Author: craig

How to Can Rhubarb Juice

Posted on by craig

Every year we’re faced with the same problem with the produce that we freeze—how the heck are we going to fit it all in the freezer?

Until last year, our freezer space was limited to our fridge freezer (we have a side-by-side fridge/freezer, so it’s a bit more room than a top-only freezer), a big chest freezer at my mom’s place, and (for emergencies only) my mom’s fridge freezer. Every year we try to preserve more and more with the goal of providing a year’s worth of food, and to do that means having the space and equipment. And those three freezers simply weren’t enough.

So, late last summer we bought a smaller chest freezer for our place…and quickly filled it up and ran out of room. About a month or so later, we bought a second smaller chest freezer, which we keep at my mom’s place. That did the trick for last year!

This year, though, we were faced with a record rhubarb haul—115 pounds—which is something we normally store in the freezer. We have SO MUCH frozen rhubarb. The big chest freezer was entirely rhubarb and nothing else, and half our fridge freezer was also rhubarb. We also juice cucumbers and freeze the juice, which filled one of our small chest freezers to the brim. It was fine for a while, but now as the peppers, Brussels sprouts, carrots, and more cucumbers are coming in—all of which go in the freezer—we were faced with the question of if we need to buy yet another freezer.

I was determined not to spend that money, so I thought about what the key problem is.

It’s the rhubarb.

We needed to get some of it out of the freezer.

We had to leave some as frozen rhubarb for my step-dad who makes pies every summer (so he’ll use this summer’s rhubarb for pies when he’s back next summer), we use some for flavouring kombucha, and we have some extended family that want some bags of rhubarb. But, in all, those uses account for maybe a sixth of what we have.

So, I started juicing.

A big batch of that juice went straight into a bucket for some rhubarb wine, but the rest I canned.

Canning rhubarb juice is quite simple and safe; rhubarb is acidic enough on its own that nothing is needed to make it safe for canning. Most recipes call for some optional sugar to counter the tartness of rhubarb, but it’s optional.

So, over the course of two days, I canned about 35 pints (17.5 litres) of rhubarb juice. Now the next challenge is to see if we use all that juice over the coming year, to see if it’s a useful project. I have some ideas of how to use it—but those are at the end of the post!

Step one: Juice the rhubarb

There are two ways to juice rhubarb—both are just as effective, but one is far easier and quicker.

Last year I bought myself a steam juicer. It’s a handy contraption of three interlocking pots—the bottom one boils water, and the steam gets vented into the top pot where the fruit/veg is kept. The steam heats the fruit/veg and eventually the juice bursts from it, dripping and draining into the middle pot. The middle pot has a drain hose built into it to drain the juice.

To juice rhubarb using a steam juicer, simply set the pots up, fill the bottom one with water, fill the top one with chopped rhubarb (fresh or frozen), and turn it on and let it do its work. I find it takes about 45 minutes for the rhubarb to fully juice with a steam juicer.

In the absence of a steam juicer, you can juice rhubarb using a pot on the stove. To do that, simply put twelve cups of chopped rhubarb in a pot along with four cups of water (and you can use this 4:1 ratio for larger or smaller batches). Simmer it until the rhubarb breaks down and the liquid turns a bright pink; this takes about twenty minutes.

Pour the pot’s contents into a jelly bag and let the juice drip out into a bowl or pot below. Let it drain for at least two hours and do not squeeze or compress the bag, or else you’ll get solids coming through and making a cloudy juice. In the absence of a jelly bag, you could likely use a wire mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth. It may take 1-2 hours to fully drain.

Canning rhubarb juice

Rhubarb juice is acidic enough for canning straight as is, but most recipes suggest adding sugar to improve the taste and cute down on the tartness. Knowing what you’re going to use the juice for would help determine if you want to add sugar or not. If it’s for drinking, then I’d recommend adding sugar. But if you’re going to eventually use it for jelly or other recipes that call for rhubarb juice, I’d recommend not adding sugar since the recipe is counting on the juice to be free of added sugar.

I chose to go with no sugar since I didn’t know what my final usage of the juice would be. Besides, I could always add sugar when I open it if I need to.

Safely canning rhubarb juice relies on the juice going into the jars warm, so start by heating the juice on the stove, bringing it to a simmer. If you’re adding sugar, now’s the time to do so, and give it a good stir to ensure all the sugar dissolves.

When it’s thoroughly heated, transfer juice to canning jars, leaving a quarter inch headspace. Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with vinegar and then seal the jar with two part canning lids, screwed to fingertip tight.

Process in a water bath canner for 10 minutes, with the ten minute timer starting once the pot is brought to a full boil. The pot must boil for the entire ten minutes. When the ten minutes is over, remove the pot from heat and let it sit for five minutes. Then carefully remove jars using a jar lifter and place them on a thick towel on a table or counter overnight to cool and seal. In the morning, check that jars have sealed (lids bend downward). If they’re sealed, they can be stored on a shelf for a year or more before being consumed; if any jars are not sealed, put these in the fridge and use them first.

Using rhubarb juice

There are a number of uses for rhubarb juice that come to mind:

  • Use juice to make rhubarb ginger gin using my recipe here. Just pour in rhubarb juice instead of chunks of rhubarb. I haven’t made this from juice yet, so you will need to experiment with how much juice to add. It’s best to start with less than you think you need since you can always add more juice, but you can’t remove juice if you put in too much. This recipe alteration also lets you reduce the sugar if you want a dryer gin, since you’re not relying on the sugar to draw the juice out of rhubarb.
  • Use juice to make rhubarb wine. Instead of letting the sugar and rhubarb sit, just use rhubarb juice and all other ingredients (including sugar) in the same proportions. I’ve found rhubarb wine made from juice rather than letting rhubarb and sugar sit results in a much smoother and more pleasant wine.
  • If you added sugar to your rhubarb juice, you could drink it as-is or mix it with other juices for a tasty blend.
  • Whip up a batch of rhubarb jelly.
  • Make a batch of rhubarb simple syrup—equal parts sugar and rhubarb juice—and use it for tasty cocktails and youth-friendly mocktails. We’ve also used rhubarb simple syrup in place of plain simple syrup for other cocktail and baking recipes.

Rhubarb Juice

Easy and tasty, canned rhubarb juice keeps the taste of summer fresh all year round.
5 from 2 votes
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Prep Time 15 minutes
Cook Time 45 minutes
Canning Time 10 minutes
Total Time 1 hour 10 minutes
Course Beverage
Cuisine American

Equipment

  • Steam Canner (Optional)
  • Water Bath Canner
  • Canning Jars and Lids (Pint size or smaller)

Ingredients
  

  • 12 cups Rhubarb, slice in small pieces
  • 1 cup Sugar (Optional)

Instructions
 

  • Juice the rhubarb.
    With a steam juicer:
    Load rhubarb into steam juicer and place on stove. It should take about 45 minutes for the rhubarb to fully juice. Make sure the pot at the bottom doesn't boil dry.
    Without a steam juicer:
    Place 12 cups of rhubarb and 4 cup of water in a pot. (Use this 4:1 ratio if you have more or less rhubarb.) Bring to a boil then reduce heat to a simmer; the rhubarb should break down in 10-15 minutes. Strain mixture using a wire mesh strainer or a jelly bag. Resist the temptation to squeeze the bag or press the rhubarb against the strainer as this will push solids through and you won't have a clear juice. If you leave it for 1-2 hours, it should fully drip through.
  • Transfer juice to a pot and bring to a simmer. Add sugar, if using, and stir until dissolved.
  • Transfer hot rhubarb juice to canning jars (pint size or smaller). Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. Screw on two-part canning lids to fingertip tightness.
  • Process in a water bath canner for ten minutes. (Put jars on rack in canner and fill canner with hot water until jars are submerged by at least an inch of water. Bring pot to a boil and start the ten minute timer when it's boiling. The canner must boil for the full ten minutes; if it stops, bring to a boil again and restart the timer.) When done, remove from heat and let sit for five minutes.
  • Transfer jars to a thick towel on a counter or table and let sit undisturbed overnight. In the morning check that jars have sealed (lids are curved downward). If they're sealed they can be stored for at least a year before using. If any did not seal, put these jars in the fridge and use them first.
Keyword rhubarb juice

Garden Update: October 2024

Posted on by craig

Things have been a bit quiet around the blog lately. That’s partly due to some employment changes (I took on a new job and am adjusting to new hours and roles, etc.), but it’s largely due to everything needing to be harvested all at once.

