Blueberry Preserves

I do things other than mix sugar-laden preserves with the fruit I grow and buy.  However, preserves are easy to make; they maintain quality for a long time (at least four years); and they are a good thing to give people.  Pickled carrots might not be accepted by everybody, but (almost) nobody will turn down preserves of some sort.

That being said, I don't like blueberry preserves all that much.  They're fine, but not as good as peach preserves.  The blueberry flavor is not that strong in the finished product; it's more just sweet.

I got a good harvest this year and did one canner load (six pints) of preserves (the canner will hold more, but six pints is a manageable quantity).

SureJell's package insert has a recipe, but I don't see it at quick glance on their website. It's just four cups crushed blueberries, four cups sugar, one package pectin. This produces three pints, so it could be doubled.   By the way, it's a standard admonition to avoid doubling a jam or preserves recipe because there may be problems with fruit set.  I am happy that I have never had any problem doing that; it's more efficient that way.

Pickyourown.org has a recipe that starts with 10 cups of blueberries (intact), 7 cups of sugar, and 1/4 cup lemon juice, plus water and one package of pectin.  I don't add water but otherwise followed this recipe (bumped up slightly with 11 cups of blueberries, 7.5 cups of sugar, and an extra teaspoon of lemon juice because the recipe otherwise yielded about 5.75 pints the first time I tried it).

Blueberry preserves are just about the easiest kind to make.  Rinse the berries; measure the right quantity; stomp them a bit with a potato masher; heat with pectin and lemon juice; add sugar when it boils; return to a full boil for one minute; then fill jars with 1/4" headspace and process about 15 minutes (I'm at 1200' elevation so added 5 minutes to the sea-level recommendation of 10 minutes).

That's about it.

What did I do with the remaining 15 pounds of berries? I froze some, which can later be turned into pies or even more preserves, and ate the rest fresh.

As I noted last year, blueberries can be cheap at the peak of the harvest (here in Georgia, both Sam's and Costco had them for $4.98 for two pounds in July). That means I saved myself about $50 by harvesting my own bushes.  Considering the time it took, in an economic sense I'm probably not coming out very far ahead. I was picking every two to four days for almost a month, from mid-June to mid-July.  But I like doing it myself (this is not to say that I didn't buy some, as well, and dehydrate them).