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.