Adventures in preserving

Its that time of year

2011-05-31T04:55:00.000-07:00

When soup becomes the only thing that will make a difference.
This is another non-preserving blog - but there's a recipe, so that counts, right?
There are a bunch of things I love about soup.
First - it's hot. Second - it's cheap. and Third - it's EASY!

This is the soup I made the other night, which fed all 5 of us, plus one lot which I popped in the fridge for lunch at work the next day, plus another couple of meals in the freezer for later on.

Firstly it did require a little bit of prep work. I soaked some beans.
I bought a kilo of "Italian Soup Mix" at one of the big stupidmarkets the other day. For this much soup I used about one and a half cups of the mix. It has red kidney beans, white beans (canneloni, I think, too big for navy beans), black-eyed peas, split green peas and yellow lentils.

One and a half cups of the dry bean mix, into a large jug of cold water, the night before the soup was to be made. I soak the dry beans to leech out their toxins (they have a few - that's why they give you some wind!) and to make sure they are all ready for cooking.

So that's the hard part of this. The rest is really really simple.

Throw some stock into a big pot. (I used frozen home-made chicken stock)
Throw in the drained and rinsed beans/lentils/soup mix.

While it's coming to a simmer, slice and dice a whole bunch of vegies. You can get a vegie soup pack for a couple of dollars at this time of the year - it usually has a turnip, parsnip, couple of carrots and spuds and an onion in it. I leave the onion out, because I have kids who refuse to eat it (and my home-made stock has loads of onion in that during the stock making process so the flavour is still there).

I used one of those packs plus a half an enormous sweet potato, about 6 extra regular potatoes, an extra 4 carrots and some broccoli and cauliflower, cut into little florets.

I also use the stems of the broccoli and cauliflower, diced up small and thrown in with everything else.

I find the soup cooks best if you chop the hardest veg and throw them in, then chop the others in order of how long they take to cook. That way your vegies that take the least amount of time (the brocolli and cauliflower florets) go in last, and don't get too mushy.

At the end, just before serving, I threw in two sachets of tomato paste.

Serve in big bowls with some grated cheese on top.

YUM!!!

Nettles, and things you can do with them

2010-11-09T01:33:00.000-08:00

A while ago it was nettle season.

Well, it was supposed to be nettle season. Fact of the matter is, the nettles I was hoping for, never grew.

Instead, I begged a couple of bags of nettles from a friend.

I can already hear you all asking why on earth I would want bags of nettles. And what bags of nettles have to do with preserving.

Firstly - nettles, or stinging nettles, or those annoying horrid weeds that cause your hands to sting a whole lot if you accidentally grab one, are chock full of vitamins and minerals. The sting itself disappears after about 3 minutes of cooking (steaming, boiling whatever!) or after dehydrating. You can then eat nettle leaves like spinach - with a similar flavour - or you can dehydrate the leaves to make a delicate tea from.

Also, the stems of nettle plants can be retted down and turned into a fibre similar to flax, for spinning thread then weaving into cloth.

BUT

I wanted nettles, because I wanted to try brewing nettle beer.

Traditionally nettle beer would have been open brewed, much like most brewing was done. I, however, cheated and used my Coopers brew kit.

I rinsed the nettles (bags and bags of them, complete with caterpillars!) and then boiled them up (in three lots - there were many!) on my stove. Then the nettles were strained out the resulting liquid.

It was at this point that I began to have my first misgivings. My kitchen smelt like over-boiled spinach. The nettle-water was green and iron-ish and ... well, not something I could imagine drinking.

But I persevered. So soon we had 23 litres of 19-ish degree nettle water, sitting in a sterile fermenter. I added some bits of orange as per my recipe, threw in a kilo of sugar (standard sugar ratio for a full brew) and then, realising that there was no way to accurately measure the fermentable content of the nettle water and not wanting to under-do it, I added a further 250g of light malt.

Pitched the yeast, aerated it nicely, popped the lid and the airlock on, and left it.

It started bubbling away the next day. It bubbled away for a week. Then it stopped.

That's about what a beer brew normally does. It's not usually any different to that. I didn't bother with measuring specific gravity or any of that nonsense. I just winged it. In fact, I left the mix sitting there for another week before I bottled it out, just to be sure.

Then I bottled it per usual, except I only used half the priming sugar in the bottles, as some directions on the net had indicated that even once fully fermented, the mix can be volatile.

