The timer chimed - my second batch of wild grape jelly was ready to be removed from its boiling water bath. When I took the lid off the pot, I noticed the water was cloudy. What the..., I thought to myself as I reached in to remove a jar with my tongs. I quickly had my answer, as the jar was empty. Not because I had forgotten to fill it, but because the bottom of the jar was missing.
Anyone who has prepared food for any length of time quickly learns there are fundamental differences between cooking and baking. Cooking allows more deviation from a recipe, whereas baking requires more precision. In my opinion, canning falls closer to baking than cooking. The list of ingredients going into a jar may be small, but the proportions are important. Tomato canning generally calls for lemon juice or citric acid, because the acid level reduces the potential for harmful bacteria. Jelly recipes can for a specific amount of sugar per batch; the instructions that come with a box of Sure-Jell powdered pectin have the following admonition in bold letters: "DO NOT REDUCE THE SUGAR IN RECIPE SINCE THAT WILL RESULT IN SET FAILURE".
Recipes and sugar have plagued my canning season this year. We had a fine crop of both wild grapes and concord grapes. While I have made other jellies in past years, this has been my first making this classic. After we picked our first batch of wild grapes, I checked our canning books and did not find a recipe specific to wild grapes. I checked some online resources and found a recipe. I immediately made the rookie mistake of ignoring the step in the instructions about letting the juice sit overnight with the jelly bag dripping into the bowl, thinking this was merely a way to get a little more juice. As I later learned and wrote about, this is an important step as grape juice contains tartrate, and letting the juice sit in a cool place overnight allows tartrate crystals to settle out for filtering.
I try to learn from my mistakes. For my first batch of concord grape jelly, I followed the recipe in my Ball canning book precisely, letting the juice sit overnight, and using 5 cups of juice to 5 cups of sugar. I checked my jars a couple of hours later and the jelly still seemed very fluid. Checking the recipe that came with the pectin out of curiosity, I was horrified to see that it called for 7 cups of sugar, and not 5 cups ("DO NOT REDUCE THE SUGAR IN RECIPE..."). I checked a second Ball canning book and saw that its recipe also called for 7 cups of sugar. How can two recipes by the same company be so different? Interestingly, the Ball recipe with 5 cups of sugar had instructions for letting the grape juice sit overnight while the Ball recipe with 7 cups did not have such instructions. Some additional research confirmed the larger quantity of sugar, but also noted the setting of jelly can take several hours or days. I stuck the jars in the refrigerator and after a sleepless night found that my jelly had set. I had one lid that sprung back, indicating a poor seal and yet another canning mishap, but that simply gave me an excuse to open the jar and taste the batch - success!
Visiting the grocery store recently provided another reminder about canning. The beginning of this year saw seed companies sell out, as people tried to grow their own food at home during the pandemic amid a realization of how fragile our food system is. As I surveyed bare shelves in the canning section, it was clear that some of those people had actually produced food, and were trying to preserve it. We have plenty of jars and rings from previous canning seasons, and I luckily had bought a couple of boxes of lids earlier in the summer to add to my stash.
As we wind down our canning season, I am a little wiser. There are countless blogs and books on canning, but here is my short take on some hard-learned lessons:
Inspect your jars when you wash them. Look for chips and hairline cracks. Heat your jars at the same time you heat the water in your canning pot to reduce the potential for thermal shock. The consensus of the blogs and instructions I found indicate if a jar breaks during processing, it is unlikely that the remaining jars will be affected by the glass. In my case, the bottom was cleanly separated from the jar and did not burst to produce glass fragments. Still, that may not be the batch you want to gift to others...
Skim the foam from your pot. One year I made a batch of strawberry jam after a day of picking fruit with some of our extended family. Strawberry jam is like spreadable summer, and I did not want to waste a drop by skimming. The jam tasted OK, but each jar has a light pink foam at the top. We eat with our eyes, so keep the foam out. If you end up with a partial jar, that is an opportunity to taste your hard work.
Buy your canning supplies in the spring. Canning and fermenting are having a moment in the food world. Do not expect to find lids or jars in September.
If you are making a recipe for the first time, check several sources. That blog recipe may sound good, but how tested is it? State extension services have a wealth of information.
Every book and blog have one common piece of advice, so I will perpetuate it here - do not double a recipe, especially jams and jellies. Foods where acid is added to individual jars or vinegar-based recipes are more forgiving. My lazy version of tomato sauce allows me to boil down whatever tomatoes the garden gives me in a week and run them through the food mill. I can make 2 jars of sauce one session and 8 another session, because the citric acid gets added to each jar. Just be sure to actually add the acid. I can say that it is not fun fishing out and opening hot jars to add that quarter teaspoon of acid halfway through processing.
Take notes. I mark up my cookbooks to note what worked well and what didn't - lining out the '5' in my Ball canning book and replacing it with a '7' was done before the batch even cooled. Label your jars while you are at it. If you are making five tomato-based recipes, those jars will all look the same 5 months from now. If I make more than one batch of a recipe, I will add a letter after the year for the jars in the same batch. This helps weed out bad jars later if problems occur, as a reminder if I made variations from batch to batch, or to help me remember which batch had the broken jar.
Don't spend too long mourning a bad batch or a broken jar. Yes, it is a lot of work to prepare food for canning, but sometimes the canning gods are not kind. Think through what you did, research what may have went wrong, and learn. Most of us are not yet canning for the apocalypse, so do it because it is fun to produce something yourself, and not because your family will otherwise starve in January.
Wipe those jar rims. It is a small detail, but do everything you can to get a good seal. Lids are cheap insurance on safely saving your bounty, so stick to recycling jars and rings and buy new lids. If your jars are too close together while you are ladling, get another wire rack and spread things out so you are not dipping your towel in one jar while you are wiping another jar.
Everyone is looking for that Pinterest/Facebook/Snapchat-perfect photo or perfect jar of jelly to gift. You are not a professional canner, so accept that your results may be 'rustic'. Do not use this as an excuse to be sloppy, but if you pay attention to sanitation and work neatly, your friends and family will love what you give them.
Canning is one of those hobbies that sounds fun, until you are mired in apple peels. Remember that it is fun, that you are canning to enjoy your harvest and to share it with others, and it is certainly a better use of time than watching TV. You can always bake cookies instead - just follow the recipe!
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