So, that did it. This year, I have decided, will be the year of vinegar pickles. Sure, I’ve got a quart or two of half sours in various stages of fermentation floating around my kitchen, but I’m hoping to can at least half a dozen pints of pure pucker pickles for my winter enjoyment. This is a mixed batch of random vegetables, including the obligatory cucumbers and zucchinis, but the recipe is fairly flexible. You could certainly add cauliflower, beans, celery, asparagus…you get the idea. Ziedrich recommends a 20-minute water-bath processing time for a version that includes mostly easily pickled things (cucumbers, peppers, onions) plus just a few carrots. If you’re planning on using lots of carrots, you’ll probably need to increase the time, but not necessarily by much. Remember, even the sturdy pickled beet only need 30 minutes. In any case, I’m not a carrot-canning expert, so change the vegetable proportions at your own risk. Please, please, please do not change the ratio of water to vinegar, but feel free to add sugar to taste.

Stuff the following things in a pint jar, in more or less the amount recommended:

3 kirby-size cucumbers
About half of a 5″ zucchini or yellow squash, cut into spears
One medium garden carrot, cut into thin spears
2 hot wax peppers, slit down the side
4 jar-length pieces of fennel, with feathers attached
1 clove garlic
1/4 t. peppercorns
1 sprig thyme
1 sprig tarragon

Combine 2 3/4 c. vinegar (I used cider vinegar) with 2 c. water and 1 1/2 T. kosher salt. Bring to a boil. Pour this over your vegetables. You’ll have canning liquid leftover—just stash it in the fridge until the next time you’re ready to assemble another jar of garden delights. Adjust two-piece canning lids and process 20 minutes in a boiling-water bath. You don’t have to wait three years to open them, but do give them at least three weeks to let the vinegar do its work.

But then I went on vacation and missed the harvest at Mood’s. Yet again.

Oh well, I thought. Isn’t eating locally all about learning that food is all about timing?

But to my surprise, some of our market’s Pennsylvania farmers showed up with a few boxes of sour cherries. I bought three pints for $3 each and dived in. I ended up with 4 pints of absolutely divine sour cherry preserves, then promptly opened one jar back up to serve to friends. And next year, I’ll pick my own and can all I want. Really.

Sour Cherry Preserves

3 pints sour cherries, pitted
2 1/2 c. sugar
Juice of one lemon
1 T real vanilla (or use a bean)
1 cinnamon stick

1) Combine all of the ingredients in a pot and bring to a boil. This is never going to gel, but bring it close to the gelling point. I used a candy thermometer and cooked it to 214°F (at sea level). Fish out the cinnamon stick and the vanilla bean, if you’re using them, and turn off the heat.

2) Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil and prepare 4 half-pint jars. Prepare your lids. Transfer the hot preserves to the hot jars and adjust the two-piece lids. Process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes.

When: Sunday, July 25th, 1 to 3 PM
Where: Doris’s house in West Philadelphia (details upon registration)
Cost: $25 includes all supplies

To register, just send an e-mail to dorisandjilly@gmail.com.

Picked beets were a staple in my house as a kid growing up. My mother always goes for your basic pickled beet: nothing but white vinegar, water, and sugar. I usually do, too, but on Saturday my CSA included several heads of fennel. Fennel and beets are a natural pair, so the few dedicated beet-loving souls who attended the Saturday class left with a slightly more sophisticated product. If you don’t like fennel, no problem—just leave it out. If, on the other hand, you like a spicy pickled beet, feel free to add any of the following (but probably not all at once) to your pickling jars: peppercorns, cloves, allspice, star anise, dill heads, garlic, or strips of hot pepper.

Beets are a low-acid food, so please don’t change the proportion of vinegar to water. You can, however, use cider vinegar, so long as it’s at least 5% acidity. Finally, the purpose of the sugar is merely to counteract the tartness of the vinegar and preserve the color—it’s not really involved in the safety equation. Feel free to add more or less, depending on your taste, or to substitute brown sugar, raw sugar, or a sugar substitute. I can’t predict what making all of these kinds of changes will do to the color and texture of your beets, but so long as your acid is 5%, it’s safe for water-bath canning. Finally, be sure to wait several weeks to let the beets develop their full flavor. Then devour at leisure.

Pickled Beets with Fennel

About five pounds of beets
One long fennel frond, cut into seven pieces
7 peppercorns
3 1/2 c. distilled white vinegar (5%)
1 1/2 c. water
1 1/2 c. sugar

1) Wash your beets, leaving the roots and 1″ of stems attached. Cook your beets your preferred way. Some options: pressure cooking, boiling, roasting, or wrapped in foil in the crock pot. Cool. If your beets are thoroughly cooked, the skins should slip right off. Leave small beets whole, but cut larger beets into bite-sized pieces (or slice, or quarter, or whatever appeals to you).

2) Make your canning solution. Combine the vinegar, water, and sugar in a small pan and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, heat water for a boiling water bath, warm your jar lids, and have 7 pint jars ready.