I bottle into glass. I had 3 full crates of glass beer bottles filled with nettle brew.
(It still smelled a bit... funky when I was bottling. I still wasn't sure. But once you've come this far, you don't give up yet)

I kept the crates in my laundry to avoid the ups and downs in temperatures that can happen when they are kept outside.

So a few weeks pass. I had read that one should leave the nettle brew in bottles for longer to age than beer. So I wasn't tempted to touch it.

But one day I came home, and my house smelt bad. Really bad. Incredibly bad. It smelt like someone had vomited something very very bad throughout the house.

A bottle had exploded in my laundry.

There was shattered glass and stinking, loathsome nettle... something??? all through my laundry. It was a disaster.

At this point I still hadn't given up hope. Sometimes a wild yeast can colonise a bottle and create havoc. It may have only been that one bottle.

I was, however, very cautious. Exploding glass bottles at high velocity filled with stinking revolting nausea-inducing muck are pretty scary. So I wrapped my stack of crates in an old couch cover, and left it there, whilst thinking about how to best handle the situation.

Over the next day, another 3 or 4 bottles exploded. My house smelt even worse - which I hadn't thought was possible. It was time to do something.

I do love my husband. I love him a lot. But he doesn't like to listen to me. It was only after he removed the couch cover from the stack of crates, shifted the stack of crates, and was bending over one with the dustpan that he realised perhaps I was right. A bottle exploded in his face, and almost took out his eye. He had cuts on his eyebrow and his hand. And the job was re-assigned to me and me alone, with a whole lot of cursing and swearing.

I determined that the best and potentially only solution was to remove the crates outside, wrap them even more firmly to prevent glass shatter fall-out, and scrub my laundry from top to bottom.

After completing that task, thankfully injury free, I have ignored the mess.

Yep, you heard me. There is a 3-high stack of crates outside my laundry door wrapped in a stinky old couch cover embedded with broken glass and nettle goo. And I'm not touching it, not yet.

The fact is - there may still be one last bottle-bomb waiting patiently to go off the minute I decide it is safe to remove the rest of it's broken brethren. And I'm not willing to lose an eye.

Next nettle season, I'm making teatowels out of them. Seems much more harmless.

Dehydrating.

2010-07-11T22:18:00.000-07:00

I have a dehydrator now. I haven't used it yet - tomorrow is going to be the day. I have a day off work and although i'm planning an outing with my kids, given it's school holidays, I'm going to use the dehydrator.
I bought it from a friend who found that it didn't suit her needs. And I confess - I bought it mostly for ONE thing - making roll-ups for the kids.
Kids seem to love roll-ups. they are sugary and tasty and easy to eat and fun to fiddle with. Only the bought ones at the shops have all sorts of added colours and sugars and thickeners and flavours and other things that Master 5 can't eat due to gluten intolerance, and master 7 shouldn't eat, because... well, who needs to eat NUMBERS when one can eat real food!

Anyway, I have made rollups before in a borrowed dehydrator from a friend. So i already know what I'm doing.

I use plums that I preserved in the Fowlers waterbath unit a year or so ago. They are a beautiful rich dark-coloured plum with a nice tart flavour. I preserved some alone in a light syrup, and some with some nashi pears, just in water.

So I drain the fruit in a sieve and use the juice for flavouring in ice-cream or something dessert-related. And the fruit itself gets blended up into a thick puree, poured onto the plastic sheets in the dehydrator (I only have one plastic sheet with this one. I'm going to use baking paper on the rest of the trays. It worked fine last time!) and spread out to an even thickness. Then we switch it on and away we go!

I've not used a dehydrator like this one before - it only has one setting and the fan is on top, not on the bottom. It will be interesting to see how well it works compared to the one I borrowed last time. If it seems to be fine I'll buy some extra trays for it as it's only got 4.

I'll let you all know tomorrow night how it went - hopefully with pictures but there are no guarantees there as our internet is being naughty at the moment.

Ali

Preserving is something you do when...

2010-06-05T02:07:00.000-07:00

you aren't working a whole lot.

BUT....

You can still preserve when you are!

The other weekend I came across a bargain at a local market. An enormous bag of butternut pumpkins, locally and 'organically' grown, for $10 a bag. I reckon it weighed about 15 kilos.

(I put organic in quotations because the gentleman who grows them isn't organically certified, but I did have a lovely chat with him about his garden and how he is a no-spray natural horse-poo fertiliser kind of fellow!)

So I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with them all. Originally I had planned to can some pumpkin cubes in the pressure canner - note, you can't can pureed pumpkin soup. According to the USDA the density of the resulting soup is such that even pressure canning for extended periods of time will not guarantee that the required temperature be reached in the middle of the jar, hence if you want to can pumpkin soup, can cubed pumpkin in stock, and puree it when you re-heat.

