Brandied blueberries must be water-bath canned

This weekend, I mentioned on Twitter that I was canning some brandied blueberries:

Three pints of brandied blueberries processing in the canner now = me looking forward to winter
— Michele Grant (@opadit) July 6, 2014

The comment prompted a pal to ask:

@opadit Do those really need canning, or does the brandy preserve them?
— Brett Heller (@hellerbee) July 7, 2014

I responded:

@hellerbee Need canning because not totally submerged in alcohol; liquid is mostly a very light syrup, only about 15% brandy.
— Michele Grant (@opadit) July 7, 2014

And then I realized that I really, really wanted to go on and give @hellerbee a better, more complete explanation by unpacking the questions he may or may not have known he was actually asking with his tweet. So here goes . . .

Holiday home canning: rustic honey-cran sauce

We're a day late and a dollar short at the homestead here, posting this recipe the week after Thanksgiving. (Marisa at Food in Jars was more timely with her enviably tasty spiced cranberry jam a few weeks ago.) But cranberries are still on store shelves, and a lot of people will serve cranberries with Christmas dinner in a few weeks' time, so maybe a couple of readers will find this recipe useful still.

I'd promised to supply the cranberry sauce at my family's Thanksgiving gathering last week. As I set out my canning gear and the sauce ingredients, I found that I was short on sugar. I had some honey kicking around, though, so I improvised a little. Now, usually you want to be wary about varying from a USDA-tested recipe when you decide to home-can and store your final product. But I wasn't worried at all about safety here, because cranberries are so very tart and acidic that you have quite a bit of leeway before you would bring the sauce's pH up to an unsafe level. And they have so much pectin in them that they're pretty foolproof. In short, you can mess around a lot with home-canned cranberry recipes, and the result will almost certainly set up nicely and be safe to eat after keeping forever.

So that I would have enough sauce for Thanksgiving and Christmas, I started with two 12-ounce packages of cranberries. This recipe can be halved, but doing so would make for a very small batch for canning. The yield as presented here is 2 pints, 1 half-pint, and a few ounces left over for immediate use. The end result is a rustically chunky, honey-imbued cranberry sauce that stands up well with turkey and wild game.

Ingredients:

1 cup white sugar

1 cup honey

2 cups water

2 12-ounce packages of cranberries, rinsed

Method:

Combine sugar, honey, and water in a large saucepan and bring to a boil. Boil for 5 minutes. Add the cranberries and bring back to a boil. Cook the cranberries gently for 10 minutes, stirring as necessary. Press berries with a potato masher. Turn off heat and skim foam.

Fill hot pint and half-pint jars with hot sauce, leaving 1/4 inch headspace, apply lids and bands, and process 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath canner.

Use immediately, or let sit a few weeks for flavors to blend.

Note: If you don't skim the foam from top of the sauce, then it will end up in the jars, and you'll have artificially full jars. The foam won't be unpleasant to eat, but the sauce won't be as aesthetically pleasing in the jar or on the table. Your best bet is to let the sauce sit for a moment after you take it off the heat and then run a large spoon over the surface, generously scooping out foam. I like to drop it into a small bowl and use it on toast or an accompaniment to cheese and crackers.

CSA home canning: green beans and carrots

About 5 parts beans to 1 part carrots

Hauled out the pressure canner again yesterday and put up 5 pints of green beans and carrots. The jars should come in handy for side dishes and soup this winter.

I had a surplus of produce this week because a friend was out of town and offered me their household's Community-Supported Agriculture vegetable share. Since I follow the Rowhouse Livin' Law of Hand-Me-Downs ("always accept hand-me-downs"), I jumped at the opportunity. I ended up filling my fridge to bursting, but by Sunday it was getting clear to me that it would be impossible to consume everything we had before this week's delivery. I knew what I had to do.

The haul included about 2 quarts of string beans and a bunch of red-skinned carrots. I carefully washed the beans and chopped them into uniform pieces. Then I peeled the carrots and sliced them. I tossed it all into a large stockpot, covered with water, brought to a boil, and simmered for 5 minutes. I packed them into pint jars and added cooking liquid, leaving 1 inch headspace. Then into the pressure canner they went.

Timing: Carrots (pints) require 25 minutes, and beans (pints) take 20 minutes. The rule of thumb is to go by the time for the vegetable that takes the longest, so I processed them at 10 pounds pressure for 25 minutes. By which I mean I processed them at 240 degrees F plus a little bit, for 25 minutes and a little bit. That way, I have some wiggle room if the temperature starts to fall and I don't catch it right away.

