Mom/Preservationist…The big weekend canning project!
I posted the other week about Bountiful Baskets and how much
fruit and vegetables I have been getting from them. Not only do the baskets
themselves give you lots of produce, but the add-ons are often too good to
resist. 25 pounds of mixed citrus for $15?! 25 pounds of Roma tomatoes for $12?
Yes please! Well the problem with buying all this stuff is that you have to use
it before it goes bad, so this weekend, surrounded by citrus, tomatoes and plenty
of other great stuff over-running our kitchen, Tim and I rolled up our sleeves
and got canning.
I used to be a reluctant canner, jam and the occasional
pickle would be all I would can. Fear of botulism kept me from getting too into
canning. However, last winter, realizing we would be moving by spring and
needing to use up the dozen chicken carcasses in our freezer I let Tim talk me
into making and canning chicken stock. 19 quarts of it. Once safely through my
first pressure canning experience I lost my fear of it. This past summer we
expanded our pressure canning repertoire and canned 14 quarts of whole
tomatoes. There is something so reassuring about pulling out big glass jars of
produce you put up. And I know exactly what is in it: tomatoes, lemon juice and
salt. End of story. Except for the jars in which we added some oregano and
rosemary.
So back to this weekend wherein we have several flats of
empty jars, two canners and mountains of produce.
A quick note on my canners. The one on the left is my mother's Presto aluminum canner from the 1970's. Still works great, unless you need to water bath process quart jars, it is a little too shallow for that. The one on the right is my brand new All American heavy cast aluminum pressure canner/cooker that the best Christmas present ever fairy brought me this Christmas. Works great, it is slower to come up to pressure than the smaller Presto, but quicker to cool down, and as anyone who pressure cans know, half the time of the project is spent building up pressure and bringing it back down again.
Tim started out working on tomatoes. We got a 25 pound box
of Roma Tomatoes so we decided to make sauce and to try a batch of homemade
ketchup. The recipe for the ketchup comes from “The Homemade Pantry: 101 foodsyou can stop buying and start making.” by Alana Chernila. This book was a
recent purchase to go along with the recent direction our cooking and eating is
taking, (but that’s another blog post) and is my new favorite cook book.
Tim seeded and cored the tomatoes and cooked them down with
onion, garlic and spices. After a good run through with the immersion blender
and the addition of vinegar, brown sugar and molasses we had ketchup. One
recipe uses 6 pounds of tomatoes (we might have used a little more) and we got 3
quarts of ketchup plus a little left over that went straight into the fridge.
Now for the critique of homemade ketchup. This recipe is
heavily spiced. We ended up adding extra brown sugar and molasses to get a more
‘ketchupy’ taste. Tim really likes the finished product. I think it tastes more
like the base for an Indian sauce then actual ketchup. I could see it as the
start to a good butter chicken sauce. Still, it was a good experiment and hey,
how many people can say they made their own ketchup?
Homemade (spiced) Ketchup
From “The Homemade Pantry” by Alana Chernila.
2 T olive oil, 1 C diced onion, 5 garlic cloves, minced
6 pounds ripe tomatoes: peeled, seeded and cored. (We did
not peel and it turned out fine)
3 t kosher salt
1 T paprika, 1 t ground cinnamon, ¼ t ground cloves, 1 T
celery salt (we used celery seed)
½ t ground cumin, ¼ t dry mustard, 1 ½ T chili powder, ½ t
ground pepper
¼ C apple cider vinegar & ¼ C white vinegar
1 T brown sugar, 1 T honey (we also added molasses)
Canning specific instructions: ½” headspace, water bath
process for 30 minutes.
Now that the ketchup was out of the way we started on tomato
sauce. We saved the insides of the tomatoes we used for ketchup and added those
in with more of the tomatoes, plus onion, garlic, bay leaf and oregano and
cooked it all down. Salt and lemon juice were added to up the acidity and we
ladled the sauce into quart jars. The tomato sauce we pressure canned at 15
pounds of pressure for 45 minutes. I think that was actually a little long, but
we are at a higher elevation here (around 4000 ft) and we added the extra time
just to be safe.