Yule presents/Home Preserving/Bacteria etc

[celynny]

For Yule this year I want to give homemade/home preserved/homebaked gifts. One thing I want to do is make baskets of a few different things, like homemade jams and jellies, home preserved peaches, and make some infused oils etc

Comments

[evil_erato]

Hot water canning is the way to go for jellies/preserves. Go to the library and see if they have a copy of the Ball Blue Book - it is THE guide for canning. It will have all your canning info in it. :)

For the quickie answer, if you run your canning jars through the dishwasher and take them out right after the dry cycle is done and use them, then do the hot water bath for canning things will be quite sterilized. Barring that, boil them as per old fashioned canning instructions.

Canned goods usually last a year or two, iirc, so they do have a decent shelf life. I just got done making peach jam a few weeks ago, and it is yummy. :D

[celynny]

Wow! A year or two???
That's really impressive, and definately good to know.
I can definately do the dishwasher thing, but I don't know how to boil the lids and cans and ugh.

It sounds so much harder to me than it probably is! I just am so worried about like food poisoning! I don't want to poison people.

[evil_erato]

You'll know if something wasn't canned properly long before time to hand out gifts. If the can doesn't seal correctly after its water bath, the lid will still pop when you poke at it. So long as it is within 12 hours or so of starting you can re-can it (with new sterilized jar/lid/collar, of course) and it should be fine. If the lids start popping up a few days/weeks *after* you've successfully canned, then there was bacteria inside and it is no longer safe to eat the contents. Don't over-think the process - it is seriously easy. I just dump jars, lids and collars into the dishwasher before I start cutting up fruit, and by the time everything is in jam form they're ready to come out and are still nice and hot and sterilized. Then I decant the jam into jars, seal them all tight and pop them into a water bath to boil for about 15 minutes. You can do jams without pectin, too - just use sugar. There are recipes out there for this - usually twice as much sugar to fruit, but look for specifics. To tell if you've got the jam to the

[celynny]

Thanks for that comment, it has a lot of good advice in it!
Do you find there is a good place specifically to find peaches for a good price?
Peaches sound easiest so I think that sounds like a winner! lol

I'd also like to try to make apple butter...

[jacylrin]

The safest way to make sure canned stuff seals properly is to buy new lids every time. You can reuse rings - the part that screws onto a canning jar - but are supposed to buy new lids every time - the flat part that actually seals against the lip of the jar and covers the opening. Jars and rings you can buy used (thrift stores and garage sales are marvelous for this), or buy new. We usually ran all the jars and rings - new or otherwise - through the dishwasher just before using, and did the dunk in boiling water to sterilize. I've heard from lots and lots of people that your best bet is to use the Ball Blue Book to learn about canning and some other forms of preservation. You'll need the right kind of set up - I think a really deep pot and a basket to hold the jars works for jams, but some other types of things really need pressure canning, which is a more complicated setup from what I understand

[celynny]

Wow thank you so much for all the information!!!!!

I'd love to have someone come and help me and show me how to do some of this. I'm worried about..you know. Doing it wrong or whatever XDD It sounds easy in the book, but when time comes for me to actually DO it? Well completely different story.

I wanted to try to make some peach jam, peach preserved in syrup, and some maybe strawberry jam preserves well in advance and then store them until yule.
I wanted to try to make some infused vinegar too, like rasperry vinegar, before the raspberries are absolutely rediculously hard to find. ^_^

I want to go to a farmers market sometime soon and get some peachies and do peachies. If you have a canning party/kitchen reorganization and don't mind me coming...well..>> You know where I'm going with this! :-D

Help from someone who's done it before is unrivaled.

[jacylrin]

Actually replying to a comment from the thread with evil_erato, but it was getting too hard to read stuff all the way over on the right

[celynny]

Woo experimentation!
Maybe we should ask Miss Crystal if you can come on Sunday and help play with the fuzzies! =)

[sandi1743]

) Ensure a tight fitting seal to keep your preserves from going 'off

[sandi1743]

BTW - with things like strawberry (and other berry) and cherry jams i like the powdered pectin much better than the liquid. just make sure that you FOLLOW the direction to the letter (which comes with the pectin) as otherwise the fruit will not set.

[celynny]

Wow thanks for all the great info!! ^___^

I'm excited for this Sundays jamming party. I can't wait to try out all my newly learned litte tricks :)

[sandi1743]

also- using a gas stove is much better then electric IMHO for making jams as the heat is much easier to control