I still feel that I haven't done much canning this year. On the other hand, every time I run something through the pressure canner, I end up with meal-type foods, as opposed to condiments, sauces, and jams or fruit butters. So it goes a lot further for stocking my pantry for easy dinners and emergencies. We haven't had much of a hurricane season this year, but it ain't over yet, and we're overdue for a harsh winter. As I mentioned earlier, I'm sad to have missed my usual small-jar products this season, but our shelves really are filling up. Just not with the sweet treats I usually produce too much of.

CSA home canning: two-day habanero hot sauce

When the CSA delivery gives you habanero peppers, make 20% habanero hot sauce.

If you are not familiar with home canning, please see the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This recipe does not substitute for a complete set of instructions on safe home canning practices.

I didn't have an actual recipe for this, so I based my work on a tested recipe for pepper relish. It yielded just under 2 pints.

One wide-mouth half-pint, three 4-ounce jars; another 4 ounces
ended up in the fridge for immediate use

Ingredients:

half a medium white onion, finely chopped

4 cups finely chopped sweet peppers

1 cup finely chopped habanero peppers, seeds retained

3 tablespoons canning (non-iodized) salt

white vinegar to cover

Method:

Combine the onion, peppers, and salt in a large, non-reactive pot. Bring to a boil and simmer 10 minutes. Take off heat, cover, and let sit overnight.

Heat again to boiling. Taking care with the fumes rising from the pan, crush the peppers with a potato masher (or use an immersion mixer). Heat through. Take off heat, cover, and let sit overnight again; or start the canning process.

To can, bring the sauce to boiling again. Simmer 10 minutes. Then pack heated sauce into hot jars, leaving half-inch headspace. Carefully release air bubbles from jars and add more sauce, if needed, to bring back to half-inch headspace. Clean rims of jars and apply lids and bands. Process pints, half-pints, and 4-ounce jars 15 minutes in a boiling-water bath canner.

Let sit at least 6 weeks before opening for use.

Note: Handle the habanero peppers safely. Some people hold the pepper with a fork while chopping with a chef's knife. Most people advise wearing rubber gloves. I'm a hippie who hates disposables, so I pinched the habaneros by the stem and used a 5-inch kitchen utility knife. I scraped the seeds and chopped pieces into a prep bowl, then dropped the stem end into the trash, without using my bare fingers anywhere on the peppers' flesh. The cutting board went straight into the dishwasher.

Grab-bag pressure canning: mixed vegetables for soup

After a weekend getaway to the woods in August, I came home to a fridge full of CSA vegetables that needed to be used up before I hauled home the next CSA delivery. The vegetables were still in excellent shape, so I pulled out the pressure canner and went to town.

There are two rules of thumb for pressure canning mixed vegetables. One, chop the vegetables into pieces of uniform size, so that they heat and cook evenly. And two, put whatever grab-bag of vegetables you want into the mix, but set your timer for the vegetable that takes the longest time to safely can.

Examples, all in quarts: If you're canning a mix of potatoes (40 minutes), green beans (25 minutes), and carrots (30 minutes), then bring the canner up to pressure and keep it there for 40 minutes. If you're canning a mix of potatoes, green beans, carrots, onions, zucchini, tomatoes, and whole-kernel corn (maize) -- I told you it was a grab-bag -- then it needs to process for the time it'll take to safely deal with the corn, which is 85 minutes.

But it's a little more complicated than just that rule of thumb. You also have to take into account that, when you pack chopped, mixed vegetables into a jar, the product is more compact than it would be if it were just one type of vegetable. To illustrate, when you pack asparagus into a jar, you stand the spears upright and slide them in like a packet of pencils; but when you chop them more finely and add other stuff to the mix, you get more mass in the jar. (Think BB's or ball bearings, versus marbles.) And thus it will take more time to heat the jar through. So the National Center for Home Food Preservation adds an extra 5 minutes to its own instructions for mixed vegetables, even though no single ingredient, individually, requires more than 85 minutes to process.

As I've mentioned before, I don't like to argue with science. So while my instinct said, "85 minutes," my hands said, "90 minutes," and I sure did heat up my kitchen that day. According to Facebook:

4:12 p.m.: Off to run a significant percentage of CSA veg thru the pressure canner. See you on the flip side.

4:58 p.m.: OK, 4 quarts of mixed CSA vegetables for soup in the canner, set to process for 90 minutes because I included sweet corn. At least it's not too hot today.