3) Place a piece of fennel and a single peppercorn in each jar. Transfer the beets to the jars and cover with hot syrup. Remove air bubbles and add more syrup if necessary, leaving 1/4″ headspace. Adjust two-piece lids. Process in a boiling-water bath for 30 minutes.

4) After the jars have cooled and you’ve checked for seals, be sure to remove the rings. The syrup is sticky, and the rings become difficult to remove if you leave them on too long. Once you’ve opened the jars, you might want to switch to a plastic lid, as the vinegar will quickly corrode a standard canning lid.

What: Beets Two Ways Class
Where: Doris’s house, West Philadelphia
When: Saturday, June 26, 1 PM
How to Register: Send Doris an e-mail

See you then!

You’ve got three basic options: freezing, dehydrating, or canning. More ambitious folks can try fermenting, like I did with my bumper crop of bok choi last year. But let’s stick with the basics here.

Freezing Greens

This is the easiest, and probably the best, solution. It’s very, very easy to freeze greens. You just blanch them, cool them in an ice bath, and freeze. I’ve got step-by-step instructions and photos here. Assuming you’ve got a good freezer, these will keep very well for a year. We used ours all winter in soups, stews, pastas, dips, and even just sauteed with garlic. They shrink dramatically when blanched—plan on about a pound of fresh greens to make about two cups.

For most people, this is the way to go. If, however, you have limited freezer space, you live in an area that experiences frequent power outages, or are planning for a future without electricity, you need other options. Alas, they’re not great. But, you asked, so here goes.

Dehydrating Greens

Are you one of those people who likes to sprinkle seaweed flakes over your rice bowl at the local health food store? Then you might like this. Steam your greens just until they’re wilted. Transfer them to dehydrator trays and dry at a low temperature (say, 110ºF) just until they’re crispy. You’ll want to keep an eye on them—within two hours, mine looked like this:

Now what, you may ask, would you do with dehydrated turnip greens? That’s an excellent question. I rehydrated some with a little bit of room temperature water, and they looked pretty good. The problem was that they had no perceptible taste. In the end, I crumbled them up and stuck them in a spice jar:

I sprinkled an entire leaf’s worth of flakes over a bowl of roasted potatoes and couldn’t tell they were there. I suspect that they’re still fairly nutritious, though, so maybe this isn’t such a bad way to incorporate hearty greens into your diet. I guess.

Canning Greens

The things I do for science.

Yes, it is possible to can hearty greens. It requires a pressure cooker and a processing time of 1 hour, 10 minutes for pints and 1 hour, 30 minutes for quarts. Yes, you read that right. And after you’ve subjected these poor, innocent vegetables to 240ºF to more than an hour, you get this appetizing product:

(And that’s the glamor shot.)

The nutritional value of all of this is questionable. They taste about like you would expect them to. If, however, you have absolutely no other options and feel strongly about having a pantry full of shelf-stable vegetables, this technique will serve you well. But Lordy, do they smell bad. Here’s how you do it.

1) Bring about 3 quarts of water to a boil. You need 2 quarts for the pressure canner, plus some extra to pour over the greens.
2) Steam the greens until wilted. Cut them into manageable pieces.

3) Stuff the greens into canning jars. Add 1/2 t. salt per jar (optional) and cover with boiling water, leaving 1″ headspace. Don’t forget to remove the air bubbles. Adjust two-piece lids.
4) Transfer the jars to a rack on a pressure canner. Pour in 2 quarts of boiling water. Lock the lid into place, but do not place the regulator on the steam vent. Turn on the heat and exhaust steam from the vent for 10 minutes. Then place the regulator on the steam vent and bring the canner to 10 pounds of pressure. Start timing once the regulator starts rocking—70 minutes for pints, 90 minutes for quarts. (If this is confusing, see the step-by-step directions, with pictures, in this post.)
5) Turn off the heat and let the pressure drop of its own accord. When the pressure has dropped, remove the regulator. Now open all your windows. After waiting a few more minutes, open the lid away from your body. The pungent aroma of overcooked turnip greens will fill your house, and you’ll have all the shelf-stable greens you want. Plan on 2 to 5 pounds per pint, depending on the kind of greens involved. Um, yum?

Other ideas?

Why is canned food shelf-stable?

When you can something, you’re doing two things. First, you’re killing bacteria, molds, and yeasts through the addition of heat. Second, by creating a seal, you’re preventing new bacteria from getting in.

What’s the difference between pressure canning and water-bath canning?

For the purposes of canning, all foods are either high-acid or low-acid foods. The kinds of food-born pathogens that can live in a high-acid environment can be killed fairly easily with moderate heat, so you can process them in a boiling water bath. Low-acid foods, on the other hand, can harbor botulism spores that are not destroyed at 212°F. Low-acid foods must be processed in a steam pressure canner than can reach much higher temperatures (usually 240ºF).

How do I know if a food is high or low acid?