The last two weeks have been a canning bonanza.

First there was SO MANY TOMATOES. At this point we have a year’s worth of salsa, pasta sauce, butter chicken sauce, and crushed tomatoes, so we’re juicing the rest of it. And that takes quite a bit of work.

Looking ahead, I knew I’d need more freezer space, so I went about juicing a bunch of rhubarb and canning the juice.

I use a steam juicer for easy juicing of rhubarb, then can the juice.

And then there were the beets. Eighty-eight pounds of beets. I pickled most of them and pressure canned some in water.

While all this was going on I also set up a batch of jalapeño wine, juiced all our grapes for grape wine, set up rhubarb wine, and set up beet wine.

And while I was working away in the kitchen, John was outside harvesting well over a hundred pounds of squash, a couple hundred pounds of potatoes, and enough carrots and parsnips to feed an army.

And there is still more to go.

Preparing for winter

As we harvest our produce, we’re leaving the property as bare earth again. But there’s still a lot of work to do before things are finally down for the winter.

The most important is planting the garlic, which John will do toward the end of this month. He’ll insulate it with squash leaves and other garden greenery. The garlic will hibernate over winter and then be one of the first things to break through the soil in the spring.

While we didn’t get much of anything from our mushroom beds, we might try overwintering them with squash leaves too. If we can successfully do that, it’s possible the mushrooms will spring to life when the weather warms again next year. If we don’t see action, we’ll try again with new mushroom kits.

And once the urgent canning is done, likely in early November, we’ll turn to canning the less urgent things. We have a ton of dried beans to can in water so they’re ready for cooking. I might also make some pumpkin purée and stick it in the freezer. And as we near January, we’ll figure out strategies for using or preserving the squash and potatoes before they go bad (which usually happens around February).

The first step is to let the beans fully dry before storing them, so I’m leaving them in cookie sheets to dry without going mouldy.

Enjoying the fruits of labour

I have cursed out loud several times these past couple weeks at the record harvests we’ve brought in. (Squash was about the same and potatoes were a little less, but most other things far out-produced last year.)

But I know come December when it’s all truly and finally done that I will be glad we did it. We’ll have veggies for a full year, fruit for several months, juice for maybe eight or nine months, and proteins (beans) to supplement dinners for a full year.

We are overrun with jars filled with produce, but it’s a good thing. Once things calm down, we’ll work at moving everything to our storage room and organizing it all. For now, it’s sitting in crates in the kitchen.

Not only does this mean convenience—I have everything on hand and in the case of things like veggies in the freezer, they’re already peeled and chopped—but it saves a TON of money over the year through grocery savings. People keep telling me about the rising cost of produce at the store and that hasn’t hit me because we buy next to no produce.

And as the spring rolls around, I’ll be ready to do it all over again.

Photo dump

Here are some snaps I’ve taken of the wind-down of the garden.

We got a record haul of 88 pounds of beets. Our previous record was 55 pounds.
And some of those beets were massive.
It hasn’t been the greatest year for peppers, but the habaneros are starting to come in.
We harvested all of our tomatoes and put the plants in our compost. We’ve got four crates of green tomatoes that we’re leaving out to allow them to ripen. I also have some green tomato recipes that I’ll likely pull out once the rush of preserving is done and I can circle back to these.
I had a week off between jobs and literally canned about 150 jars. Most were pickled beets, some were pressure canned beets, and the rest was tomato juice and rhubarb juice.
Our potato harvest wasn’t so great this year. We got four half-filled Ikea bags, whereas we normally have four or five filled-to-the-brim Ikea bags. However, we always have way too many potatoes, so we’ll see if this ends up being a reasonable amount.
We had a nice haul of squash, ending up with about as much as we normally have. Most of it was butternut squash, a few pumpkins, and a handful of pumpkin squash (a green squash shaped like a pumpkin).
We like to let our pumpkins stay out until right before a frost—this lets them get nice and orange, but also doubles as Halloween and autumn decorations since we grow our pumpkins in the front yard.
On the left is grape wine and on the right is jalapeño wine. The grape vine in our yard had a label that said “red wine grapes”, so I’m quite excited to taste this. I made grape wine last year with a friend’s concord grapes and it tasted like spiked grape juice; I’m hoping this is more wine-like. For the jalapeño wine, this is completely new to me, but it’s supposed to be good!

How to Make Bread and Butter Pickles

Posted on by craig

I’ve heard it said that in every relationship, there’s one person who loves pickles and one person who hates pickles, and whenever they have burgers, the pickle-hater donates their pickles to the pickle-lover.

That’s certainly the case with me and my husband. I do not like pickles and he will gladly take my pickles so he can have double pickles on his burger. It happened last night, in fact.

But when you garden and you grow a ton of cucumbers, it’s hard to not pickle them. It’s easy to do, it uses up cucumbers, it looks pretty on the shelf, and it keeps one half of this relationship happy.

When I do up a batch of pickles, my favourite is bread and butter pickles. This is partly because this is the only and only type of pickle I find reasonably tasty—but please don’t fear, because I regularly get requests to make these pickles, so for pickle lovers these ones are amazingly tasty!

The other reason I like making these is because I find them much more visually appealing than other types of pickles. In addition to cucumber slices, bread and butter pickles also have slivered onions and spices like mustard seed and celery seed.

Preparing the cucumbers and onions

We have a habit of letting our cucumbers grow too large. We primarily use them for juicing, so larger cucumbers means more juice. For pickles, though, you want smaller cucumbers. Since these will be sliced cucumbers, though, it’s okay if they’re a little on the large side.

Start by slicing ten cups of cucumbers. Slices should be approximately 1/4 inch thick.

Then thinly slice or sliver four cups of onions. I usually cut my onion in eighths so the slices are not too long, but this can be personal preference. I aim for about 1/4 inch thickness on the slices so they match the cucumbers.

Toss the cucumbers and onions in a glass or non-reactive metal bowl with half a cup of canning or pickling salt. Mix everything around really well, then cover and let it sit on the counter for about two hours. The salt will draw some of the water out of the cucumbers and onions, as well as remove the bitterness that might be in the cucumbers.

After two hours, drain the cucumbers and onions and give them a good rinse to get as much salt off as you can.

Preparing the brine

The brine is a vinegar and sugar mixture with spices added. This is what will actually pickle and flavour the cucumbers.

In a large pot, combine three cups white vinegar, two cups granulated sugar, two tablespoons mustard seed, one teaspoon celery seed, and one teaspoon ground tumeric. I typically use the yellow mustard seeds you can buy in the spice section of the grocery store, but if you have access to brown or black mustard seeds, you can use these instead. In general, the darker the mustard seed, the more intense the flavour and heat, so if you like a spicier pickle, it might be worth your while to seek out darker mustard seeds. (We grow mustard in our garden and we get black seeds, so sometimes I will throw these in.)

Bring the brine to a boil and stir or whisk to ensure all sugar is dissolved.

Making the pickles

The next step is to add the drained and rinsed cucumbers and onions to the brine. Bring the mixture back to a boil, then remove the pickles from heat and transfer them to pint jars.

This can be quite messy, no matter how careful you’re being.

I use a slotted spoon and a canning funnel to divide the solids into five pint jars. The canning funnel helps me stop from spilling all over the place but it’s still somehow the messiest recipe I make. Once everything is evenly divided between the five jars, then use a ladle to add brine to the jars, bringing everything up to a half inch headspace.

