Pear Preserves, 2018

As I have previously noted, the pear crop failed in north Georgia last year due to a late frost.  So this is my first opportunity to do anything with pears since 2016.  I have two Kieffer trees that are too young to bear, but a nearby farmers' market, Jaemor, sells them.

Back in 2016, I made preserves. I repeated the process this time around and noted again that the eight cups of pear bits didn't break down much when mashed with the potato masher, so I was essentially heating pear dices with very little liquid in them.  Per instructions from the BBB and SureJell site, I added the lemon juice and pectin initially, as well.  It had been long enough since the last time that I had forgotten this is how it was before, as well, and I put in another four tablespoons or so of lemon juice.  More acid never hurts, though it might inhibit the set. When the pot boiled I dumped in the sugar--all 10 cups' worth--and the mixture eventually turned sort of syrupy.

I cut up about 8.5-9 cups of pears and got 6.5 pints.  I happened to have a half pint jelly jar from someone who gave me some jam once, so I went ahead and used that in addition to six pint jars.  Normally I don't bother with half pint jars; they're too small.  Everything turned out well.

Pear preserves are nice, but they don't have as strong of a fruit flavor as peach preserves or (maybe) even as much as blueberry preserves.  But they're a worthy addition to the canning mix.  Over the two years since I made them last time, I've used up all but two of the pints I did back then.  That says something.

The Kudzu Is Blooming

This is another post that's behind the times: kudzu has been blooming for a month.  My understanding is that it doesn't seed itself that well, spreading mostly by runners, but it does definitely bloom.  The flowers are not that apparent when looking at a kudzu patch, but there are plenty of flower stalks hiding under the leaves.

As flowers go, they're not unattractive.  They also have a pronounced grape-like scent that's strong.  There's a recipe for kudzu blossom jelly that I haven't tried and (at least this year) won't, but it is definitely intriguing...
 

Peach Preserves

I've written about dehydrating peaches and making peach butter, but there are a few other things I do with peaches:  can them (as-is, with syrup), pickle them, and make peach preserves.  The latter is actually one of the most common.  As I have noted before, I do make things other than sugar-laden treats with fruit, but peach preserves are easy, and a little bit of peaches go a long way.  I get twice as much preserves as butter for the same amount of peaches, at least partly because the extra sugar in preserves (twice as much) increases the bulk.

Making peach preserves is pretty easy and I have (so far) not screwed it up so it must also be nearly fool-proof.  I start off doing something that is recommended against:  I double the recipe in the Ball Blue Book (BBB).  Pickyourown.org has a recipe, too, that is heavier on the fruit, lighter on the sugar--but I still use more peaches than they recommend.

I use eight cups (actually more like nine) of chopped, peeled peaches.   To peel, float them in simmering (not boiling) water for a few minutes; then the skins come off pretty easily.  You can just pull them off and don't need to cut, except in a few places.  Then I quarter them and chop them into relatively small pieces.  I probably divide each peach into 160 small chunks, which is not as slow as it sounds.  I can peel and chop a peach in about two minutes (or less).  According to the weight/volume on pickyourown.org, nine cups should come to a little more than five pounds fresh (you may need more if you need to cut around plum curculio larvae or other things).  The full recipe is:

8-9 cups chopped peaches
4 tablespoons lemon juice
14 cups sugar
2 packages of pectin.

I add the peaches to the pot and dump a proportionate amount of lemon juice in as I'm filling it; I don't treat separately to prevent browning.  Once the peaches are in the pot, I mash them up with the potato masher, much as I noted with the blueberry preserves.

 I then add the pectin--so everything is in the pot except for the sugar--and start heating it on low/medium heat.  When it boils, I dump in the sugar, mix it up, and turn the heat up a bit to boil it again.  Once it boils for the second time (which can take 15 minutes or so), I let it go for about a minute--during which it will be starting to foam a lot--then turn the heat off.  After that, it's just a matter of filling the jars and canning them.  I use pint jars and get about eight pints from the nine cups of peaches (I usually have a little left over that I just refrigerate).  These steps are straight from the BBB.

The jars seal quickly and I have never had any trouble with them setting up, but once I think it was somewhat thin; tilting a jar would make the contents shift a bit, albeit stiffly.

As you can see in the picture below, the jam is brightly colored and doesn't have any issues with turning brown.  After a couple of years the jam will be darker in color, but still is good.  I've used preserves up to about four years old and they are still fine.

This is an easy and very tasty way to preserve fruit. It probably shouldn't be a mainstay for obvious reasons; each jar has about one cup of fruit and almost two cups of sugar in it.  However, in small increments it's fine.  I go through maybe five or six jars per year.

Although Whey Low says that its product can be used 1:1 in place of sugar for preserves, I haven't tried it.  That'd be very expensive (although I use almost as much in my annual cranberry canner load, that yields seven or eight quarts vs. eight pints).

Although I'm somewhat less than fully objective, I like my peach preserves better than any I've ever tried--even ones made with sugar and Belle of Georgia peaches, which are what I have usually used (off my trees in the back yard, which now have expired).  I don't know what it is about them that makes them better, but they really do have a good flavor.  Making them is well worth the time.

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).