Of course, I haven't had a day when I'm not in paid employment since the pumpkin purchase, so I haven't had the time to pressure can anything.

I did, however, make up an enormous batch of pumpkin soup and fill my freezer with it. I still have other pumpkins left, which is fine, and I will post more recipes that are not preserving ones here about that later on - but this is my made-up pumpkin soup recipe.

Firstly - I heard from a friend that butternut pumpkins, when fresh, do not need to be peeled. This is great, because I hate peeling pumpkin. So when I was prepping this lot, instead of peeling them I scrubbed them all.

This recipe 3/4 filled my enormous stockpot, but cooked down to about 2/3 full once it had finished.

Scrub 8 small-medium butternut pumpkins, chop into biggish peices, de-seed and throw into stock pot.

Chop 3 onions and throw in as well.

Fill stockpot with chicken stock ( or vegie stock, or whatever you have on hand - I used powdered stock as my canned stock from last year is all gone)

Throw in some flavoursome bits - I used Nutmeg, and Sumac, and some "mediterannean" seasoning that I had, which has oregano and almonds and a few other bits in it. Taste it to see if it's ok.

Throw in some red lentils. I used a half a packet. Adds some protein and some fibre and some other good bits too.

Cook until pumpkin is soft, then use a stick blender (carefully! because the soup is hot!) to blend all the pumpkin into a puree. Then cook for a bit longer until the soup has reached a consistency that you are happy with.

Ladle into containers and fill your freezer up! I tend to use Tupperware in my freezer - mostly because I take soup to work as it's easy to heat up/defrost.

Well, that's it really. Easy and by keeping the skins on the pumpkin the texture is a little bit more chunky, and I reckon you get more vitamins included in the mix (if the heat doesn't cook them out first...)

Enjoy!

The tomato sauce odyssey

2010-02-26T17:01:00.000-08:00

*this is a pic-heavy post!*

So! Some sauciness!!!

Herein lie the tomatoes. Was pleasantly surprised this time - this big 20 kilo boxes were $22 each, but they are Roma tomatoes! Last time the 'sauce' tomatoes I bought were big round ones with more juice than flesh. (love the 70's carpet, and 70's lino??? Keep an eye out - there's more!)
Next step - I put the tomatoes in a big bowl of water, wash them, then chop them and put the chopped up bits in another bowl. (Roll on moss green tiled splashback and another shade of moss green faded laminate....)

Here you can see half of the chopped tomatoes in my big pot. My stove is pretty annoying - there's not much room for big pots!
This is the post with chopped tomatoes (10kg), 6 big green apples also chopped, 2 litres of white vinegar, 5 cups of white sugar, assorted herbs and spices, and *just* enough room for the 2 kilos of onions that I chopped next. No, there are no pictures of me chopping onions. I was too busy crying and crying and crying. Next time I'm buying pre-chopped frozen onions and to hell with the expense.

This is my tomato puree device. It is awesome. However in my kitchen it is a bit of a PITA. The thing fastens onto a benchtop with a suction pad - but the only place I can really put it where there is space that's LOWER under the end where the sauce comes out is on my kitchen sink. And the draining board is NOT a flat surface that happily takes to a suction cup, so I kind-of have to hold it with one hand while turning the handle with the other....

Here is a dishrack full of washed jars. I will be sitting them in the sink with almost boiling water on them to get them hot again before I fill them. It's a tag team game in my kitchen - with only one sink it gets a bit tricky! You can see I'm using a mixture of FV jars and recycled jars with new lids.

The sauce all cooked down ready for processing through the machine.

A part of the processed sauce, ready for pouring into hot bottles.
Here you can see what's left over after the mix has gone through the machine. This lot is destined for my compost.

You can see here that my canner simply doesn't fit on my stove-top with anything else - so everything has to be done one at a time. When I sell enough craft to buy a new kitchen, I'm going to have a much bigger stove-top with bench space either side so the enormous pots can all fit at once *heaven*

The inside of the canner. I'll be using it as a waterbath only, so I won't use the lid.
The canner filled with jars, and water - I still need a little more in there though!

And the jars after processing. Three of the jars didn't fit in this round of processing - they will go in the fridge, and tomorrow when I do the next lot, I will pop those in too. Obviously, since they will be cold, I'll put them in the canner BEFORE the water starts to get hot, so they can be brought up to temperature first!