Because of how the cucumbers layer in the jar, there’s a good chance that air bubbles are trapped. While it’s impossible to completely remove them, you do want to do your best. Using a bubble remover tool, a wooden chopstick, plastic cutlery, or any non-metal utensil, jostle the contents of the jar to remove bubbles. If the fluid level goes down, add more brine to bring it back up to a half inch headspace. If you run out of brine, you can add white vinegar.

Canning the pickles

Because I find this recipe to be oddly messy, you’ll want to take extra care to wipe the rims of the jars with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. If there is any sugary brine left on the rim, it may prevent a proper seal.

Once the rims are cleaned, put on the two-part lid and screw to fingertip tightness.

Process in a boiling water canner for ten minutes.

If you’re newer to canning, this means to put them in a water bath canner and submerge with hot water until the water level is one to two inches above the top of the jars. Bring the water to a roiling boil and then start the ten minute timer. If the pot ever stops boiling, bring it back to a boil and restart the timer.

Remove from heat and let the pot sit for five minutes before carefully removing the jars with a jar lifter. Set them on a thick towel on a table or counter and let them rest overnight. In the morning, check to see that the lids have sealed (they bow downward). If they have, then they can sit on a shelf in a cool, dark place for approximately a year. They can sit longer, though quality (but not safety) can degrade after that. If any jars have not sealed, put them in the fridge and consume them first.

Bread and Butter Pickles

A sweet and savoury sliced pickle, perfect for sandwiches and burgers.
5 from 2 votes
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Prep Time 15 minutes
Cook Time 15 minutes
Resting Time 2 hours
Course condiments
Cuisine American

Equipment

  • Water Bath Canner
  • 5 Pint Mason Jars

Ingredients
  

  • 10 cups Pickling Cucumbers, Sliced ¼ Inch Thick
  • 4 cups Onion, Sliced ¼ Inch Thick
  • ½ cup Canning or Pickling Salt
  • 3 cups White Vinegar
  • 2 cups White Sugar
  • 2 Tbsp Mustard Seed
  • 1 tsp Celery Seed
  • 1 tsp Ground Turmeric

Instructions
 

  • Combine cucumbers, onions, and salt in a large non-reactive bowl (glass or stainless steel). Mix until cucumbers and onion are fully coated. Let sit for two hours.
  • After two hours, drain the cucumber/onion mixture and rinse well to remove most of the salt.
  • In a large stainless steel pot, combine remaining ingredients and bring to a boil, ensuring sugar has dissolved. Add cucumbers and onions to the pot and return to a boil.
  • Remove from heat and start filling jars. Using a slotted spoon, scoop solids equally into five pint-size mason jars. Top with brine, bringing contents up to ½ inch headspace. De-bubble the jars with a wooden chopstick or plastic utensil. Top up with brine to return to ½ inch headspace. If you are short on brine, you can add white vinegar.
  • Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with vinegar, then put on two-part lids and screw to fingertip tightness. Place in water bath canner and cover with hot water until jars are submerged by 1-2 inches of water. Process in canner for ten minutes; once the water starts boiling, start the ten minute timer. If at any point the water stops boiling, return to a boil and restart the ten minute timer.
  • When processing time is over, turn off heat and let canner sit for five minutes. Then, carefully using a jar lifter, remove jars from canner and place on a thick towel on a counter or table and let them sit undisturbed overnight.
  • In the morning, check to see that lids have sealed (they dip inward). If so, they can be stored on a shelf for up to a year; after which safety does not change, but quality may degrade. If any jars did not plea (they click when you press on them), store these jars in the fridge and consume them first.

Notes

If using quart jars, add 5 minutes to processing time.
Keyword bread and butter pickles

Garden Update: September 2024

Posted on by craig

While it seems this slow start to garden season this year delayed everything, it’s yet to be seen if it has an actual impact on harvest quantities. Things are coming in fast and heavy right now, but with the weather starting to cool and as we inch toward fall, the ripening might slow down and we might not see much more coming. The next few weeks will be crucial for stocking up this year’s haul—which provides next year’s food.

August harvests

While we’ve had a few things here and there that were ready early, like a few potatoes that needed to be harvested extra early and a couple bell peppers, here are the significant harvests this past month:

  • Corn, 28 cobs. This is down considerably from the 130 we had last year. However, we planted a significantly fewer corn than last year, and of what we planted, some stalks developed a fungal growth and several healthy cobs were stolen by the squirrel.
  • Cabbage, 2 heads. This is a new-to-us crop. I’m fermenting one right now to make sauerkraut and I gave the other one to my mom.
  • Garlic, 188 bulbs. This is a record haul for us. I’ve already dehydrated some to make garlic powder and with the rest I’m letting them cure so they store nicely in the pantry. I’ll likely pickle some.
  • Tomatoes, currently around 100 pounds, with lots more to go. I’m not sure if we’ll reach last year’s haul of 206 pounds. There are a lot of green tomatoes so we’ll still get a lot more, just not sure if it will be as much as last year.
  • Cucumber, currently around 60 pounds. There’s more coming, but I’m not sure how much. It’s not looking too promising for reaching last year’s haul of 173 pounds.

Likely coming this month are the massive hauls of our:

  • Black beans
  • Peppers (bell peppers and hot peppers)
  • Grapes
  • Onions
  • Beets
  • Carrots
  • Parsnips

And in early October before it gets too cold and wet we’ll harvest our squash, potatoes, and popcorn.

The salsa experiment

For the last several years I’ve been canning a very tasty salsa using a premade salsa mix intended for canning. You chop the tomatoes and throw them in a pot with the salsa mix and vinegar, cook it a bit, and then can it. It was super easy and delicious. But that salsa mix has been discontinued!

This year I need to find a new salsa recipe, but I’ve always found salsa recipes intimidating. The ones I’ve seen seem to require several different types of hot peppers and a whole list of spices. But I don’t want to go shopping for ingredients; I just want to pull them from my garden. I did some digging and found three easy recipes to try. I’ve canned them all up and will soon have a taste test with some family or friends to determine which is my new salsa recipe going forward.

Here’s what I’ve put together this year (so far):

  • Tomato and corn salsa. I made this with cherry tomatoes, so it’ll hopefully be a bit sweet, and it has homegrown corn and a couple homegrown jalapeño peppers. I’m hoping it has a nice flavour to it and it isn’t too spicy.
  • Tomato and jalapeño salsa. This is similar to the above recipe except it has no corn and about ten times the number of jalapeño peppers! This will likely be very spicy.
  • My Bernardin Complete Book of Home Preserving (which, for US folks, I believe is the exact same as the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving) has a roasted tomato salsa ranchera recipe and in the notes it mentions a Sicilian alternative where instead of using jalapeños you mix in chopped pickled banana peppers. I went with the Sicilian alternative and am really looking forward to trying this one! While the Sicilian variation is technically a relish (relishes and salsas are pretty much the same, but relishes are more acidic), I would use it as a salsa.

Lots of tea…

Our chamomile plants have stopped flowering for the year and we ended up with about one litre / one quart of flowers. These make excellent chamomile tea! Next year we will plant a lot more of these flowers so we get a year’s supply, since we expect this litre of dried flowers to last only for two or three months.

We’re also working on dehydrating our mint and saving that for tea. We’re currently at 3.5 litres with a LOT more to go!

Building up the pantry

Earlier this year I posted a photo of my food storage room and its bare shelves. These are starting to fill up again. Around that time, our freezers were mostly empty too, and now everything is packed to the brim.

I’m really looking forward to when the end of October rolls around and all of the processing is done, and we’ve got packed shelves and stuffed freezers and we get to just spend eight months enjoying the fruits of our labour.

We want to be more strategic with our meal planning this year. Usually, the squash and potatoes start going bad around February or March and we rush to use as many as we can as soon as possible. This fall, we’re going to do meals like shepherd’s pie and dinners with roasted root vegetables, so we use much more of these up before we get to that new year rush to use them before they go bad.

