Adventures In Canning, Part Two

I did it!  I made my own apple butter!  It wasn't difficult, and the result tastes really good!  My main reason for making it was to be able to share it with my dad, who LOVES the stuff.  He's getting like half the batch - which should last him a couple months :-)  

I was going to attempt to re-write the recipe I used, and give detailed instructions on canning, but I'm afraid I will miss some details or not explain them well, and it's really not the kind of thing you should cook by just reading a one page recipe anyway.  I think if you are going to can something like this you should have a book to refer to in case you have a question or something doesn't seem to be going just as planned.  You need to follow the directions to the letter to be sure that your product is safe.  I borrowed my friend Amy's canning supplies and the book she uses.  I really liked the book, it's called "The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving Food" by Janet Chadwick.  It tells you everything you need to know about canning, freezing, and drying food.  I'm going to get my own copy, along with my own canning supplies, because this was fun.  I also like this website.  It has a ton of info on canning, along with stuff about local produce in general.  

So instead of typing the recipe exactly, here are some pictures and brief explanations of what I did.  In case you noticed, you're right, this is not my kitchen.  I ended up house-sitting for a friend on short notice, so I made the apple butter in her kitchen.

First, I went to the Farmer's Market and bought about 12 pounds of apples (I was making a double batch).  I was looking for tart apples, such as Liberty, Golden Delicious, McIntosh, and Jonathan.  I bought a few pounds from about four different farms so I had a good variety.

About half of the apples I bought.

I loved this recipe because I didn't have to peel or core a single apple!  I just chopped the apples into small pieces, including the peels and cores, and put them into a pot with 2 cups of apple cider (which I bought from one of the apple farms).  I brought it to a boil and let the apples cook for about 20 minutes.

They cooked down considerably.

I then ran the cooked apples through a food mill in batches.  My awesome mother-in-law was kind enough to mail me her food mill so I wouldn't have to buy one (needless to say, when I return it to her, she's getting a jar of apple butter to go with it!).  The food mill helps to separate out the peels and seeds, so you are left with, basically, apple sauce.  I blended it a little more with an immersion blender to get it a little smoother.  

I spread the mixture out into a shallow baking dish and put it in a 200 F oven and let it cook for 8 hours, stirring every hour or so.  Then I added a little ground cinnamon and cloves (no sugar at all!). 

About an hour before I was ready to fill the jars, I filled the waterbath canner and turned the heat up to bring it to a boil (it took a LONG time).  I got the lids gently simmering in a pot of water, and I had another pot of water barely boiling in case I needed to add more to the waterbath at any point.  I cleaned the jars in the dishwasher so they would be clean and hot when I was ready.

I filled the jars, wiped the rims with a clean damp cloth, and put on the lid and screw band.  Then I loaded the jars into the rack in the water bath and lowered them to the bottom.  I had to wait awhile for the water to come back to a boil, but then I just had to boil them for 5 minutes and then I took them out and let them cool for 24 hours on the counter.

Jars loaded, ready to be lowered.

Jars lowered, waiting for water to return to a boil.

I know the lids are sealed because the center is depressed (no popping when pressed), and I can pick up the lid by the edge and it stays sealed.    

The jars had a fine white powder on the outside, I think it was residue from the metal rack.  It wiped right off.  

Adventures in Canning

I recently finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and became very interested in learning how to preserve food.  My friend Amy had some experience canning jams and beans, so we decided to try tomato sauce, a first for both of us.  We chose to make the "Family Secret Tomato Sauce" recipe from the book, also posted on the book's website. 

We bought "second" tomatoes from a local organic farm for $1 a pound.  Second tomatoes are just regular tomatoes that are too ugly to sell for full price; they might be shaped funny or have weird marks on them, but they still taste great, which is perfect when you need to buy a lot and are just going to mash them up anyway.  We just had to call a couple days in advance and place the order.  We bought all the spices in bulk at the Co-op, and the onions from the Organic Growers Club at OSU (they just happened to be selling them the Friday before).  

The recipe starts by calling for tomato puree from 30 pounds of tomatoes.  So, since Amy has an awesome blender ("will it blend?") we just started dropping those babies in and pureeing the crap out of them.  Pretty soon we had filled a 5 gallon pot with hot pink tomato liquid.  Very watery liquid.

Hmm.  The recipe said we'd be using a 3 gallon pot.  Did we miss something here?  Slightly concerned, we added all the spices, stirred it up, and left it to simmer while we went shopping for canning jars.    

After about 4 hours, it was supposed to have reduced to a more typical sauce-like consistency.  This is what ours looked like.  Pretty much the same, not thickened at all.        

It was 6pm on a Sunday night.  We had planned on doubling the recipe, so we still had a whole second batch left to make!  It was nowhere near thick enough to be sauce, so we were sure we had done something wrong.  

After browsing various websites, it looked like maybe we should have blanched the tomatoes, peeled, seeded and squeezed out excess juice, then pureed.  Even though that was probably the best way to do it, there was no way in hell I could be convinced to put in that kind of effort this late in the day for the second batch.  We really did want to make something worth canning though, so in the end, rather than peeling the tomatoes, we cored and quartered them, ran them through the food processor to dice them, then strained out the excess liquid.  The result was a much better tomato product.

In order to salvage the long-cooked flavor of the spices and onions that had been stewing all day, we ladled off about 2/3 of the thin tomato sauce and replaced it with the chunkier tomatoes until we had the consistency we wanted.  

Around 9:30 pm, we finally had our sauce, albeit about half the amount we were hoping for.  It tasted really good!  

The thin tomato sauce that we ladled off did not go to waste either.  It was the perfect base for minestrone.  We also used some to make chili mac!  We followed the recipe from our beloved America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, replacing any tomato products with an equivalent amount of our "special tomato base".    

In the end, even though we had some mishaps, I'm way less intimidated by canning than I was in the past.  I'm even considering attempting to make apple butter this fall, my dad's favorite!