That's the first round of tomato sauce. So roll on tomorrow, for the pasta sauce version!

Tomato Weekend

2010-02-25T14:35:00.000-08:00

Well, this is it.
It's 9.05 in the morning, and I've just printed out my recipes (again!), written the shopping list, and I'm just about to get out my jars and lids and things.
Then it's straight up to the fruit n veg place, and today will be tomato central.

I'm thinking that I'll only do a few kilos today. I know it's not going to be enough to last me the year. But my 'tomato weekend' just got turned into what is practically a 'tomato day' thanks to a 15 yr old and his excursion (yes, it requires my personal supervision!) tomorrow afternoon/evening, and what looks like a free floor for my craft space (aka the garage) which requires picking up. A days' worth of loading pavers versus another 70 odd kilos of tomato preserving .... well, I can't look a gift horse in the mouth, now can I!!

So The plan is to get through a Quadruple batch of tomato sauce (ketchup I think it's called in the US - on that side note, if ketchup is tomato sauce, what is catsup???) and a Quadruple batch of pasta sauce today. That's about 40 kgs of tomatoes.

I like my tomato puree machine, because without it I'd have to skin and de-seed the tomatoes using a seive, which would add so much time to the process! As it is, I just wash em, roughly chop em, cook em down for about a half hour til they are all mushy, then run them through the machine - then put the resulting puree back into the pot with the rest of the pasta sauce ingredients if it's the pasta sauce I'm making. If I'm doing the tomato sauce I do it the other way round - cook the diced tommys up with everything else and run it through the machine at the very end.

I should get off here and get on with it. It's 9.12. Lots to do!

PS I will try to take photos during the process today. Try. You'll have to forgive the kitchen. Even though it's not dirty at all, it's so old that it looks dirty. Too hard to explain - you'll see in the pics!

Preserving is fun - but not in a South Australian Summer!

2010-01-13T14:57:00.000-08:00

In fact, South Australian summers are best reserved for .... making beer!

Well, sometimes.

I thought I would just blog a little about the making of beer. I have a standard Coopers brew kit and I really like it. I also have a few non-standard things that I prefer to use - like glass bottles instead of PET.

Making beer in the Coopers kit is really really easy. The main dramas to be aware of are cleanliness and temperature control.

Once you've got a sterile fermenter (the big round thing with the lid on it and the tap at the bottom) you pour in the can of premixed malt and hop extracts, add a kilo of your choice of extra fermentable goodness (white sugar, dextrose, malt, a combo.... hell, if you're making stout chuck in a can of condensed milk *droool*), stir it all up with some hot water, fill up with tap water to the 23 litre mark, throw in your yeast and stick the lid on.

It CAN get complicated. Different types of beer use different types of yeasts, which have a different ideal fermenting range. Keep in mind that if you aren't at all fussy about your beer, and you just want something vaguely beer flavoured, with a bit of an alocholic boost, for drinking after a hot day in the garden - temperature control aint that important.

If you want something specific, like a german lager clone, you need to get fussy both with your yeasts and possibly whether or not you go the whole hog and malt and mash your own grains to get the goodies to brew the beer from in the first place.

I'm lazy, I use the can options above. I have a heat mat for brewing when it's cold. Somewhere I have a thingy that you plug in between the powerpoint and a fridge, with which to set the fridge temp to about 12 degrees which is perfect for lager brewing. I've not used it, because my brew fridge died.

Anyhow once your beer has fermented as much as it's going to (there's a small art to determining this effectively - it uses a thing called a hydrometer. It comes with the kit, and is fully explained, so I"m not going to!), put it in sterile bottles with a little extra sugar (comes in handy pre-measured doses in tablet form from - you guessed it - Coopers!), stick on your lids, and let it sit for a couple of weeks. Then drink it.

Another thing I've been doing lately is brewing some cider. It's quite possibly even EASIER to do than beer. All you need to do is get yourself a set of these and then you can follow said directions to your heart's content. I use bought long life juice. Apple and blackcurrant is the preferred choice here, because it's quite difficult to find Apple and berry where I am. Sometimes I spice it up with some nutmeg and cinnamon when I add a little bit of sugar in it - for extra kick.

So enjoy the hot water by making your own cooling beverages!

PS despite the heat, it will soon be tomato time again. I'll be taking 2 weeks off work this time round. We ran out of sauce, pasta sauce and soup, and I'm also down to my last jars of passata, so I really really need to do more this time! I shall endeavor to take photo blog type things of this mammoth tomato effort!