August photo dump

The sunflowers along the side of our property have grown quite tall, with several of them higher than the eavestroughs on the house. We think this might be a record height, but we’ll know at the end of the season when my husband measures them.
These are two squash plants that have grown out of the compost bins after a couple seeds survived the process. Not only have they completely overtaken the work area just to the right of this pic, but they’ve climbed this twenty-foot tree (you can see squash leaves right at the top on all sides of the trees), but it’s also gone along the top of the fence to the left, going at least 1/3 of the way down our property.
We’ve had a grape vine for several years but never managed to harvest more than a handful of grapes. Last summer, my husband built a pergola for the grapes to climb on, which has resulted in the plant spreading out and making it easier for me to harvest grapes. This is maybe 1/4 or 1/3 of what’s on the plant. These are red wine grapes, so I’m looking forward to seeing how they taste as a wine. Harvesting these grapes is a little intimidating, though, because the wasps have discovered they love grapes and once they break into a few grapes, they all come swarming.
Another harvest pic. These tomatoes and jalapenos went into making salsa. The red bell peppers will likely be chopped and frozen, but if I get enough red bell peppers I’d like to try canning roasted red peppers.

How to Make Fermented Snap Peas

Posted on by craig

Snap peas or sugar snap peas are one of those “blink and you’ll miss them” kind of produce. While they’re not quite as quickly there-and-gone as things like cherries, they do have a relatively short span of time in which they produce peas, and it’s fairly difficult to maintain that freshness of snap peas for any length of time. Thus the culinary experience of munching on sugar snap peas with roasted garlic hummus is a treat for my family for a few weeks mid-summer.

For long-term storage of snap peas, I shell them and put the peas in a bag and then in the freezer. While we no longer have the whole shell to eat, we at least have peas to keep us stocked throughout the year. (This year I’m attempting pea pod wine with the discard shells—look for a potential update on that in the winter!)

There’s a recipe for preserving snap peas I’ve been eyeing for a while and have finally tried—fermented snap peas.

Fermentation is the process of fostering an environment for beneficial bacteria to take hold in a food and choke out any bad bacteria. Fermented foods can then be stored for quite some time in the fridge, sometimes as long as several months, depending on the specific fermented food.

Fermented foods are loaded with probiotics and eating these foods can contribute to a healthy gut microbiome, which can have a broad impact on general health, including boosting the immune system. Fermented foods can also be easier to digest, which may be of benefit to some folks, and which can also increase nutrient absorption.

But, really, when you find a good recipe, fermented foods can be just darn delicious. Every week I make a batch of kombucha, which is a fermented tea-based beverage, and we drink it regularly.

So when I finally came across this recipe for fermented peas, it checked off a long list of things I was looking for—a new food preservation project, a way to preserve snap peas beyond their small window, and a delicious new food.

The science and art of fermentation

I’ve spoken before about how fermentation is both a science and an art, and it was me eventually coming to understand that symbiosis that led me understand the appeal of fermentation. The science is fairly basic—you use a saltwater brine (or just salt in the case of some foods like cabbage) to create an environment conducive to beneficial bacteria. These bacteria will thrive and outcompete the bad bacteria. That’s the science of it.

The art is where things can get a bit creative. You can flavour your fermented foods in a million different ways. For these fermented snap peas, I threw in some red pepper flakes and a heavy dash of Italian seasoning for some hot Italian snap peas. However, I could have instead thrown in some dill and peppercorns, or some sliced garlic, or the spices used in bread and butter pickles to make bread and butter snap peas.

How to ferment snap peas

The process is pretty simple and mostly requires patience.

You will need a fermentation vessel. I have a cool little Mason Tops kit that has a straight-sided jar, a glass weight, and an airlock for the top. You can also make do with any jar, a Ziploc bag filled with water as a weight, and a loose-fitting lid to act as a makeshift airlock. And, really, given how the peas are packed tightly and unlikely to float, you could probably skip the weight altogether.

Once you’ve got your fermentation vessel selected, start by putting any spices and seasonings in the bottom of the vessel. Then cram the peas in there. You’ll likely want to put them vertically so it’s easier to fill the narrow gaps with pea pods. (If you just dump the peas in, they’re not likely to be tightly packed and the brine you add won’t cover your peas.)

Unfortunately, I forgot to take any photos of this process for this blog. 🙃

In a bowl, combine water and salt (quantities listed in the recipe card below) and stir until all the salt has dissolved. This is your brine for fermenting. Pour the brine over the peas and ensure they are fully covered by brine. If not, you may need to push the peas further down or make more brine to top it up.

Put the weight on top of the peas, close the jar, and let sit in a cool, dark place to ferment. Fermentation will take several days. (If you’re using a regular lid and not one with a built-in airlock / air release, you will want to ensure the lid is loose-fitting to prevent gas buildup. Still, you may want to briefly and very quickly open the lid once a day to vent gasses.)

You’ll know it’s fermenting because of the bubbles that form and rise to the top. After several days, the peas should be ready. There’s no real test of readiness for fermented foods and it’s sort of a “how does it taste” assessment. Fermentation with saltwater creates a vinegar, so the peas should taste pickled, but the degree of “pickle-ness” is up to you. Once you determine it’s ready you can remove the weight and store the jar in the fridge. It should last several months.

How to use fermented snap peas

It was recently pointed out to me that while my recipes sound tasty, some of them would benefit from a section on how to use them—so welcome to a brand new feature to my recipe pages!

There are a variety of ways to use fermented snap peas:

  • When I do a BBQ or a dinner for a group of people, my appetizer is usually a baked brie with crackers, and whatever random pickles and preserves I have in my fridge. So this would go great paired with a baked brie, pickled beets, and sugar-fermented blueberries or Saskatoons.
  • Depending on how you flavour them, they would go great as a side of topping for dinner. I made spicy pickled snap peas with cayenne pepper and Italian seasoning, so it would go great paired with a stir-fry (the spice is more prominent than the Italian seasoning). If you’re eating fermented foods for the beneficial probiotic bacteria, you’ll likely want to add the peas when serving rather than cooking them in the stir fry, since the heat may kill the probiotic bacteria.
  • Fermented snap peas would also make a wonderful addition to a packed lunch or a bento box, as a vegetable side with a bit of a kick.

Fermented Snap Peas

Fermenting is a great way to preserve snap peas for months beyond their season. Plus, they're tasty!
5 from 1 vote
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Prep Time 10 minutes
Fermentation 7 days
Course Appetizer

Equipment

  • Fermentation Vessel, with Weight and Airlock

Ingredients
  

  • 2 cups Water
  • 1 Tbsp Sea Salt
  • 2 cups Snap Peas
  • Seasonings, To Taste (see notes)

Instructions
 

  • Make the brine by combining water and salt, stirring until salt is dissolved.
  • Place seasonings in the bottom of the fermentation vessel. See notes for some ideas for seasonings.
  • Tightly pack peas into the fermentation vessel and cover with brine until peas are submerged. If peas are not submerged, you may need to pack them down tighter or add more brine. Putting the fermentation weight on top may push the peas down too.
  • Put the weight and lid on and store in a cool, dark place to allow peas to ferment. Check daily. You should see bubbles form after a few days; this is from fermentation.
  • Start tasting the peas after 5-7 days and then taste daily until desired fermentation has been reached. Once done, store peas in the fridge.

Notes

Spice options:
  • Spicy: 1 tsp red pepper flakes and 1tsp Italian seasoning
  • Garlicky: 1-2 garlic cloves, sliced, and 1 tsp peppercorns
  • Bread and Butter: 1 tsp mustard seeds, 1/4 tsp celery seeds, 1/4 tsp turmeric
Fermentation vessel:
If you don’t have a fermentation vessel you can use any large jar. In place of a weight, you can use a Ziplock bag filled with water or, if it fits, a small ramekin or other small dish. In place of an airlock lid, you can use a loose-fitting lid, but you may want to vent built-up gasses once per day, even if the lid is loose-fitting.
Keyword fermented snap peas, snap peas

How to Can Cherries

Posted on by craig

I’ve spoken a fair bit in the past month of the tart Nanking cherries we harvest from a friend’s parents’ tree, but it’s a bit annual thing for us. It’s this one-time harvest of dozens of pounds of cherries and they need to be used ASAP before they go bad.

