Here’s what I am thinking (I always think in bullet points so bear with me, right brainers):

• Summer crops stored in the field – carrots, parsnips, brussel sprouts, plus so many more
• Summer crops stored in the root cellar – potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, onions, wheat, oats, sunflower seeds, plus so many more
• Summer crops canned – tomatoes, pickled this or that, jams galore
• Winter crops eaten fresh – mache, scallions, endive, spinach, baby lettuce, plus so many more

This would be a pretty radical shift from almost all of our summer crops getting canned or pickled and only a small holding of potatoes and sweet potatoes in the root cellar.  But oh how freeing this new plan is.  Don’t get me wrong I love to can as much as the next sweaty, exhausted gal but I could use a break.  Plus I am not all that fond of pressure canning, it scares me.  Now all we need is a place to grow the food and we are set.  No more dead, embalmed food for us.  What do you think?

Thanks,  Courtney

Host a Jam Making Party

Due to a recent sale on raspberries I organized and hosted an informal jam making party.  It was definitely a success and I highly recommend you consider planning one too.  We finished in the same amount of time that it always takes me to make jam but we put up 3 times as much and had so much more fun.  And to finish the fun we ate the last jar which wasn’t full enough to process, with cheese and crackers.  Delicious.

It’s quite a simple idea that I saw in Ashley English’s book last summer.  Being that I am pregnant but love to can I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to get a little help and have fun with my friends.  All you really need is willing participants and a box of Sure Jell (okay well maybe a few more things than that).  If you have never canned a thing in your life then Sure Jell should definitely be your first forage into canning.  Jams are so forgiving and Sure Jell takes most of the guess work out of the process.  The Sure Jell pamphlet inside the box will give you instructions and quantities of fruit needed.  Really everything you need to know is right there.  Just read it fully.

Next invite some friends over and provide them with a list of the things they will need to bring.  Since supermarket sales often don’t last long, it’s a good idea to buy a bunch and freeze it until you can schedule a time to get together.  Most fruit will freeze just fine and not affect the integrity of the final product one bit.  I figured out how much fruit everyone should purchase then gave them a list of things to bring.

Here’s the list of ingredients that I sent out for our particular recipe:

4 pints raspberries

1 bag of sugar

1 box Sure Jell (yellow box)

9 half pint canning jars

9 new lids

9 screw bands, used okay

1 large bowl

1  6- 8 qt pot

I provided the straining equipment for the raspberries.  That being my trusty Squeeze-O-Strainer.  I also had two boiling water canners set up outside on our Camp Chef outdoor cookstove.  This was so that our house didn’t heat up plus we needed the stove top burners for making the jam.

During the party make sure as the host you have read the directions and communicate them to the guests often.  If you are new to jam making just make sure to take your time and don’t miss a step.  This can be kind of hard because there is so much good conversation going on in the kitchen.  No matter how many times I have made Sure Jell jam, as soon as I measure out the sugar I immediately want to dump it right in.  But you can’t you have to wait, that’s so hard for me.

So go have fun and as a bonus if you have great friends like I do then they will help with the cleanup and let you put your swollen pregnant feet up.

Oh and remember jam recipes can’t be doubled so you will need to cook each in a separate pot.  Why is this?  Because there is chemistry going on in that pot and we don’t mess with chemistry.  We just follow the chemistry rules.  In fact that is a good motto for all canning.  Don’t try to wing it, follow the rules.  Maybe that’s why I love canning so much, it’s so structured.

Be adventurous, once you’ve made jam, try pickling, and once you’ve mastered pickling, try pressure canning.  You could also spend time decorating the jars and preparing them for gifts too.  All with friends what could be more fun.

Cherry Preserves

Apricots macerating

Blueberries heating

Thanks,  Courtney

Canning: Why proper headspace is important

I wish I had read this post of mine before our little canning jaunt this weekend.  I was enticed by a sale at the grocery store for blueberries.  Of course I bought way too much.  But I decided to can the blueberries to make pie later in year, or as long as I could hold out.  Which with my pregnant restraint won’t be long.  My goal is to can fruit and then develop a pie recipe that accommodates my canned fruit rather than fresh or frozen.