Pear Preserves

Harvest season is starting to wind down a bit so I have some time to post.  I have a lot of material queued up, but it takes time and motivation to get it online--that and timeliness: a post on thinning peach trees probably wouldn't resonate much right now.

I got some Kieffer pears yesterday.  There are trees all over north Georgia that are overloaded with pears right now and they have an ever-increasing collection of drops on the ground. Most of these are probably Kieffers.  Many people apparently don't bother with them anymore; in the Atlanta exurbs, there are a lot of pear trees in what are now subdivision yards--the new occupants have no idea what to do with them and, since they didn't plant the tree, not much interest.  They might have tried gnawing on one at some point and quickly decided they were no good.  However, the people who planted the trees didn't waste time and effort.  If there were better fruit trees to plant, they would have done so.  The old rural farmhouses might be gone, but the trees endure.

I had a Kieffer tree myself (briefly).  It was long-neglected when I took ownership of the property and I did get a few pears the first year.  I tried to eat them fresh both before and after I let them sit at room temperature waiting futilely for them to ripen and soften to become like Bartletts.  I looked into doing pear preserves at the time but never got around to it.  The tree was a scaffold for a poison ivy vine the size of Godzilla, so I cut it down after a year or so and hauled it off to an inert landfill (I was worried about even burning it for firewood).  The poison ivy had more or less embedded itself in the tree over a period of years and couldn't be pulled out or cut off at ground level.  The tree had literally grown around it.

Kieffers are very hard.  They look like pears but do not assume Bartlett-like softness and coloring when they ripen.  My peck bag had a mix of green and almost-golden coloring, as the picture shows.  They are somewhat grittier than Bartletts and way more so than Seckels.  The skin is more noticeable than that of a Bartlett when eating fresh if unpeeled.  The pears at the right (any color) were sweet enough; I was pleasantly surprised when I cut one open and sampled it.  It was also very crunchy.

You can see videos and sites online that say you can briefly immerse pears in simmering water, then quench in cold water, and remove the skin easily.  I don't think that works with Kieffers, or if it does, there's more to it than just letting them bob in near-boiling water for up to a couple of minutes.  I soon gave up and resorted to a vegetable peeler.

That worked fine.  They peeled quickly.  I used the knife to cut off the top and bottom, then quarter them, cut out the core, then dice them.  I was surprised at how quickly it went:  I'm pretty slow at canning food prep, but I got eight cups of diced pear pieces in less than two hours.

This is a double batch, which various sites say is a bad idea when making preserves, jams, and jellies.  I have never had problems getting a doubled recipe to work, but at some point I might--either way, if I'm going to go through all the trouble to get everything set up then torn down and cleaned at the end, I want to do more than three pints.

I did not have much trouble with darkening; to each two cups of diced pears I added a tablespoon of lemon juice, stirring it around a little.  I then followed the standard directions.  The Sure-Jell package insert has a recipe, as does the website.  I did not add the butter--that wasn't on the package insert and it does not necessarily sound appetizing.  Before heating, I used a potato masher to bruise the pieces and liberate some juice, but they did not break down nearly as well as peaches or blueberries, to say the least.

I was a little worried that the nuggets wouldn't soften enough.  Crunchy preserves would be interesting, but they would also unprecedented in my canning experience.  No worries on that count; I actually ended up with slightly more than eight cups of pears, so also had slightly more than six pints of preserves: the remaining 0.2 pint after I'd gotten as many filled jars as I could I just put in the refrigerator.  It set up well when it cooled and the fruit chunks are tender.  The ones in the canner got even more heating, since they were processed for about 17 minutes.  They should be fine.

The consistency of the pears was thinner / runnier than I get with peaches when the mixture was heated.  As the pear pieces cooked down, they shrank quite a bit--one of the reasons that fresh-pack pears and apples usually don't turn out all that well, I suppose--and the overall viscosity became very fluid.  I mentioned above that I usually don't have trouble getting my preserves to set up, and that's true: I also don't usually do the frozen-plate test, but I did today just to be sure.  All was well.

The recipe is the standard two cups of sugar per pint, so is very sweet--but that's okay.  Given the amount of this I eat at any given time, I'm not worried about counting calories for this.  I tried some reduced sugar jam with the low-sugar pectin one time and didn't care for the consistency.

It's good stuff.  I'm not sure I want to go on a mission to meet people and ask them if I can harvest pears from their trees, but Kieffers have some promise.  I have two pear trees that are too young to bear: Magness and Seckel.  A third, Ayers, was unfenced and demolished by a randy buck last fall.  I will look to replace it this winter.

I've been thinking of another Ayers or a Warren... something that is good to eat fresh.  There are some who say the Kieffers can become soft eventually, and that even if not, they're fine crunchy.  I half-agree.  It's a bit more work to render a Kieffer ready to eat than it is to do the same with a Bartlett or Seckel (with the latter, it's just clean and start biting).  I'm going to try dehydrating some Kieffers with and without skin to see what happens.  Will I plant a Kieffer?  I don't know.  They are definitely low-maintenace and disease-resistant, thriving everywhere around me in conditions of long-term utter neglect.  Maybe.  I'll think about it after seeing how the dehydrating works out.