For the most part, we freeze the cherries as soon as we get them because they’re in the height of summer when we’re being overrun with foods that we’re harvesting. But once my schedule starts to open up, I juice the cherries and can the juice, and then at a later point when I’ve got more time, I start a batch of cherry wine (which is incredibly tasty).

While I’m generally not a fan of cherries, I do find that I enjoy eating these tart Nanking cherries as I pick them. I figured it was time to attempt canning cherries—for eating later in the year but also for garnishes on fancy drinks.

Canning cherries

Canning cherries is easy and safe. Cherries—both sweet and tart—have an acidity level that makes them safe for water bath canning.

Canning cherries is an easy beginner-friendly water bath canning recipe, so if you’re new to canning and have worried about the safety of canned food, this is a great starter project.

The only downside is pitting all the cherries. There are different tools and gimmicks for pitting cherries, from a cherry pitter, to stabbing a chopstick through the cherry (to push the stone through), to using an unfolded paperclip to scoop out the pit. But I found that none of these tricks worked, so I carefully used a sharp knife to slice open every cherry and pull out the pit. While this means I don’t have any whole uncut cherries in my end result, that’s really not as big a deal as it might feel like.

Tart cherries like mine can easily brown while you’re in the process of pitting them all, so to stave off that browning, you can put pitted cherries in a bowl of water with a splash of lemon juice mixed in.

Your choice of syrup (or water)

Cherries are acidic enough that they could be canned in just water, but canning them in a syrup of sugar-water complements the taste of both sweet and tart cherries perfectly.

Following the advice of a couple websites, I chose to go with a very light syrup of three-quarters cup of sugar, dissolved in six and a half cups of water. It’s light enough that the tart cherries should retain their tartness and the sweet cherries shouldn’t become overly sweet.

When I eventually opened a jar of my canned cherries and ate my way through the cherries, I found that it had indeed reserved that sharp tartness. Perhaps a bit too sharp. If I can cherries again next year, I may look at using a heavier syrup to see how it affects the taste; hopefully the sweetness will counter the sourness a bit, but still allow that distinct tart taste to shine through.

If you want to start off with a heavier syrup, consult the chart below for various syrup “heaviness-es”. For what it’s worth, the National Center for Home Food Preservation (which is where this chart comes from) recommends a medium syrup for sweet cherries and heavy syrup for sour cherries.

Syrup TypeCups of SugarCups of Water
Very Light3/46-1/2
Light1-1/25-3/4
Medium2-1/45-1/4
Heavy3-1/45
Very Heavy4-1/44-1/4

How to can cherries

You can raw pack cherries by placing the cherries in the jar, covering them with syrup, and then processing the jars in the canner. However, the hot pack method produces better results as the pre-canning process removes some of the air from the cherries and they then sit in the final jar better, and it also reduces the processing time in the canner.

To hot pack cherries, start by making your syrup. The ratios in the table above should be fine for 11 pounds of cherries (weighed before pitting), so if you’re dealing with a larger or smaller batch, you’ll want to adjust your syrup quantities. I tend to over-do the syrup quantities a bit whenever I’m canning because I find I usually need a little more than the recipe calls for.

In a large pot, bring syrup and cherries to a boil. As soon as the boiling point is reached, cherries can be transferred to jars.

Whether you’re raw packing or hot packing cherries, fill jars with cherries and syrup to a half-inch headspace. Using a bubble remover tool or a non-metal chopstick, remove bubbles from the jar and add extra syrup if needed to bring the headspace back to a half inch. Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar, to remove any stickiness that might impede a proper seal. Place lids on, then screw ring on to fingertip tightness.

Place jars in a water bath canner and top with hot water until jars are submerged by 1-2 inches of water. Bring to a boil and let boil for the appropriate length of time on the chart below. If the water ever stops boiling, the water must be brought to a boil again and the timer restarted.

Hot Pack
(Pints or Smaller)		Hot Pack
(Quarts)		Raw Pack
(Quarts or Smaller)
Elevation
0 – 1,000 feet		15 minutes20 minutes25 minutes
Elevation
1,001 – 3,000 feet		20 minutes25 minutes30 minutes
Elevation
3,001 – 6,000 feet		20 minutes30 minutes35 minutes
Elevation
6,001+ feet		25 minutes35 minutes40 minutes

Once the processing time has finished, remove the pot from heat and let sit for five minutes. Then, carefully using a jar lifter, remove jars from the canner and place on a thick towel on a counter or table and let them sit undisturbed overnight. In the morning, check if jars have sealed, if so, they can be stored in a cool dark place and should be consumed within a year—after a year, the food is still safe provided the seal is not broken, but quality may degrade. If any jars have not sealed, place jars in the fridge and consume promptly.

Canned Cherries

Canning cherries is simple and easy to do, and keeps that fresh taste of summer preserved for the depths of winter.
5 from 1 vote
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Prep Time 1 hour
Cook Time 15 minutes
Course Fruit
Cuisine Fruit

Equipment

  • Water Bath Canner
  • Mason Jars with Lids and Rings, quart size or smaller

Ingredients
  

  • 11 pounds Cherries, Sweet or Tart, weighed before pitting
  • Sugar, as per preference in the instructions below

Instructions
 

  • Wash, stem, and pit cherries. Tart cherries may turn brown after pitting, so they can be temporarily put in a large bowl of water with a splash of lemon juice mixed in.
  • Prepare syrup, as per your preference, dissolving sugar in water. This can be done on the stove, heating until fully dissolved.
    Very light syrup: ¾ cup sugar, 6½ cup water
    Light syrup: 1½ cup sugar, 5¾ cup water
    Medium syrup: 2¼ cup sugar, 5¼ cup water
    Heavy syrup: 3¼ cup sugar, 5 cup water
    Very heavy syrup: 4¼ cup sugar, 4¼ cup water
    Cherries can also be canned in water only. The National Center for Home Food Preservation recommends medium syrup for sweet cherries and heavy syrup for tart cherries.
  • For raw pack canning:
    Fill jars with cherries and syrup, leaving half-inch headspace. Debubble and add syrup if needed. Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. Put on lids and screw rings to fingertip tightness.
    For hot pack canning:
    Add cherries to pot of syrup and bring to a boil. As soon as mixture boils, fill jars with cherries and syrup, leaving half-inch headspace. Debubble and add syrup if needed. Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. Put on lids and screw rings to fingertip tightness.
  • Put jars in a water bath canner, fill with hot water until jars are submerged beneath 1-2 inches of water. Bring to a boil on the stove. Once boiling, process for the indicated time below. If at any time the water stops boiling, bring to a boil again and restart the timer.
    For raw pack canning (quarts or smaller):
    0-1,000 ft: 25 minutes
    1,001-3,000 ft: 30 minutes
    3,001-6,000 ft: 35 minutes
    6,001+ ft: 40 minutes
    For hot pack canning (quarts):
    0-1,000 ft: 20 minutes
    1,001-3,000 ft: 25 minutes
    3,001-6,000 ft: 30 minutes
    6,001+ ft: 35 minutes
    For hot pack canning (pints or smaller):
    0-1,000 ft: 15 minutes
    1,001-6,000 ft: 20 minutes
    6,001+ ft: 25 minutes
  • Remove canner from heat and let sit five minutes. Carefully using a jar lifter, remove jars from canner. Place jars on a thick towel on a counter or table overnight. In the morning, check that jars have sealed. If so, jars can be stored in a cool dark place for up to a year. If any jars have not sealed, place them in the fridge and consume promptly.
Keyword canning cherries

How to Can Tart Cherry Juice

Posted on by craig

I’ve spoken a few times on this site so far about the friend’s parents’ place that has a cherry tree and a few apple trees. Earlier this summer we went and harvested the cherries and we made sure to get every last cherry we could reach, and ended up with a record harvest of around 45 pounds (compared to 25 pounds last year).