6:35 p.m.: Stupid corn. It's a million degrees in here now!

And the result:

Photo taken with my antiquephone: sweet corn, carrots, green beans,
zucchini, onion, and tomatoes

Each quart jar there will make for a very quick soup this winter: add water or broth, heat to boiling, and add cooked pasta or rice. Sprinkle parmesan on top or serve a little cheese on the side, throw some bread or rolls on the table, and that will warm you up in November or February. I'll get three if not four portions of soup out of each of those jars. Looking forward to it already!

Home canning: apple butter

Apple butter marks the end of the summer canning season here at Rowhouse Livin'. We've been steadily putting up batches of jam and marmalade since June, but now it's slim pickin's for fruit at the farmers market, and that means it's time for apple butter. Into the kitchen!

As always, if you are not familiar with home canning, please see the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This recipe does not substitute for a complete set of instructionson safe home canning practices.

We're going for a full canner load of 7 pints. First, carefully wash and then coarsely chop about 8 pounds of apples . . .

Canning winter squash the USDA way

I've been a little horrified by some of the YouTube videos and blog entries posted by home canners and "preppers" who I'm sure are very well-meaning, skilled, and as yet not dead from botulism. I'm no nutrition expert; my kitchen sure isn't a food laboratory; and really, Jim, I'm a lawyer, not a microbiologist -- so what do I know about safe home canning practices?

As it turns out, I do know a lot about home canning. I've been canning for at least 15 years. But since I'm not a microbiologist, and since my kitchen isn't food laboratory, and since I'm not a nutrition expert, I rely on other experts to put home canning practices and recipes through scientific testing under controlled laboratory conditions. I'm thrilled that the USDA and various land-grant university extension services do that work for me, and I'm happy to use their results.

Last week I discussed that a home canning blogger offered a good looking but problematic guide to putting up winter squash. This vegetable is particularly tricky to can at home because its water content and texture can vary so much. In order to make sure the home canning process thoroughly kills the bacterial spores that produce the deadly botulinum toxin in this uneven vegetable, you're supposed to make sure that you: (1) pack the jars with heated one-inch cubes of squash, never purée; and (2) process the jars in a pressure canner, pints for 55 minutes and quarts for 90 minutes.

I don't know why some of these Internet home canners don't follow these two rules. (At the link above, for example, they canned purée and processed the quart jars for under 90 minutes.) If the issue is that they prefer purée to cubes, home-canned cubes are simple enough to mash or purée when the jar is opened. If it's an issue of processing time, well, I think there's little difference between 75, 80, or the USDA-recommended 90 minutes. An extra 15 minutes of stove fuel will do very little harm to my utility budget, but an under-processed jar of food can make my household very ill.

You know what else I see on some of these Internet home canners' websites and videos? Messy kitchens. Messy both in clutter and in dirt. Again, I don't have a sterile laboratory of a kitchen myself. But I clear off my workspaces, lay out all my tools ahead of time in an almost complete mise en place, and clean my utensils and dispose of waste as I go with a canning project. And I keep my fingernails short. Who are these people with manicures? Do they really want that acrylic, varnish, and adhesive getting into the jars? Ew.

But on to the Rowhouse Livin' project. We canned six average sized butternut squash. As always, if you are not familiar with home canning, please see the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This blog entry does not substitute for a complete set of instructionson safe home canning practices. A full guide for canning is especially important where, as here, we're talking pressure canning. This food item CANNOT be safely canned in a boiling water bath canner. More!

Rowhouse Livin' gin

Rhubarb seems to be a trend lately among farmers market aficionados, chefs who want to feature seasonal ingredients, and hipsters and homesteaders getting into old-timey recipes. Who can blame them? I grew up on my own grandma's rhubarb pie -- not strawberry-rhubarb, just straight rhubarb -- made from the patch growing by her front stoop, and it helped make me who I am today: sour, stringy as I get older, and a good source of Vitamin C. Not that this makes our household more authentic than someone who first tried rhubarb in the past few years. But let's just say that some five years ago I was thrilled to have found some rhubarb at the Whole Foods, and when I gleefully tossed it onto the conveyor belt at the checkout, the young cashier with 1980's-style glasses and her half-shaved hair said, "OK, I give up. What's this?" And I desperately wanted to answer her, "Oh, it's something I've been eating for decades, but you've probably never heard of it."

