Cranberry Sauce, 2017

I usually make a canner load of cranberry sauce sometime before Thanksgiving, when berries are usually widely available in stores.  This year I missed that window, but found some at Costco in mid-December.  I brought home ten pounds; my normal batch is about 8-9 pounds of cranberries that make about 8-9 quarts of finished sauce.

As usual, there were a lot of bad berries.  I have gotten better (I think) at picking through them; this time I spent about 10 minutes per 2-pound bag sorting out the culls.

The bags were actually somewhat over-filled; although I pulled out almost 1.5 pounds, I ended up with about 9 pounds total--enough that they didn't fit in the pot initially (the picture below shows about eight pounds' worth when they were first added).  The berries rapidly compress as they start to rupture with the heat (my normal mix is 10 2/3 cups each of water and Whey Low, plus the berries; the berries pop when the water gets hot enough).  I added the remaining berries as the mixture cooked down a bit.

Here's something I forgot from previous sessions:  cranberries compress not only when first heating but after canning.  I had a note in my recipe book to leave 1/4"-1/2" headspace but observed that the sauce compresses as it cools. The Ball Blue Book recommends 1/4".  I ended up leaving about 1/2" in most of the jars, which led to this:

As you can see, they collapsed a lot.  The large ridge around the neck is about at the 1/2" mark, and the contents receded well below that.  They'll still be fine, and all the jars sealed with no problem, but they look like some of the contents leaked out during processing--which has happened, but did not happen this time.  I've never had issues with any jam-type products doing that, only ones with a lot of water in the jars (e.g., pickled things).

I go through about nine quarts per year, so one canner load is about right.  They keep for a few years; I have opened jars up to three years old that were completely fine.  As I noted previously, I used to buy bags and stash them in the freezer, to make sauce on demand whenever I wanted it--as it turned out, that usually did not work well and I ended up tossing them eventually.  Canning works much better to preserve them.

This sauce ends up being relatively low-carb compared to an alternative sweetened with sugar.  According to the Fat Secret website, raw berries have about 3.46 grams of carbs per ounce, but 1.3 grams of that is fiber--net 2.16 grams.  That means there are about 35 grams of carbs per jar from the berries (one pound), plus the carbs from the Whey Low.  For 10 2/3 cups divided by 9 quarts, the amount of Whey Low per jar is about 1 1/6 cups per jar.  That much sugar would be about 235 grams of carbs.  If Whey Low clocks in at 20% - 40% of that, it will reduce the overall carb impact of the sauce--when consumed in moderation.

Stuffing

I apologize in advance; it looks like there are strange things going on with the fonts in this post again.  The Blogger tools may or may not be fixing the issues.

There is absolutely nothing special about this recipe.  In days of yore, my mother made stuffing, aka dressing, and shoved it into the turkey before putting the bird into the oven at Thanksgiving.  I've never done that, but a few years ago I decided to try to recreate the stuffing itself, to be baked in a casserole dish along with the turkey.

Since I make my own sourdough bread routinely, I just did a Google search for sourdough stuffing recipes, finding a few from which I created this composite (the original link or links are lost).

1 lb sourdough bread

8 tbsp butter (1 stick)

2-4 stalks celery cut in half lengthwise & sliced

1 medium onion, chopped

2 tsp dry sage

1 tsp dry thyme

3 tsp dry parsley

2 1/2 c chicken broth (this works out to one Cambell's can reconstituted, but there are a lot of non-condensed options, too)


One pound of bread is half a loaf.  I have used both my basic recipe, roughly 50/50 white and whole wheat flour, and all whole wheat.  Both work fine.  I slice the bread into cubes and put it in the oven on a cookie sheet at 350 for 20 minutes, after which time it's thoroughly dried.

The bread goes into a casserole (I use an old round Pyrex casserole dish, 2.5 liters--it has to be at least that large; 2 liters would not be big enough).

I then melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the other dry ingredients (chopped celery, onion, and spices).  The chicken broth either goes in a few minutes after that or it can be added at the same time.  I continue heating the mixture until it is hot, then pour it into the casserole dish into which I've put the bread, mix it a little, and then put it in the oven. 

If it's baking with a turkey, the oven will be at 325, so it stays in for 50 minutes (half covered, half open).  It can also be baked a little higher (350) for a little shorter time (maybe 40 minutes).

That's it.  It's very savory and the flavor does seem similar to what I remember.

Bumper Crop of Black Walnuts

Last year (2016) I got no black walnuts.  North Georgia had a severe drought in the late summer and early fall; although I had some nuts on the trees in July, by the end of August they had all aborted.

This year was different.  A lot of nuts were downed in early September by Irma.  As I mentioned in September, I went ahead and cracked some of them right away to see if they were okay and they were.  Lesson learned, however:  The nuts had not cured.  I left the container of nuts shown in the Irma post out at room temperature to see what would happen, and after a week or so the nut meats molded.

I didn't go back for the rest of the Irma walnuts because (as noted previously) it was a total pain trying to remove the husks.  It probably took 30-60 seconds of hammering to get them off each nut.

The remainder of the crop started to drop in October.  In all, I probably got about 20 gallons' worth off of my two trees, and I left many more on the ground unharvested.  I just couldn't get to them all in time.

It takes me about an hour to process five gallons.  I have gotten better at it, but it's still labor intensive.  First I knocked off the hulls with a hammer. The fully ripe ones were much easier to de-husk.  I had some husk fly larvae but not many; perhaps last year's failed crop cut down on the population some. Then I swirled them in water in a bucket, using both the water stream out of the faucet and the nuts themselves to remove remaining husk.  I did about three or four rinses, ending up with what you see here.  That's about clean enough, though I have seen cleaner shells.  People pressure wash them or do many more rinsing cycles to get them cleaner.  They don't have to be works of art.