Making Baked Beans from Scratch

2009-10-07T19:52:00.000-07:00

Well, due to some dietary restrictions that I have meanly imposed on my youngest lad, buying baked beans in cans is now frought with difficulty. He can't have gluten, wheat, wheat by products, or anything dairy. So all those little words like "thickener" and "starch" are a no-no!

SO today I'm making a large batch of baked beans from scratch, so I know exactly what's in them, and I know that they are safe for him to eat.

First step - select the beans. Contrary to popular opinion, you can make baked beans out of ANY type of bean. It just depends on what you like. I happened to have some dry navy beans left from last time I made them, and I also threw in a few handfuls of dry black-eyed peas. (no, not the band.)

These were put in the big stockpot and covered with water to soak. I ended up soaking them for about 18 hours, although overnight is usually fine.

Then I drained them into the colander. At this point I had a heaped large colander full of soaked beans. Yep, that's the sum total of the measurement you'll be getting today *grin*

Now there are a number of different ways that you can follow from here. One is to simmer your beans in fresh water for about and hour - hour and a half. Then drain again, mix with sauce ingredients, and back in oven on low heat for about 6 hours.

However - I don't like the bake in oven for long periods thing. And today I really didn't want to be in and out of the kitchen all day either.

So I pulled out the slow cooker.

Put beans in slow cooker. If you are making these the same way I am, add about 3 cups of water, about 1 litre of passata (mine is home made from last years tomato preserving frenzy - one litre is approximate, i used one size 27 Fowlers Jar) and stir.

Then I threw in - some garlic powder (to taste), about a cup of dark brown sugar, a tablespoon or so of powdered mustard, and a good teaspoon of ground cloves. It now smells like baked beans in there!!!

Switch crockpot on. Here directions may vary. I have read 12 hours on low. But because I chose NOT to pre-cook the beans (as well as the pre-soak) I have put the pot on high for a few hours first.

I will probably stir in once in a little while and see how they are going, and then perhaps turn it to low, all things depending.

And if I was going to work tomorrow, I would definetly be pressure canning these babies. But since I AM going to work, they will go into the freezer instead.

Today!

2009-07-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

Today i am going to pressure can carrots. I'm following the instructions from an internet friend who is quite possibly the most helpful woman ever whenever I have a preserving question - and I will ask her later on if it's OK for me to publish her instructions here so everything is all in one space.

If I can find batteries that are charged for the camera I will try and do a bit of a step by step photo thing too. But I won't make any promises on that one!

We eat a lot of carrots here - and often they are kinda expensive. So I thought I'd can some, and buy the juicing ones or even the horse ones from the local feed store. Given that I can buy a 20 kilo bag of carrots from there for $10.95, and the stupidmarket carrots are often around the $1.40 per kilo, I figured it would save us some dosh, at the cost of a day in the kitchen. And since it's school holidays, a day in the kitchen isn't that surprising anyway - I'll probably get the kids to roll some biccies for the teeny tiny oven while I peel carrots!

However - it did occur to me that attempting to get 20 kilos of carrots into jars meant that I had to have storage space for 20 kilos of carrot jars... and it meant that I would possibly get RSI from peeling all that many carrots - and I thought it might take me a couple of days....

To get rid of all my excuses, the stupidmarket had carrots on sale for 99c a kilo - so I decided I'd start this venture small rather than large and bought 6 kilos.

So today - canning 6 kilos of carrots. And if there's time a couple of jars of pumpkin cubes too.

Not so much preserving, per se, as cooking WITH preserves.

2009-06-15T00:32:00.001-07:00

OK. So I'm a bit of a slap-dash cook. I'm not really organised enough to have things like measuring spoons, cups, sifters and mixing bowls all easily accessible. Nor do I have metres upon metres of empty benchspace in which to do things.

I also have hordes of hungry children.

Normally the two of these things result in home-brand milk arrowroot biscuits. BUT NOT ANY MORE!!!!

With the onset of a DECREASING amount of hours spent at work outside of the home, (starting today YAY!) I decided to stepford things up a little in my home. And I baked muffins.

I know I've baked before, but it's been a long time.

Tomorrow is playgroup day, and I was conscious that there is a little lass at our playgroup who can't have eggs at all due to allergies. I also remembered the upteen jars of plum butter that I had preserved and bottled the year before last that STILL hadn't been opened, sitting in my newly organised preserving cupboard.

