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).

Dehydrating peaches

As I mentioned last year, I lost my crop in 2015 due to a late frost.  In late March that year, my temp dropped to a horrifying 23 degrees at ground level one night, wiping out both the blueberries and peaches, which were in full bloom.  I tried spraying water on everything but the hose froze, so I gave up.  I later found out that a few Belle of Georgia peaches survived at the top of the tree.  The killing cold was only at ground level.  However, by the time I noticed them, they were long-neglected in terms of spraying (for disease and insects) and did not mature well.  A few blueberries made it, too, probably due to buds not being open at the time of the freeze.  But I got just a handful (literally) off of five bushes.

This year was back to normal, at least for one of the trees.  As I indicated last year, my peaches were on dwarf rootstock, which various sources have indicated don't have long lifespans.  This was the trees' 16th year in the ground, and the yellow cling continued a steep decline that began a couple of years ago.  It only yielded five pounds--which were good and eaten fresh (bug free)--and the tree will be turned into firewood this winter. It is pretty much dead at this point.  Alas.  The Belle of Georgia produced about 55 pounds, which is somewhat less than the record year.  BG had some issues with the harvest, too, which I'll detail another time.  But I'll take the 55 pounds and be happy.

I turned the peaches into pie filling mix (at the time of processing, that just means putting five pounds of sliced treated peaches into a bag and freezing), peach preserves (made in a fashion similar to the pear preserves  described recently), peach butter, and I also dehydrated some.

It's the same process I follow with apples.  Slice, treat to prevent darkening, and put on the racks in the dehydrator.  I leave the skins on.  I don't peel unless forced.  The result is a very high-quality product that keeps for a long time.  I still have some dehydrated peaches from my bumper crop a few years ago.

I have also canned peaches--as in sliced and put into syrup--but that is probably my least favorite way of preserving them.  They are okay that way, but it is much less work to dehydrate.

Thoughts on Tattler versus Metal Disposable Canning Lids

Tattler lids are made of plastic, have a rubber gasket, and are reusable.  They cost a lot in comparison to single-use metal lids, but can be bought in bulk for less than a dollar each (if you do a lot of canning, keeping in mind that a lid is unavailable until the jar it is on is opened, you might need 200-500 or even more.  Buying large quantities makes sense).  I do not know what their lifespan is, but I have seen 10 times mentioned as an average; there's probably a distribution in there somewhere with some being worn out sooner, some later.  I suspect the gasket is the first-to-fail component in most cases, and replacement gaskets can be had for less than $0.28 each.  The Tattler site itself says they are "indefinitely reusable".

Is this cost-effective?  If you assume $0.73 for a wide-mouth lid and you get 10 uses out of it, that's $0.073 per use.  If you can stretch that to an average of 15 uses with a replacement gasket, that cuts the cost to $0.067 per use (these numbers are for illustration only: as noted above, the real average lifespans may be higher or lower; I haven't hunted down any source that cites actual data).  For comparison, metal wide-mouth lids can be had for about $0.20 each if you look for them (full sticker price is higher).  Mills Fleet Farm has them for $2.35 per box as of this writing, and I got them for $2.44 per box at Wal-Mart last week locally.  So the lid cost to do 15 cycles with Tattler (including a replacement gasket) could be about $1.00 versus about $3.00 with metal lids.  These are averages: some Tattlers might become unusable after the first use, while others might be going strong after 20 uses. To be redundant, there's a distribution of lifespans--I don't know what the parameters are.  User practices probably matter, too.  If one reusable lid plus two gasket replacements lasted for 30 uses, the cost for reusables versus metal lids would be about $1.29 versus $6.00 for disposable metal lids.

So far, so good.  I got some reusable lids a few years ago and started experimenting with them, getting generally good results.  I then got a box of 100 EZ-Seal lids when they were on sale one time.  Reusable lids do require a bit of finessing to operate (even the EZ-Seal ones, in my experience).  There are more-detailed descriptions of the process elsewhere (an example is here).  Basically, the lid can't be tightened with the ring as much as you might normally tighten a metal lid when first putting them in the canner.  When you take them out, you have to tighten them down all the way so they can form their vacuum as they cool.  It is a challenge to get the lid loose enough to vent, yet tight enough to prevent contents from leaking out during processing.  The EZ-Seal lids are advertised as not needing this special handling, but I have found that they show signs of excessive pressure if tightened as much as I do with metal lids (i.e., the center of the lid is domed a bit when processing is finished).  I tighten all of them when removing from the pot (this is easily accomplished with kevlar pot-handling gloves).

They aren't as easy to label, but the picture above shows how I deal with that: I just write on the jar with a Sharpie.  The writing can be removed with a little alcohol or, in many cases, it will disappear in the dishwasher.