I haven't cracked these yet--that's actually the most labor-intensive step in processing--but they are ready to go.  They'll be good in the shell for a year or two.

Low-Carb Pecan Pie

This recipe is not any different from the low-carb black walnut pie I described a couple of months ago with two exceptions: most obviously, the nuts were pecans, and secondly, I made the crust with about 75% whole grain rye flour.

Although the amount of sweetener was the same, it tasted sweeter, probably because of the influence of the pecans versus black walnuts.  Pecans do seem to be somewhat sweet.

3/4 cup brown sugar Whey Low (aka Whey Low Gold)
1/2 cup Whey Low Type D
1/4 cup butter (4 tbsp)
3 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla
1 cup nuts
1/8 tsp salt

I baked it at 350 for 40 minutes, similar to the black walnut pie.  The crust fell apart above the pie filling when each slice was removed from the pie pan, but it held together reasonably well elsewhere.  The rye flavor was fine.

It's another potential dessert to add into the mix with someone who's diabetic.

Applesauce

This is something I haven't made in a few years.  Timewise it's not that much of a job, but it is an involved process.  First the apples have to be cut up, then heated, then processed, then seasoned (sugar and/or cinnamon), and finally canned.  All of this requires coordination of stove space, pots (including the washing thereof), and processes to keep everything moving smoothly with minimal bottlenecks.

Apples need to be pulped, and for that, they need to be heated.  The other thing I use the food mill for is peach butter, and when pulping those, it can be done raw.  Raw peaches are tough but doable.  Raw apples are not.  So they need to be cut up and thrown into a pot to cook a bit.  The first time I made applesauce, I tossed the whole thing into the pot, just quartering it.  Now I use an apple slicer and pitch the core.

There is some apple pulp that gets lost when sacrificing the core, but I do it this way for a few reasons:  First, getting the seeds out is a help.  They just contribute to the mess in the mill.  Second, the area around the stem is likely to be dirty and have pesticide and herbicide residue (I wash them off to some degree, but washing thoroughly in the stem area would be troublesome).  Third, the cores often have problems--apples often begin to decay in the core area before the rest of the apple suffers any loss in quality.  Using an apple slicer also makes the process pretty quick, and cuts the apples into relatively narrow pieces for heating.

As a side note, the slicer above didn't last very long.  I got it to handle big apples, which it worked well for--for the first 100 or so apples.  Then it broke, forcing me back to my other slicer that is smaller and does eight slices.

Once sliced, they go into the pots for heating.  There's no need to dunk them in a vitamin C or citric acid solution to prevent browning as I do when preparing apples for dehydrating.

The heating phase is the most difficult logistically.  The apples will break down rapidly as they heat, but initially, for 8 quarts of sauce, about 25-30 quarts of heating capacity are needed.  I put a little water in the bottom of the pots to limit sticking (the apples themselves will contribute more as they cook down), and turn the pile over frequently to heat the slices on top.

It can take a while to heat them, maybe 20 minutes, and at that point there will probably still be a few slices on top that are hard.  Trying to mill them is an exercise in frustration.  I just toss back any that are hard and let them continue to heat.

Soft slices pulp almost immediately.  The peels don't break down and have to be removed frequently while milling.

Milling enough apples for eight quarts of sauce takes a while.  Probably a half bushel, roughly 20 pounds raw or even a bit more, are needed for that amount of sauce, and much of that ends up being cores and peels, i.e., waste (unless you have rabbits, chickens, or other animals that might like the tailings).  All of the fiber is apparently in the skin; applesauce itself has almost no fiber.

 

 At any rate, I just hook the mill on top of a large pot and periodically transfer the sauce back to one of the pots--once I have one emptied of cooked slices--for seasoning.  I don't add sugar.  This batch of sauce was about 2/3 Stayman and 1/3 Goldrush, with a few Arkansas Blacks tossed in.  I added a little over two tablespoons of Ceylon cinnamon as the only seasoning.  Having the sauce in a pot facilitates heating it back up--it will have cooled during milling--before ladling it into the jars.

Once the other pot is emptied of apple slices, it has to be moved off the stove to make room for the canner.  While the canner is heating up, the jars can be prepped.  Applesauce is one thing that regular-mouth jars work well for; I have a mix of those and wide-mouth in inventory.

The remaining processing step is simply to fill the jars, leaving 1/2" headspace, and processing.  The National Center for Home Food Preserving recommends 25 minutes for hot sauce (I'm over 1000 feet in elevation), but if the sauce isn't really hot, I go 35--and I use atmospheric (non-pressurized) steam canning, as noted previously. Pickyourown.org recommends the same processing time.

That's it.  Acidifying is unnecessary; the pH of the finished sauce is about 3.5, well below the 4.6 threshold.  Three big pots--16 quart and 20 quart stock pots plus the canner--are involved, along with the mill, bowls for sauce, small pot for the lids, funnel, jar lifter, spoons, etc. Cleanup requires time and coordination just like the earlier steps. It ends up looking close to the cartoon I posted before, but it's all good in the end. Total time for all of the above was about four hours (including cleanup).

Addendum:  Here's something interesting.  I did two batches this year; the first one was Stayman and Goldrush, as noted above; the second batch was Arkansas Black, Cameo, and a few Goldrush apples.  The color of the sauce was different; it had a red blush to it.  Shown below is the second batch by itself and then in a composite that includes the first batch (already shown above).