Their cherries are Nanking cherries, which are quite tart. And it was with these cherries that I learned I actually do enjoy eating some cherries. These are very delicious, if a little mouth-puckering sour at times. My mom later gave me a sweet cherry to try, to see if I liked it, and, well, I didn’t. Tart cherries are the one for me! (It’s the same with grapes—I enjoy the sourness of green grapes but really don’t like sweeter red grapes.)

When we harvest the cherries, we wash them all, let them dry a bit, and then bag them up and freeze them. We very rarely use fresh cherries.

(If I’m feeling ambitious, this cherry liqueur is phenomenal when made with tart cherries. Do this recipe exactly the same, just with tart cherries instead of sweet cherries.)

For the rest, I turn the cherries into juice and make wine from the juice.

This year, with a record cherry harvest and a record rhubarb harvest (115 pounds versus our previous record of 85 pounds), I needed to clear out the freezer to prepare for the oncoming haul of peas, corn, broccoli, and peppers that are destined for the freezer. I wasn’t ready to start a batch of cherry wine, so I decided to juice them and then can the juice, so it’s ready to go when I want, but it’s not taking up freezer space.

Once the garden season slows down in the late fall / early winter, I’ll pop these jars open and get started on a batch of tart cherry wine, which is incredibly delicious.

The safety of canning tart cherry juice

I did enter into this project with great trepidation. I couldn’t find recipes or guidance on canning cherry juice from the official websites / organizations that fully lab-tested recipes to ensure safety. With canning, if done improperly, you run the risk of botulism, which is undetectable when opening a contaminated jar and can kill you.

However, I dug a little deeper. There are food bloggers that fully explain the safety of food and their reasoning in determining if something is safe. If I could find that, I’d be good to go. Thankfully, that’s where I found the information I needed. I found a few websites that talk about the safety of canning tart cherry juice and, most importantly, why it’s safe. As I suspected, tart cherry juice is acidic enough to be safely canned. However, please use your own best judgement in assessing if this is right for you, since, as I said, there are no lab tested recipes from the most-trusted sources.

How to can tart cherry juice

This recipe applies only to tart cherry juice and not to sweet cherry juice. There are different levels of acidity and sugar, and I have not researched sweet cherries since I do not have access to them.

The first step is to juice your cherries. I pulled out my steam juicer to tackle this project. I’ve posted previously on using a steam juicer to juice cherries, so check out that post if you want the step by step breakdown.

If you don’t have a steam juicer, there are other options for juicing—this website lists a variety of ways to juice cherries.

Once you have clear, sediment-free cherry juice, you’re ready to start the process of canning.

You can use any jar up to the half-gallon size; the only difference between the sizes is the half-gallon has a longer processing time.

Fill jars with tart cherry juice, leaving 1/4 inch headspace. Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. Place lids on and screw on bands to fingertip tightness.

Place jars in a water bath canner and add water to ensure jars are submerged by at least two inches of water. Turn stove on high and once the water is boiling, let boil / process for five minutes, or for ten minutes if you’re using half-gallon jars. If the pot stops boiling at any point, bring back to a boil and restart the timer. If you’re at a higher elevation, adjust your processing time using this chart.

When the processing time is over, remove the pot from heat and let sit for five minutes. After five minutes is up, carefully use a jar lifter to remove the jars from the pot and set them on a thick towel on the counter overnight.

The next day, check the jars to ensure they have sealed—the lid is curved downward. If so, jars can be stored in a cool, dark place for at least a year. If not, place these jars in the fridge and consume promptly.

Canned Tart Cherry Juice

Sour cherry juice is easy to make and safe to can, and makes an excellent base for mixed drinks or even enjoying as-is.
5 from 1 vote
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Cook Time 5 minutes
Course Drinks

Equipment

  • Water Bath Canner
  • Mason Jars, with Lids and Rings

Ingredients
  

  • Tart Cherry Juice

Instructions
 

  • Fill clean mason jars, up to half-gallon size, with tart cherry juice, leaving ¼ inch headspace.
  • Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. Place on lid and screw ring to fingertip tightness.
  • Place jars in a water bath canner, fill with water until submerged by 1-2 inches of water. Bring to a boil. Once water is boiling, start the timer. For jar sizes up to one litre / one quart, processing time is five minutes. For half-gallon sizes, processing time is ten minutes. If the water ever stops boiling, bring to a boil again and restart the timer. If you're at a higher altitude, adjust your timing as necessary.
  • When process time is up, remove pot from heat and let sit an additional five minutes. If you're at a higher altitude, adjust your timing as necessary.
  • Using a jar lifter, carefully remove jars from canner and place on a thick towel on a counter or table and let sit undisturbed overnight.
  • The next morning, check if jars have sealed (lid is depressed), and store in a cool dark place for up to a year. If jars have not sealed, place in the fridge and consume promptly.

Notes

This recipe applies to tart cherry juice only, as tart cherries are acidic enough to be safely water bath canned. This recipe does not apply to sweet cherries.
Keyword nanking cherry juice, sour cherry juice, tart cherry juice

How to Can Apple Juice

Posted on by craig

Fruit trees are something we’ve always been interested in, but there’s just no room for them on our property. Thankfully, a friend’s parents have a few fruit trees and don’t do anything with the fruit, so raiding their trees is a summer tradition for my husband and I.

Three of those trees are apple trees. Unfortunately, one of them didn’t get a single apple this year and another still needs about another month before the apples are ready—but the third tree was ready this past week, so John and I headed out for our first apple tree raid of the year.

We managed to get 142 pounds of apples from the one tree! We’re being more diligent this year about making sure we take everything. Last year, we took most of the fruit, but not all. I ended up juicing the apples and we soon learned we loved having apple juice on hand in the fridge. Our supply of juice last year ended up lasting almost a full year. We drank our last one about a month ago.

Last year we got 285 pounds of apples, so about double what we’ve harvested so far this year. We don’t think the second tree will give use enough to match or beat last year’s haul, but fingers crossed it’s still a heavy yield.

Juicing the apples

How you juice the apples is up to you.

Last year I did them with a traditional juicer with the spinning grate. The benefit of this is that it’s quick. I managed to juice all my apples in one day. The drawback is there’s a lot of sediment in the juice and it gets very messy when doing large batches. I was constantly cleaning the apple pulp out of the juicer, which meant it was often accidentally splattering all over the place.

I collected the juice in a large pot and skimmed off all the foam that was forming, as this often had a lot of sediment in it.

This year I pulled out my new steam juicer. WOW was it ever cleaner and easier to do—I chopped up the apples, put them in the juicer, and let the thing do its work. The drawback though is how long it takes. It took me three full days to juice all 142 pounds of apples. But the juice was sediment free and required no filtering.

A steam juicer is a three tiered pot where the bottom level contains the boiling water, the top level is a colander that holds the fruit, and the middle level collects the juice that drips down from the colander. The steam heats up the fruit and makes the juice burst out of the fruit. Here’s a more detailed post from when I juiced cherries with a steam juicer.

Whether you’re using a mechanic juicer, a steam juicer, or some other device, follow the instructions that came with the device if they differ from what’s written here.

If you don’t have a juicer, here’s a post on WikiHow that explains how to do it on the stove or in a blender.

You want the juice to be as clear and sediment free as possible. A steam juicer does a great job, but a mechanical juicer can create some sediment, and the methods in the WikiHow article could also create sediment. You can strain the apple juice through a sieve lined with several layers of cheesecloth to filter this out. Alternatively, if you’re doing a smaller batch, you can store the juice in the fridge overnight so the sediment settles, and then carefully ladle the juice out into a clean pot.

Safely canning apple juice

However you choose to juice your apples, once you’ve got apple juice, the juice can be easily canned with a water bath canner.

I found some difficulty in nailing down a recipe for safe apple juice canning. The recipe I used last year required no lemon juice as it was assumed the apple juice is acidic enough on its own. In researching again this year, I found a recipe that called for 3 tablespoons of lemon juice for a three-liter batch (which is a tablespoon per liter), and then found a recipe that called for 3 tablespoons of lemon juice for a six-liter batch (which is half a tablespoon per liter).