Now for the rest of the story.  My failure rate with reusable lids has been higher than that of metal lids.  I have been canning for about 10 years and have gotten pretty good at the basics.  I think I have had a failure to seal or a lid come unsealed in storage with metal lids, but if it has happened, it has been only once or maybe twice.  In other words, it's a very rare event.  I do a fair amount of canning: 96 jars so far this year.  I'm very confident in saying that my failure rate with metal lids is 1% or less.

With reusable lids it is more like 20% (or maybe even more).  My first several uses, I did not have any failures.  Since then, I have had a few.  I might have had a reusable lid fail to seal when the jar was first cooling once or twice, but most of my failures have been in storage.  A jar that is sealed after the jar first cools is discovered months later to have come unsealed.  An initial failure to seal is disappointing.  However, having to use a jar right away is less serious than having to throw out something later.

Two recent failures:  As I recently mentioned, I made pear preserves for the first time.  I put up six pints.  Two jars had reusable lids that had been used before without problems.  Both sealed initially, but a day or two later, I noticed one had come unsealed.  I was a little unhappy about that but put the jar in the refrigerator and went on my way.  After reading comments about reusable lid failures to seal in a recent post on Rural Revolution, I decided to check my reusable lids in inventory.  I found one on a quart of pickled peaches that had come unsealed. I debated what to do with the jar.  The peaches had been made in mid-July, and they could probably sit at room temperature for that long without harmful spoilage (they're pickled in pure vinegar).  I wasn't sure, however, and in the end I tossed it.

That is a major loss.  I put up the equivalent of five quarts of pickled peaches this summer and lost 20% of that because of a lid failure (some were in pints; I put up eight jars total--only about three or four were sealed with reusable lids).  This also diminishes the cost advantage of the reusable lids, because 20% of my growing, harvesting, and processing time went down the drain (though if I started valuing my time in monetary terms I'd buy pickled peaches at an apple orchard in Georgia or off Amazon rather than do them myself).  I would've been willing to pay quite a lot to avoid losing the peaches.

The standard recommendations to deal with failures to seal--make sure the jar rim, gasket, and lid are free of anything that might inhibit the seal, tighten upon removing from the canner, etc--are okay insofar as they go, but they don't really make the case for reusable lids in my kitchen.  I did all of those things.  I might have missed something, but I did the best I could.  I may just lack adequate quality control to get failures with these lids down to an acceptable level (I would probably be fine with 5%). Maybe food or syrup is getting between the band and jar during processing.  My failures have mostly or exclusively been with previously-used lids and gaskets--that might be a factor.  If so, that erodes the cost advantage.  One other thing I will link to without much comment because it's from a source that obviously has an incentive to call reusable lids into question (i.e., Ball, maker of metal single-use lids): plastic lids don't vent as well when heating and may "may lose half their vacuum over the course of a year."  This is consistent with my experience, where I get a seal initially but it comes unsealed some time after initially cooling.

Cost is the primary factor in favor of the reusable lids, but having lids available in the event of a shortage is another.  Apparently there was a widespread shortage of lids in the 1970s, when reusable lids were first developed.  However, both of these factors can be mitigated.  Buying metal lids in bulk may reduce costs further from what I cited above, and metal lids can actually be reused once if you really want to.  This is nowhere recommended; the NCHFP notes that the gasket material gets deformed by the jar lid on first use, so doesn't reliably seal a second time (contamination is not a factor--the lids can be cleaned after the first use, and the heat processing takes care of contamination if any is present).  I have tried reusing metal lids to see if it works, and I have a failure rate maybe somewhat higher (perhaps double) than with new lids, but I don't have enough data to say much more (while the gasket may be deformed the first time, simmering it before reuse may soften the gasket and help it re-form to a new jar lid).  My observed failure rate with once-used metal lids has been much lower than my observed failure rate with reusable plastic lids, however.

My point in bringing this up is not to advocate for routine reuse of metal lids, but to observe that if you kept once-used lids that were in good condition and stored them somewhere, you'd have a buffer if there was ever an interruption in supply of new lids.  The storage life of lids seems to be quite long and probably exceeds five years.  In other words, I have put up 96 jars so far this year and will do more before the end of the year (applesauce, apple pie filling, and cranberry sauce at a minimum).  I could buy 500 metal lids today and then 100 per year going forward, and always have a substantial inventory on hand, plus a growing stack of once-used lids to fall back on if things got desperate for one reason or another.  With rotation, the lids would never be over five years old.

Which approach makes more sense--reusable or single-use?  That depends on one's individual failure rate with each type, the importance of cost, and other factors.  There's no single best answer.

Canning Pears

I canned some of the Kieffers (as part of my evaluation process to determine if I want to get a tree this winter to plant to go along with the Magness and Seckel).  The procedure I followed was pretty much the same as for peaches except that I did peel them.