So I put the two things together in a some-what haphazard manner and came up with these little gems, mostly allergy safe (unless you happen to be gluten intolerant, in which case use a gluten-free SR flour substitute - or avoiding salicylates, in which case you might not want to make these at all - sorry!!!). They are dairy and egg free however.

Please excuse the measurements. I kinda didn't make any. LOL

Grab yourself a largish bowl, and tip into it a 250 mL jar of plum butter. (oh. haven't blogged the plum butter instructions. Will do so ASAP!)

Add about 3 heaped teaspoons of brown sugar (leave out if you added sugar in your plum butter in the first place!)

Throw in a handful or two of dried cranberries (my fav. dried fruit of all time!)

Then add approx. 7 heaped tablespoons of self raising flour (can you tell I did this a little bit at a time??) and about half a cup of rice milk. Stir lots. Ask small children to stir even more.

Take back the bowl, add more rice milk and stir until you have a general muffin-like consistancy. Smells good already!!!

Now, after the kids have filled your mini muffin trays with mini muffin paper cases (this is actually very important - with no butter the muffins will tend to stick and you kinda have to eat them out of the cases, rather than peel them out first!), drop a heaped teaspoon of mix into each muffin case.

Stick in a pre=heated oven (180deg C) and cook for around 10 minutes.

If you are using BIG muffin tins and cases, I reckon about 25 mins would be fine.

They come out very nice, not as sweet as one might expect. If you have a sweet tooth, you will need to ice them - but my kids are loving them, and there might even be enough left for playgroup tomorrow.

I'd love to add photos but I've had a huge camera disaster, so that won't be happening. But they are little muffins that have met with my kids approval, and are a great use for the plum butter (or apple butter, peach butter, whatever really!) that you might have lying in your preserving cupboard, after being inspired by a random forum post, a slow cooker and a visit from our local "plum man" who trots over every year selling us bags of his cherry plums for practically nix.

Enjoy!!

ETA: Plum Butter. OK I'm probably not going to have a lot of time to blog it up nicely, so here goes.

There is no butter in it. There is no butter in any of the fruit butters I have preserved. And they are REALLY easy to make.

Get out your slow cooker. Fill it with fruit (pips and skins included, just halve them or whatever is comfortable!) Turn it on to low heat. Add about an inch of water or fruit juice in the bottom of the slow cooker to stop things burning. Leave it going for a good 12 hours. If you like, and your fruit is really juicy, leave the lid slightly askew during the last 4 hours to let some of the liquid evaporate out again. You can add whatever you like to it - I did some apple butter with a hint of cinnamon and cloves, and a little bit of sugar. I did some peach butter too. It's all good.

Once it's all cooked into mush, scoop it out and push it through a fine sieve. Messy, but effective. Throw out the seeds/pips/skins (or feed em to the chooks once they've cooled down, or hurl into the compost) then ladel the resultant gloop into sterilised hot glass jars, wip rims, put on lids and waterbath for 10 minutes.

You're done. And it's good in muffins. *grin*

In response to a question...

2009-04-15T03:05:00.000-07:00

I had an email from a reader the other day, but her return email address bounced. So I've decided to publish the email and my response to it here, minus names and other incriminating evidence *grin*

She Said:

Hi Ali.  I actually wanted to ask you a question about
preserving, but I couldn't figure out how to leave a comment on your blog
(sorry!).  I was wondering if you could tell me your method of using the
FV to waterbath jams and such - I'm interested in doing the same for jams
and chutneys.  Thanks!!

My Reply:

It's really simple to use the FV to waterbath jams and chutneys. If you have an electric FV unit, put water in it and get it to almost boiling. Then you fill your HOT jars with HOT jam/chutney/whatever (note - wearing gloves is a good idea here, hot jam BURNS!). Wipe rims, finger-tighten lids (or put rings and lids on, depending on the jars you are using) and using tongs, place into the FV unit. You won't have a problem with jars cracking as long as everything is hot - jars, jam, and water in the unit.

Once all your jars are in there, check the water level. If it's not covering the jars, top up the FV with fresh boiling water (I have my kettle going as well to make it all faster).

Once the water level is about 2 inches over the jars, make sure the unit is switched on. Let it come to a rolling boil - then time it for 5 minutes.

Using tongs, pull the jars out carefully, and place them on a bench in a draft-free spot. I usually put a couple of thicknesses of towel under them so the shock of the cold bench doesn't cause jar breakage.