All fruits except for figs and tomatoes are acidic enough to can in a water-bath canner. Figs and tomatoes can be safely canned this way with the addition of a small amount of lemon juice. Everything else—including vegetables, meats, fish, and mixtures of high acid and low acid foods (for instance, salsa)—either has to be pressure canned or made more acidic. The short answer to this question is to follow the recipe. The longer answer, recommended only for experienced canners, involves comparing fruit/vegetable/acid ratios and densities from trusted sources. Please be cautious when using internet canning recipes, and consider comparing unfamiliar instructions to published guidelines, such as those of the National Center for Home Food Preservation and those listed in the Ball Blue Book of Preserving.

What’s the processing time?

The term “processing time” refers to the amount of time that you either boil or pressure can your jars. The amount of time depends on the food—check your recipe. In a boiling water bath, you start timing when the water returns to a boil. In a pressure canner, you start timing when the canner reaches pressure.

I have a pressure cooker. Can I use it as a canner?

That depends. Small pressure cookers are not necessarily guaranteed to reach and maintain the appropriate temperatures necessary to kill botulism spores. Most pressure canners are 23 quarts or larger—large enough to hold 7 quart jars on a rack, or 14 jelly jars, stacked. If you’re not sure, contact the manufacturer. My attempt to explain the science of pressure cookers is here.

Do I have to sterilize the jars?

If the recipe calls for a processing time of more than 10 minutes, no. Otherwise, yes. In either case, manufacturers generally recommend that you pre-heat your jars to reduce the chance of breakage, particularly before processing in a water-bath canner.

Can I use a dishwasher to sterilize my jars? What about to process them?

If your dishwasher has a sterilization setting, you may use it to sterilize your jars. You may not, however, process your jars in the dishwasher. You need to use a boiling water bath or a steam pressure canner, as per the recipe.

If I have a low-acid food, but I just want to keep it for a few weeks, can I water-bath can it?

No. Food is either safe for water-bath canning, or not. If you do not have a pressure canner but have a food that needs to be pressure canned, you either need to refrigerate it or find some other way to preserve it.

How long will canned food keep once it’s opened?

Once the jars are opened, canned food is just like regular food, with similar keeping times. Something pickled might last months; a highly sweetened jam might last several weeks; and a tomato sauce might last only a few days.

Can I reduce the sugar or salt in a recipe? What about sugar substitutes?

YES. Contrary to what you may have heard, it is perfectly safe to reduce the sugar in a canning recipe so long as you are using an appropriate processing time. (The highly liability conscious company that sells Ball jars backs me up on this.) Sugar is a preservative, which means that food (particularly fruit) with sugar added will retain more of its original color, taste, and texture. It also means that the jars will keep longer once you’ve opened them. You may not get the texture you’re expecting if you reduce or substitute sugar—for instance, your jams might not set. But since sugar does not affect acidity, it doesn’t affect safety. Same thing with salt: the amount of salt in canning recipes is not enough to act as a preservative. It’s there for flavor. If you need to reduce your salt, just leave it out.

How will I know if a jar has gone bad?

A broken seal, a bulging lid, moving bubbles, mold, foam, bad smells, funky texture, and sliminess are all signs that you should not eat the contents of a jar.

Why do you store jars without their rings?

See previous question. If you’ve got an active bacterial population in your jar, they will produce various gasses. If the rings are removed, the pressure inside the jars can eventually build up to the point that the lid pops off. This is your signal, months later when you find the jar in the basement, to not eat it. If the ring is attached, the lid might not pop off. In rare cases, the jar might even explode. On a more mundane level, you should remove the rings because moisture trapped between the jar and the lid will cause them to rust.

How long can you store your jars?

That’s a good question. The USDA generally says 1 year. Many experienced canners will tell you that they fairly regularly keep their canned goods for longer than that, and just as many will tell you that food begins to lose its flavor much sooner (say, 6 months). Since the whole point of preserving foods is to hold you over until the next year’s harvest, shoot for a year.

Got more questions? Bring ‘em on!

My favorite strawberry farm, Gaventa’s, no longer offers U-pick. Waaaah. My next favorite strawberry farm, Mood’s, apparently isn’t offering strawberries this year, but plans to open for other fruit picking in mid-June. That left Johnson’s, a weirdly tourist-y place in Medford that I don’t particularly recommend as a “farm experience” (enforced hayrides = bad, in my book), but the price was right ($1.75/pound for more than 10 pounds) and the berries were DELICIOUS. But here’s the kicker: they wanted $4.95 for pick-your-own cherries. Um, no.

For that, we headed over to Rowand’s Farm in Glassboro. Now this is a U-pick I can live with. The proprietors sit in lawn chairs and hand you plastic buckets. Sweet cherries are $1.65/pound. They also have strawberries, but I can’t vouch for them, having already gorged myself at Johnson’s. But there’s a catch: they’re closed on Saturdays.

Once you bring all that fruit home, then you have to do something with it. Some options and recommendations from last year’s blog:

Freeze it, individually (not particularly recommended, but convenient) or in sugar
Make endless jars of jam, including my favorite, cherry raspberry
Can it with rhubarb
Combine it with lemons for a marmalade
Stash it in syrup
Dehydrate it

Julia over at What Julia Ate highly recommends drowning fruit in alcohol and straining the remains to make liqueur. This is a new one for me, so no results yet. But I’ll keep you posted.

Happy picking and preserving!