While I had no reason to doubt any of the sources, I went with the last one—3 tablespoons per six liters—as that was from my Bernardin canning book (the Canadian version of the well-known Ball canning book), which is a very trusted source.

The next step was figuring out how I was going to do this. The recipe calls for juicing apples, adding the lemon juice to the apple juice, pasteurizing it, and then canning it. But I wasn’t doing the exact 24 pounds of apples the recipe calls for, I was doing 142 pounds. Plus, I don’t think these apples are as juicy as the ones they used in the Bernardin recipe. So I altered the recipe to add the lemon juice straight to the jar, which makes the recipe highly adaptable to any amount of apples and apple juice.

How to can apple juice

Once you’ve got clear, sediment-free apple juice, transfer it all to a big pot and heat it on the stove until it reaches 190 degrees Farenheit, and hold it at that temperature for five minutes. A candy thermometer is helpful for this step. I have one of those laser temperature readers, which seems to give a pretty accurate reading. This step pasteurizes the juice to get rid of any bacteria or yeast on the apples.

While the juice is warming, prepare your jars. I find I don’t need to immerse the jars in boiling water, but running them under a hot tap for a moment can help warm the glass and prep them for hot apple juice.

Add lemon juice directly to the jars:

  • 1/2 Tbsp of lemon juice for a liter / 1,000 ml jar
  • 1 tsp of lemon juice for a pint / 500 ml jar
  • 1/2 tsp of lemon juice for a half-pint / 250 ml jar

Make sure to use bottled lemon juice rather than fresh squeezed lemon juice. You need to reach a certain level of acidity for safe canning and bottled lemon juice has consistent acid levels, whereas fresh lemons can be highly variable.

Ladle hot apple juice into the jars, leaving 1/4 inch of headspace.

Wipe the rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. This removes any juice and sugar from the rim that might prevent a proper canning seal from forming. Screw on lids to fingertip tightness.

Place the jars in a water bath canner and fill with hot water, submerging the jars with at least an inch of water. Bring to a boil on the stove. Once the canner has reached a full boil, remain at this boil for ten minutes. (Putting a lid on will prevent your kitchen from getting too steamy.) If you turn down the temperature and it stops boiling, bring it back to a boil and re-start the ten minute timer. If you’re in a higher elevation, adjust your processing time with this chart.

When the ten minutes is over, remove the pot from the heat and let it sit for five minutes, then using a jar lifter carefully remove the jars and let them sit on a towel on the counter or table overnight. In the morning, check that a seal has formed (the lid is depressed). Sealed jars can be stored in a cool dark space for at least a year. Any jars that did not seal should go in the fridge and be used immediately.

Canned Apple Juice

If you're making homemade apple juice, canning the juice is a great way to keep it fresh all year long.
5 from 1 vote
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Prep Time 15 minutes
Cook Time 10 minutes
Course Drinks
Cuisine American

Equipment

  • 1 Water Bath Canning Pot
  • Mason Jars Size and quantity depends on how much juice you're canning

Ingredients
  

  • Apple Juice
  • Lemon Juice

Instructions
 

  • Start with clear, sediment-free apple juice.
  • In a pot on the stove, bring the apple juice up to 190℉ and maintain this temperature for five minutes.
  • In a mason jar, add lemon juice — ½ Tbsp for one litre jars, 1 tsp for pint (500 ml) jars, ½ tsp for half-pint (250ml jars) — and then carefully ladle in hot apple juice, leaving a ¼ inch headspace.
  • Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. Put on lid and screw band to fingertip tightness.
  • Process in a water bath canner for ten minutes. Once the water boils is when the timer starts, and the water must boil throughout the ten minutes. If it stops boiling, bring to a boil again and restart the timer. If you're in a higher elevation, adjust your processing time using this chart.
  • When timer is finished, remove pot from heat and let sit for five minutes.
  • With a jar lifter, carefully remove jars from pot and transfer to a thick towel on a counter or table and let cool undisturbed for 12-24 hours. If seals have formed (lid is depressed downward), jars can be stored in a cool dark place for at least a year. If seals have not formed, place jars in the fridge and consume promptly.

Notes

This recipe can be used for one litre (1,000ml) / quart jars, pint (500ml) jars, and half-pint (250ml) jars.
Keyword apple juice

Garden Update: August 2024

Posted on by craig

What a difference one month makes!

In the last monthly update, I wrote about how this year is not a good year for the garden. May and June were very cool and rainy and by the time I was writing up my July update, things looked like they do in early June.

Pretty much right after that post, the weather turned and became much more like a normal summer. We get occasional rain—more than we get some summers—but the days are now hot and sunny, which the garden loves.

Everything looks so lush. This is one of my favourite times of year for looking at our house. We’re not the only ones on the block that garden, and we’re not the only ones with front yard gardens, but when it comes to the scale of what we do, we stand out.

When someone comes to our house in the summer for the first time, I tell them the house number but then say “look for the garden, you’ll understand when you see it.”

Growth progress

A lot of things have come up quite rapidly. Tomatoes and peppers are still quite small and struggling, though the tide is slowly turning and things are looking vibrant, but the rest of the garden…

Potatoes and garlic are the tallest we’ve ever seen them. Strawberries are more prolific than we’ve ever had. Carrots and beets are looking lush too.

One of the surprises this year has been chamomile. We’ve tried growing it from seed a couple times and gotten nowhere, but this year I found a few seedlings at the greenhouse and scooped them up.

We only have three plants but they are heavy with flowers, and it’s the flowers that are harvested for chamomile tea.

To harvest chamomile, you pluck off the flowers, with as little stem as possible, and you set it to air dry for 10-14 days. I’ve got a good system going where I harvest every weekend and I have two baking dishes filled with flowers to help keep straight which flowers were picked when.

To make tea from dried flowers, it’s about 1 teaspoon of flowers per cup of tea.

Homegrown chamomile tea is much stronger than the store-bought stuff in tea bags. It’s likely because it’s so fresh and hasn’t been on a shelf for weeks or months.

The first time I had a mug of home-grown chamomile tea, I was soon stumbling around like I was drunk because the sedative effect was so strong. I’ve had a couple cups since then, and while I haven’t had as strong a reaction, I can definitely feel it trying to conk me out.

The mushroom beds

We planted mushroom beds under our cedar trees a little while back. Mushrooms need cooler temps, in the 15-20 degrees Celsius range, to fruit (to grow mushrooms), so it’s been too hot for that. I suspect right now it’s doing a lot of the underground work and growth.

However, despite the slightly-too-warm weather, it looks like the white oysters have attempted fruiting.

Unfortunately, the day after I took this pic, the temperature jumped to over 30 degrees Celsius and stayed there for a few days. These mushrooms stopped growing and dried out. However, once the cooler temperatures come in the fall, we should start seeing action here again.

In the meantime, I need to start looking at how to preserve mushrooms; in the fall we should be harvesting mushrooms faster than we can eat them.

A lot of mushrooms can be dried, such as the king oysters we have growing in the back patch, and that’ll likely be what I do for the others we’re growing. However, from what I’ve read, regular oyster mushrooms like these generally don’t do well with drying. The dehydrate just fine, but when you try to rehydrate them, they either don’t rehydrate well and remain tough or they take in too much water and then they become mushy. (A friend gave us a bag of dehydrated oyster mushrooms last night, so I’ll be able to test how well they do or don’t rehydrate!)

Oyster mushrooms can be frozen, though, but they have to be blanched first. (According to one site I’m reading, if you don’t blanch them first, frozen oyster mushrooms that are then thawed become a mushy mess.)

The fruit tree harvest

We don’t have fruit trees on our property, but we know some folks that do, so every year we head over there a few times throughout the summer to raid their cherry tree and their apple trees.