A local purveyor sells a rhubarb-infused spirit. It's too sweet for my taste, and it's too expensive for my wallet. (And it's not exactly local any more.) Here's the Rowhouse Livin' version.

Clean and roughly chop enough rhubarb to fit loosely into four one-quart mason jars. Cover completely with a mid- or low-priced, unflavored vodka. (I use Jacquin's, local to Philadelphia.) Close the jars with two-piece caps. Let the jars sit in a dark corner, away from heat, for at least six weeks. Check the jars for evaporation and top off with vodka if necessary, though this is unlikely. Gently shake the jars three or four times during the six weeks.

Prepare your storage bottles by washing them in hot, soapy water. Rinse in hot water, and then purge out the water droplets by rinsing with a jigger of plain vodka, much as you'd do in a chemistry lab with your glassware, except with grain spirit instead of lab-grade ethanol or acetone.

Strain the infusion through a colander or strainer, squeezing or pressing the rhubarb; and then let pass through a coffee filter, changing filters as they get clogged. Store indefinitely in tightly closed, food-safe decorative bottles:

We'll use the jar first, and the whole stash will last
about three years

Because it's unsweetened, a less hardy urban home economist may want to keep some simple syrup on hand. Without sweetener, over ice with a splash of water it's refreshing in the summer and bracing in the winter. Bottoms up!

Home canning: vegetarian soup stock

Last week I canned two quarts of vegetarian soup broth. Usually I'm happy to use store-bought soup concentrates, but it's good to have on hand something that doesn't require added water to use, and in a real pinch doesn't even need to be heated up. Just a bottle opener and we're ready to go. To begin:

Math and more photos after the jump . . .

Home canning: peach-cantaloupe marmalade

This is an old-timey recipe, one I found in a tattered old government publication from my grandmother's farmhouse some years ago.

"Preserving Fruits and Vegetables in the Home," publication
dated 1929 from the Dominion of Canada

Let's take a look inside at today's recipe:

"Seal and store." This is why grandma called her jars "sealers."

Dig that recipe, though: 12 peaches? An entire cantaloupe? And 3 oranges and a lemon? That is an absurd quantity of fruit mass you'll be dealing with for the marmalade, which should be a small-batch product -- usually we want our jams and jellies to max out at about 6 cups of fruit, or we're far more likely to get a syrup than a jelled, set product. Were fruits in 1929 really that much smaller than today's produce? So! Modern version and illustrative photos after the jump!

Home canning: Onion pickle

I found a few huge, beautiful, sweet white onions at the farmers market in July, along with some sharp red "torpedo" onions. I took 6 white onions and 2 red onions and essentially used the Ball Blue Book recipe for vinegared red onions, but modified along the lines of what Food in Jars came up with a little while ago. I left out sugar for a sour-only pickle, dropping cloves, peppercorns, mustard seed, and celery seed into the jars before packing in the heated, sliced onions, and I ended up with these beauties:

All, and I mean all, the sample recipes I found called for sugar,
which I left out. Hope that wasn't a mistake

They've been ageing for a few weeks now. When they first hopped out of the canner, the red torpedoes had stained the jars bright, bright pink. Now they've mellowed to a crazy brown-mustard parchment color, and you can't tell the torpedoes from the sweet whites.

The Rowhouse Livin' household doesn't consume a lot of pickles, so I hardly ever make them, whether onions, or cucumbers, or any other type of pickle. I used to make bread-and-butter pickles, but after a few intervals of realizing it was taking me two years for us to finish a mere five pints of pickles, I decided to leave them out of my canning repertoire for a while. So I'm realistic and imagine it will take me a while to get through these onions. I see them as a topping for salads, or a winter sandwich condiment, or a relish to accompany the pizzas I make for my Sunday semi-potluck dinners. I'm really looking forward to popping the lids and seeing how they turned out.

Recipe:

If you are not familiar with home canning, please see the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This recipe does not substitute for a complete set of instructions on safe home canning practices. Jar size: pints. Slice the onions in half lengthwise, then into narrow slices crosswise. Add to a large saucepot, cover with vinegar, add 1 generous tablespoon non-iodized salt, and bring to a boil. Gently simmer onions for 10 minutes.

Into each pint jar, add a few whole cloves, a few peppercorns, 1/4 teaspoon whole mustard seed, and 1/4 teaspoon celery seed. Fill heated jars with hot onions and cooking liquid, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Process pints 10 minutes (sea level) in a boiling-water bath canner. For this batch, 8 onions yielded 6 pints.