One of the joys of tending a garden is having a surplus of veggies and being able to can them. Typically I end up with a few cans of pickles each year and leave it at that but this year I was introduced to Strawberry Day and Peach Day at the farmers market and decided to expand my canning horizons! I'd never tried this before because for some weird reason I felt like I needed to grow anything I preserved. I'm glad I gave up on that bizarre requirement this year. When Kim told me about Strawberry Day at the farmers market I had grandiose dreams of strawberry jams and preserves! And so it all started with $20 and a flat of strawberries.
First thing was first, I cleaned and picked through my haul to remove all the bruised and rotting fruit. Then I dried them before chopping and freezing the berries. I decided to freeze them instead of processing them right away because I was too busy to can at the time. If I remember right we'd just started tearing down the deck or something like that. Either way, in the freezer they stayed until I had time to process them, which ended up being about 2 months. Freezing the berries had the wonderful side effect of softening them. Which made boiling them down much faster!
What made this canning spree much more fun was that I had company this time! Kim had never canned before and I was going to "teach" her. What really ended up happening is we both learned how to process fruit and I just showed her how to properly sanitize and then process glass jars.
The evening started with lots and lots of mushy strawberries (fresh from the freezer).
Key canning equipment here: A stock pot (or canning pot) with a canning rack inside it, large sauce pan for fruit boiling (two of the recipes called for Strawberry Puree), small sauce pan for lid prepping and medium sized lid for caramel making (one of the recipes was Strawberry Caramel). Not an eye was spared on the stove this day. We used them all with gusto! All canning recipes will be linked at the bottom for your canning pleasure!
Don't forget to wash your jars before you sanitize them...yeah I don't exactly know why either but do it anyways. After you've washed them throw them right into the water while it's warming up. You may break the glass if you try to put them in the boiling water instead of warming them up *with* the water (I forgot this at least 3 times in a row).
Next we boiled and mashed (with a potato masher) the strawberries and sugar (because we ignored the recipe and added the sugar first) until they appeared broken down. Sort of like mashed potatoes but much soupier and more like mashed strawberries.
Then we strained the strawberry mash through a metal screen to remove the skin and seeds.
The products of this step are an incredibly gross looking paste.
And a delicious looking (and tasting) strawberry puree.
Set aside your strawberry puree and pull those jars out of the water.
Fill the jars to about a half inch head space, place the activated lids on each jar and loosely tighten the bands. Go ahead and throw them back in your hot water (it's OK if you see air bubbles escaping) and make sure you have enough water to completely cover your jars. Process according to the recipe (which in this case was 15 mins).
Once the cans have finished processing, remove them from the water bath and place them on a rack to cool.
They looked so pretty! In hindsight we wished we'd used the smaller jelly jars for this recipe to make it easier to use before spoiling.
Our next recipe was Strawberry Caramel! Neither of us had a clue what we were getting ourselves into with this one. It starts of simple. Simple syrup that is.
You keep boiling and stirring this syrup until it begins to darken. Then you add the strawberry puree to hot syrup and continue to stir. The recipe will tell you that "the syrup with begin to spit and appear to seize. So take care". Ex...excuse me? Hell yeah it seized! It turned into what looked like rock candy in about 10 seconds flat! Take care?!?! What does that mean? Will it unseize?!
Yes...yes it does. A few more minutes of stirring the rock candy and the sugars dissolved again. So take care...
The recipe calls for a few more minutes of boiling to thicken up the caramel (or what appears to be blood). Like before, we were wishing we had the smaller jars for this recipe too so we wouldn't have to use all the caramel sauce at once. We processed this a little longer than normal just to be sure it was safe. Then set it aside with the purees.
Since the making of this strawberry caramel was nothing but hot boiling liquid, we hadn't had a chance to see what it tasted like until the remnant had cooled off in the pot. It was the most delicious, strawberry syrup we'd ever tried. This would be amazing on pancakes, cakes, ice cream, other fruit, a spoon even!
To wrap up the night, after we'd finished cleaning our mess, we topped a couple scoops of vanilla ice cream with the left over strawberry puree. It was so good it was practically sinful.
We ran out of time that night so we saved the peaches for another night and another blog post!
Recipes:
-Liz
