I have always enjoyed home canning. Today I was able to share that with my Eldest Daughter. She hadn’t helped with canning before, but she was a trooper. Stuck with me until the end. Even through a couple of mishaps. But we did fine. The apples were beautiful. I used Jonathans. There were a couple of nice Suncrisps in the mix, a gift from friends who picked up the apples for us. I set those aside for eating fresh. Thanks, Chuck and Liz!
For canning information, my favorite online site is pickyourown.org. The site provides easy to follow directions.
The site says to boil the apple slices in a gallon of water, or apple juice, or light sugar syrup. I like this recipe for spiced sugar syrup.
- 8 c. water
- 2 c. sugar (This can be reduced or omitted. Our apples were tart, so I used some sugar.)
- 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp. ground allspice
- 1/4 tsp. ground cloves
When the liquid was too low to cover the apple slices, we just made another batch of the same.
I had Eldest Daughter blanch the apple slices for five minutes as directed, fill the jars, and then pour some of the liquid over the apples till 1/2″ from the top of the jars.
I did the peeling.
I had a large bowl of salted water at hand and I dropped the peeled apples into that until I had four or five done. That kept them from browning. I sliced and cored the peeled ones, and put them back in the salted water until I had enough to fill the 8-cup measuring cup.
The deer are going to love these leftovers.
We actually made 21 jars. The directions online said we should get 16-19 quarts from one bushel. We had about a dozen apples leftover. One jar turned out NOT to be a canning jar. Oops! It opened during processing and we had to empty the water from the canner and start over with fresh. The second mishap? I cut my thumb while washing dishes during clean-up. Broke a large glass bowl. The replacement bowl will definitely be plastic. My thumb is fine. DH came home, took a look at it and gave his blessing for a mere band-aid. No stitches, thank you!
There was a bowlful of apple slices left over after filling all the jars. We popped them in the microwave for a few minutes, then ate them over ice cream. A sweet ending to the job. Should have taken a picture of that!
Clark was glad we were done. There was a patch of sunlight calling his name…
~~Rhonda