From one cherry tree, we managed a harvest of over 40 pounds of cherries, which is about double what we harvested last year. It’s not necessarily that there were more cherries this year, but rather we were more thorough in taking as much as we could, stripping the tree of everything except the impossible-to-reach cherries.

These cherries will be juiced and turned into wine, though I did try canning some cherries so we have them for eating later or to use as garnish in mixed drinks.

We went back a few weeks later to do the first of what will likely be two apple picking visits. From one tree, we managed to get 142 pounds of apples. They have a second tree that might need another month or so before the apples are ready, so we will be heading back to get more. However, I’ve been told the second tree (it’s in the back and I didn’t see it) did not produce as many apples as in the past. So, we may not quite reach last year’s haul of 285 pounds of apples, but we’re going to try!

Looking ahead, we need to figure out what to do about fruit trees.

Their cherry tree is slowly dying. They keep telling us each year that the next year might be the last year, yet the tree keeps going, but one day it will actually be that final year.

There’s a similar fear with the apple trees, that one of them might die. And, oddly, this year one of their three apple trees didn’t produce a single apple.

While we will continue to harvest cherries and apples as long as their trees bear fruit, we are starting to explore options for expanding our harvest. We’ll start inquiring if friends or friends-of-friends have fruit trees in their yards. There’s a neighbour across the street that has a cherry tree and an apple tree, so we’re looking for the right opportunity to strike up that conversation with them. And we’re also exploring the idea of planting trees in our neighbour’s yard; they’ve asked us to do more garden stuff in their back yard, and some fruit trees would be an easy way to do things without adding a ton of garden maintenance time to our routines.

The annual rhubarb harvest

We don’t have rhubarb, but both our neighbours do, and neither wants any of it, so we take it all for ourselves. This year we harvested 115 pounds / 52 kilos of rhubarb, which is our largest harvest ever!

We’ve chopped, washed, bagged, and frozen the entire harvest. My mom’s basement freezer is stuffed to the brim with rhubarb.

We usually don’t do a whole lot with rhubarb. I make a big batch of rhubarb wine and maybe a batch or two or rhubarb ginger gin, but that really only uses a fraction of our harvest. My step-dad will often make rhubarb crumble and rhubarb pie, but even he has his limits to how much he can use.

This year, since we likely won’t get as many apples as we normally do—which means we won’t get as much apple juice as we normally do—we’re thinking of juicing some of this rhubarb and working that into our weekly rotation of juices. This would use up some of the rhubarb and would help make the apple juice last all year since we’re drinking less of it.

Foraging ahead

I happened to find a mention somewhere that wild hazelnut trees grow in Manitoba, and this piqued my curiosity. Around the same time I learned that wild cranberry bushes also grow in Manitoba. After doing some research and asking around, I may have found a couple spots where these plants exist, so in August (for hazelnuts) and September (for cranberries), I’ll be heading out to see if I can find them and forage them. (In Manitoba, it is legal to forage nuts and berries from provincially-owned land.)

I’m really hoping the foraging adventure is successful because I’m already researching how to preserve these things and what to make with them. I’m mostly eyeing hazelnut butter and cranberry juice.

I’d like to learn more about foraging and how to do it in or surrounding the city. I remember from visiting the family cottage when I was younger that there were wild blueberry and strawberry plants to pick food from, but that was out in the woods immediately surrounding the cottage. Doing something like that here in the city or in a place I have to drive to feels monumentally impossible—the first task is finding these things when they’re not part of my immediate vicinity. It sort of feels like looking for a needle in a haystack. I could pick some random place to forage stuff, but it’s a total shot in the dark if anything is there.

But, like with anything else I do food related, I’ll do some research, I’ll ask around, and I’ll figure out how to get it done.

Making Use of Scraps

Posted on by craig

Gardening, especially on a large scale, means creating a lot of organic waste.

While there are some plants where the whole thing is edible, such as chives and leeks, most plants result in edible products but the rest of the plant dies at the end of the season. Or in the case of perennial bushes and trees, the leaves fall off as the plant goes into hibernation.

Nothing truly goes to waste, though. We compost religiously. We have four bins in our backyard and collect compostable goods from our house, my mom’s house, a coworker, and occasionally the discarded coffee grounds from the office.

But beyond that, I’ve always enjoyed looking for new and creative ways to use the scraps or parts of plants we’d normally throw out.

Garlic scapes

We’ve already talked about garlic scapes a few times here on Urban Homesteading, and I’m sure I’ll be posting more about them as time goes on.

Scapes are the flower stem of the garlic plant. They’re long, thick, and have a delicious bite of garlic. They can be pickled, grilled on the BBQ, turned into hot sauce, or thrown in dinner where you’d otherwise use garlic. The possibilities are almost too much to list here.

Pea pods

This is one I haven’t tried yet but I am so curious to do so: pea pod wine.

We grow a ton of peas. Along our front and side fence we grow sugar snap peas, which are meant to be eaten whole. When the harvest gets too large, I usually shell them and freeze the peas, discarding the pods.

In our neighbour’s yard, we have a long trellis set up where we grow Alaskan peas. These ones are a bit hardier and can be pressure canned and sit on a shelf until ready to eat. This similarly involves shelling all the peas.

With either harvest, I’m left with quite the pile of empty pods.

I happened to notice a recipe for pea pod wine and my curiosity has gotten the better of me and I will be trying it this year. I’ve found that vegetable based wines rarely taste like the vegetable they’re made from, while fruit wines tend to preserve that flavour. I’ve made beet wine and parsnip wine, and the beet wine ended up fruity and the parsnip wine tasted like a regular white wine.

Vegetable juice

This past weekend, my husband thinned out the carrots and beets. When planting these, the usual practice is to over-plant and then when they start coming up, yank some out so the remaining plants have enough room to keep growing.

After he did this thinning, he gave me a crate full of baby carrots and baby beets. And when I say “baby”, I don’t mean the size of baby vegetables you get at the store, I mean micro-baby, too small to really do anything with.

We decided to juice these. I pulled out my steam juicer, which is incredibly convenient, mess free, and easy to use. It took three batches, but I juiced all the carrots and beets—including the greens—as well as an old bag of frozen celery from last year that we never ended up using.

I got 20 cups / 5 litres of juice. I put them all in individual one-cup jars, leaving headspace in case of expansion, and put them all in the freezer. My husband will be drinking them once a day as part of his lunch.

Onion and garlic seasoning

While there isn’t much waste when cutting onions and garlic—it’s mostly the papery skins and perhaps the tops or bottoms—this is still flavourful waste. One way to use this up is to create onion and garlic seasoning.

When chopping onions and garlic, separate the papery skins from the waste. (If there are any bits that have actual onion or garlic attached to them, like if you slice off the top of the onion to help you peel it, hold onto that for the next idea down in this post.) Discard anything that doesn’t look great.

After giving these skins a quick wash, you can put them in the oven to dry them, then grind them in a food processor or blender. While it’s not quite the same as onion powder or garlic powder, it can be used similarly. However, I tend to sprinkle it over my fries for an extra tasty kick.

You can also save the skins in a bag in your freezer until you’ve got a big enough batch to make this project worth the effort.

Vegetable broth

Save any usable vegetable scraps! Anything that looks in good condition (blemish and rot free) and is safe to eat (remember, tomato leaves and potato eyes are unsafe to eat), throw into a Ziploc bag or container in the freezer. When you’ve got a big batch, you can make vegetable broth.

To do this, simply dump all the frozen scraps into a big pot, fill with water, and let it simmer for an hour or so until all the deliciousness of the scraps has leeched into the water. Strain out the solids and you’re left with a rich broth. If you have a pressure canner, you can use that to can the broth, and if you don’t you can freeze it in jars, ensuring you leave headspace in case it expands in the freezer.

You’ll want to avoid anything that has an off taste or would overtake things—broccoli can be bitter when preserved and beets can make everything beet red. But the options are almost endless and allow for creating unique broth—I often throw in onions, garlic, herb scraps, mushroom stems, squash peels, carrot peels, celery leaves, tomato skins, and more.