I followed the recipe for canned berries in the Ball Canning Book.  This was a very simple recipe.  And by simple I mean fast.  It involved very little cook time, no pectin and very little sugar.  The recipe said to leave 1/2″ headspace.  I couldn’t find my handy dandy tool that measures the headspace so I used the picture in the book.  Then I consulted Robert.  We decided it needed just a little bit more.

After processing in a boiling water bath for 25 minutes (we are at a high altitude so I have to add 10 minutes to any processing time) we pulled out the jars only to find that they had severely leaked.  The canning water was purple and the jars kept leaking once they were on they were out of the water.  Not good.   Robert and I said a little prayer that they would pull a seal and I wouldn’t have to freeze them.  After about an hour they did seal though but we lost a lot of liquid.

Here is another example of headspace problems.  In this case we underfilled the jar of applesauce.  You can kind of see from the picture that there is a brown discoloration at the top.  This is safe I believe, just discolored due to too much oxygen in the jar.

You can see the jar on the left is filled pretty full, maybe too full.  The jar on the right is too low and the top portion of the jar is brownish.

The Ball canning book has a section in the back for diagnosing problems.  We think we may have overfilled or overpacked the jars.  But the fruit should be fine.  I think it might easily discolor though like the applesauce.  I hope to use them before this happens.  So another lesson in canning, trust the book and don’t overfill or underfill the jars.  We’ll get it right one of these days.

Thanks,  Courtney

Apricot Jam and Cherry Preserves

What did you do on Sunday afternoon?  We were toiling over the hot stove.  But oh, was it worth it.

Apricots macerating.  Courtney cut these up the night before and let them sit for quite a while.

We made a batch of Apricot Jam and a batch of Cherry Preserves.  No pectin needed.  Just fruit and sugar here.  We used recipes from the Art of Preserving again.  Here are a few teaser pics from the end of the process:

And of course we had one more of each that was a partial jar which we’re eating now.

Thanks, Robert.

Pitting Cherries Without a Cherry Pitter

Cherries herald in the summer stone fruit season.  And boy am I glad they do.   I suppose any fruit would do after a boring winter of canned this and dried that.  But it was cherries that received the special honor (I know rhubarb is really first but actually it’s a vegetable I think).  Recently I received 6 pounds of organic sweet cherries from a fabulous mail order fruit company.  What to do with so much fruit I wondered?   Because you better believe that I was not going to let one single cherry get moldy and be thrown away on my watch.  Off I went to my canning books.

But before I could even get the book open my son popped a cherry in his mouth, chewed and swallowed it all, I managed to grab the stem as he was swallowing.  Okay now I had a new problem, I needed a way to pit the “balls” as he calls them, so he could actually enjoy them too.  I started cutting around the seed but that was unacceptable to an almost 2 year old boy because then they weren’t “balls” anymore and he wanted “balls.”  I remembered reading in Cook’s Illustrated about using a wine bottle and a chopstick to pit them.  Hmm sounds strange.

All we had was a beer bottle, go figure, so I gave it a try.  To my surprise it actually worked.  Here’s what you do.

1.  Gather your supplies

2.  Position cherry upside down on the top of the beer bottle.

3.  Using a chopstick, poke a hole right through the top of the cherry into the bottle.

The pit should fall into the bottle and the cherry remain intact.

I found that it worked better if the cherry was upside down and you aimed for the tiny mark on the bottom left by the flower.  When the cherry is rightside up I had several bottom halves of the cherry rip off and fall into the bottle.  Losing any bit of my cherry was unacceptable and turning it upside down solved the problem.

My son was pleased with the “balls” and I was too.  Now onto canning.  FYI I will be making Cherry Preserves from The Art of Preserving.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Thanks, Courtney.