That's about it really. 5 minutes is enough to waterbath jams for. If you do it much longer it can cause the jam to over-set. Chutneys you can easily waterbath for 10 minutes if you feel the need - for me it would depend on the proportion of vinegar and what types of fruit/veg are in the chutney - eg: a naturally low acid food like zuchinni made into a chutney I'd most likely waterbath for 10 minutes, but tomato or apple ones I'd be happy with 5 minutes on.

Hope that helps, and happy preserving!

Thanks! Ali

PS. To add comments to the blog, all you do is click the spot where it says "0 comments" under the relevant post. That will open up a pop-up window where you can enter your comment/question.

Some concerns

2009-02-22T22:16:00.000-08:00

I am often reading various forums in various places, and time and time again I read people recommending different methods of preserving.

Now I know my ways aren't the be-all and end-all of it. And that everybody has their own opinion about what is required when preserving different types of food. So rather than become the evil woman who rants at everyone who's opinion is different to hers - I tend to ignore it. I will say my little peice about what I choose to do - then let it lie.

It's very difficult though. Because IMO, people are playing with their health is a serious way if they food they preserve is not properly done. And on open forums, often people who are ready these different methods are completely new to preserving, and don't have the knowledge behind the methodology.

So anyhow - here I'm going to list a few basic things that comprise MY do's and don'ts of preserving food.

DO list.

Always have clean, sterile jars.
Always have NEW lids (if using recycled jars, or Mason jars, or the bronze-coloured FV jar lids.)
Always use NEW rubbers on FV jars.
Always completely cover jars with over an inch and a half of water when preserving using the boiling water method (suitable for high acid foods only)
Always use a pressure canner according to the directions supplied with it for low acid foods.
Always ensure your kitchen is clean, your tools and equipment are sterile.
Always use the most up to date preserving information you can find.
Always add lemon juice or citric acid to tomato-based preserves to ensure the acid content of your food is high, unless you intend to pressure can.
Always check your jars thoroughly for damage, nicks and cracks before each use.

DO NOT list

Never use the water bath method for low acid preserving.
Never use methodologies in books printed in the 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's etc. (although some recipes can be adapted, best not to until you really know what you are doing!)
Never leave part of the jars out of the water in the water-bath method. (there is no way of knowing that the steam produced by the boiling water actually gets or stays hot enough to keep the contents of the jars boiling during the process)
Never use old lids (unless you are using the stainless steel Vacola lids)
Never eat food that looks off, smells funny, or doesn't seal properly when it cools after preserving.

Well. I guess that's all pretty self-explanatory.

I think I might take things to the extreme - I will waterbath my sauces, my jams, my relishes, everything - even though my mother looks at me very strangely when I do so! But the way I see it is this - I have put a lot of time, money and effort into making this produce. SO I am going to do the very best that I can do to ensure that said produce is kept completely sterile and preserved properly, so I don't get any horrible surprises when I go to use it in the following year.

It just makes sense to me, that's all.

Ali

The first batch and why!

2009-02-19T17:26:00.000-08:00

We eat a lot of pasta. And I mean - a LOT. So preserving pasta sauce is high on my list of priorities. Making and preserving it yourself saves a lot of money and you know exactly what is in the jar. I don't like additives and colours and unnecessary numbers in my food and I've noticed how difficult it is to find things that don't have all that!

I decided it was high enough on the list to take a week of annual leave from work to get a good kickstart on the preserving.

At the moment a fruit and veg shop close to me has 10 kilo boxes of sauce tomatoes for $8. Although I know the tomatoes aren't organic, they are local - and if I was to buy organic tomatoes here the costs would blow out so high as to make the whole preserving thing not worth the money involved. Next year I hope to not have to buy any tomatoes - I would rather grow our own.

So out of 40 kilos of tomatoes and a week of extreme busy-ness, I made lots of goodies!

Firstly, the pasta sauce. Using a recipe from Green Living Australia I made 8 jars of pasta sauce. It's a very easy recipe to follow, all you really need is a really big saucepan. As usual, I doubled the quantity in the recipe.

After this I made 8 jars of tomato sauce (ketchup for our US readers!). I used another recipe from the GLA forum, you can find it here. I haven't made this particular sauce recipe before but it smelled REALLY good and I'm betting that after a few weeks/months in the jars it will be even better.

I also did tomato soup from this site. Some of the recipes on this site are not preserved in what I would consider a safe way. So do be careful. But I made this soup recipe last year and preserved it in the waterbath and it worked out fine. I didn't thicken the soup with the flour before waterbathing due to the safety concerns i have - thicker things in jars can not always reach boiling point in the middle, allowing bacteria to breed in the jars once sealed. I also added lemon juice to every jar, just to ensure that the acid levels are high enough. The lemon doesn't subtract from the flavour of the soup at all, and the thickener can be added later when you go to serve and eat the soup if you want it.