It turns out I may not have needed to do that.  Jill Winger notes on her Prairie Homestead blog that she does not peel them and gets good results.  Contrary to the advice of the NCHFP, I raw-packed, as Jill did (though I did use a light 1:3 syrup, contrary to Jill's approach of using plain water).  It's not a safety issue; the NCHFP just says that raw pack yields poor quality.  The NCHFP recommended 25 min. for hot-packed quarts; the recommendation for raw- vs. hot-pack peaches is +5 min., so that's what I did, adjusting another +5 min. for altitude.

I timed it.  I spent about two minutes per pear, nearly half of which was peeling.  Peeling was also pretty messy, spending a spray of peach juice droplets over the immediate area.  I quartered them rather than leave them as halves, because the stem fibers and cores were easier to remove as quarters.  I just cut both of those parts out with a knife, then used the melon ball to dig out any remaining parts of the core (I'll see later if I was successful, but so far I seem to have managed pretty well with the pears I dehydrated).

As the photo shows, they resist browning well after a dunk in an ascorbic acid solution.  The contents of the bowl above had been out of the water for about an hour when the picture was taken.

Time start to finish for about 10.5 pounds, which yielded 5 quarts, 1 pint was about 3 hours, which is pretty standard.  It works out to about two pounds per quart, which is fairly typical (albeit more than with apricots, which are apparently not as dense). Even though packed cold/raw, they didn't shrink down much after processing.

Dehydrating Pears

Dehydrating pears is pretty similar to dehydrating apples.  Prep was similar to what I did for the pear preserves, with a couple of exceptions:  I didn't dice them and I only peeled some.  I wanted to try them with skins on and skins off to see if there were any differences.  Obviously, leaving the skins on is easier.

The melon baller is an addition to my kitchen hardware since I cut up the pears for preserves.  It makes it a little easier to get out the hard tissue around the core, but I still use a knife to get out the strands leading up to the stem.  When quartering the pears, a knife works pretty well to cut out the core and seeds, also.  The bowl in the right sink in the picture is where I dunked them to keep them from browning, with much success (the bowl held water with ascorbic acid).

As you can see below, the presence of skins makes a major difference in how fast they dry down.  This was shot just a few hours after starting the dehydrator and running it at 135 degrees.  Those with skins are still fairly plump in the photo, while the peeled ones are shriveling fast.  How's the flavor and texture?

The verdict: I like them--with and without the skin (these are more Kieffers).  They are very gritty when dried, but the flavor is great.  I dried some Seckels a couple of years ago and these are almost as good.  Dehydrated Kieffers are a winner.  I'm still undecided about planting one, however...

Wild Muscadines

Muscadine grapes are a native variety that do well in the South.  The European-style grapes have plant disease issues when grown here.  There are a number of cultivars that produce very nice grapes (albeit all with seeds--no way around that).  Most or all state agricultural extension services in the southern US have pages devoted to muscadines, e.g., UGA.  Somewhat confusingly, the different states' sites offer conflicting information.  Ison's, a nursery that has developed and patented a large number of muscadine varieties, has a table that more or less lines up with the information available from the extension services (keeping in mind occasional disagreements--which may be related to how different varieties perform in different regions).

There are wild types growing...wild...everywhere in the South.  I have seldom seen any female vines with fruit on them, but when walking through the woods near the well recently, found one growing on an old fence.  The picture at the right was taken in early July.

I was wondering if I'd ever see any fruit off of the plant.  Muscadines are eaten by a variety of wildlife, and north Georgia also has been in a fairly severe drought since spring.  Most farmers in the area have no irrigation (with 50+" of rain per year, it's normally not needed), and I saw a number of fields where the corn crop was lost.  Wheat was not as heavily-impacted, though yields may have dropped, and soybeans got off to a very slow start but some rains arrived in August to keep things going--temporarily.  September has been mostly dry, as well.  The drought has caused a more or less total loss of my own black walnut crop this year; in April and May things were looking decent but all of the nuts dropped early.  Some hickories are dropping now but I haven't opened any up yet to see if they are developed.

I did get a harvest--one grape--off the vine pictured above.  When I looked in early September one was ripe with a couple of others still green.  The grape was tiny but the flavor was okay.  The skin was thick and fairly tart, but overall it wasn't bad.  I hope this plant continues to develop.  It will probably never amount to much because it's under a fairly dense oak canopy.  Still, it's a nice find.  Then again, I may have to cut it out.  If it grows substantially, it might pull down the old fence. The old fence isn't serving much functional purpose currently, but I don't want it to end up on the ground.

I see wild muscadines littering the trail where I run in August, both bronze and black, but they grow high in the trees, so the grapes usually split or at least get badly bruised in the fall to the ground: they are seldom in good / edible condition.

I have a trellis set up for muscadines--more domesticated varieties--but I haven't planted them yet.  I need to get my fencing set up for the vines when they are installed; I have a substantial deer population in the field where they will be going.  That's a project for the off season coming up.

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.