I made a few jars of BBQ sauce using a recipe that I seem to have lost already *sigh*. I have never made BBQ sauce before and it smelled amazing.

By the time I had done all that, my time off work was running out fast and I still had a box and a half of tomatoes left over that were fast going soft in the heat here. So I decided to make passata from the rest of them, to be used in other sauces/casseroles over winter.

Passata is essentially, lightly cooked and sqaushed up pureed tomatoes.

It's very easy to make - just core the tomatoes, cut them up a bit and put them in a big pot with about a half a cup of water on the bottom. (The water is there to stop them burning before they cook down and release their own juices)

Once the tomatoes have started to soften, you can give them a helping hand - I got out my potato masher and smooshed em all up. Then I cooked them down for about an hour.

For the next step, you need one of these. I love mine to bits, it's makes life so easy when making sauce. You just assemble it (clean, of course!), pour the cooked tomatoes into the top, and crank the handle. Tomato puree comes out the bottom - and skins and seeds all come out the side shoot.

It is a messy job because tomato juice has a tendency to go everywhere - but it's lots of fun.

Once all your tomatoes have been pressed through the machine, (oh, and I put the 'waste' pile back through a second time, to make sure I've got all the juices out), put them back into a big pot on the stove and bring to the boil. Add salt to taste.

Traditionally, a sprig of fresh basil is put into each jar before the sauce is ladelled in. But I had no fresh basil this year, so I put dried basil into the stockpot and cooked it for about another half an hour till the basil was well re-hydrated.

By now you should have HOT clean jars and lids ready, and a waterbath unit of some description with HOT water in it waiting. (This is the one I used this time, although I sometimes just use my canner as a waterbath. Not enough room on my stove for the big new stockpot and the canner though!) Using a funnel and a ladle and lots of towels on the benchtop, I filled each jar with hot passata, added a squirt of lemon juice, wiped the rims of the jars, put the lids on and put into the FV unit. I then topped up the unit with boiling water from the kettle until the jars were covered by about 2 inches of water.

Wait for the water to come to a full rolling boil before starting the timer, then let them boil for 20 mins.

Once the time is up, carefully take the jars out of the unit. I have tongs for this purpose, and I learned last year that wearing rubber gloves can be extremely handy too! If the tongs slip at all, or you are short like me and it's hard to get a good grip on something that almost higher than you, rubber gloves on your hands will mean you can stabilise the jars without burning yourself.

Put the jars on a towel on your bench, out of a draft, and let them sit for 24 hours. Then you can wipe them over, check that they are all sealed, label them, and put them away.

I bought a label-maker this year, much easier than writing it on annoying sticky notes by hand when you are doing lots of jars.

So that was my first round of preserving for this year. I will have to get some more tomatoes and do more pasta sauce, because 8 jars will only last us about 4 weeks once the weather cools down. My aim is to make enough while tomatoes are in season to last us the entire year. Last year I did 110 kilos of tomatoes, and we ran out of pasta sauce in about October, so I almost made it.

I am thinking that I will buy one box at a time from now on, and just do a box-full every fortnight, into pasta sauce, until the season is over.

So I am happy, because the wardrobe in our bedroom is once again filling up with full jars instead of empty ones!

Welcome!

2009-02-19T17:20:00.000-08:00

Well, after losing my recipe book and record from last year's preserving efforts, I have decided to blog it all instead. Because I really don't want to lose everything again!

This year I will start afresh and this way, I will always have my records to look back to.

Briefly - I really enjoy preserving food. I have a pressure canner for preserving low-acid foods such as soup, baked beans, and vegetable and meat dishes. I generally use Fowlers Vacola jars in the canner and in my waterbath canner.

Most of my jars came from scouring op-shops and keeping my ear to the ground! I also use recycled jam and pasta sauce jars, with new lids that I buy. I've been known to buy some new jars from time to time as well - I bought a box of 300ml jars last year for jam, because they fit nicely in my fridge (we have an ant problem, with small children and jars of jam, so any open jars get kept in the fridge). This year I bought a few new passata jars for my tomato sauce because I really like the shape of them and they are easier to pour directly from onto sausages *grin*

Last year's preserving efforts were unhampered by work commitments, as I was a SAHM back then. This year is rather different, as I am at work every weekend, and busy during the week running children to and from school and kindy and swimming lessons and all that other busy stuff!