I make an Onion Pepper Relish which uses tomatoes and is hot-packed like a jelly. It is sweet and sour and is modeled after Harry & David’s product. Put up about 33 pts which takes us through next harvest. DH loves it on his sandwiches every day. I use the onions, peppers and tomatoes I grow. My tomatoes are almost done - saving the rest for slicing. Peppers are really coming in now and am making roasted red bells in vinegar brine. Late planted beans will be ready soon for dilly beans and just canning plain.
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I got around to making my cherry-currant preserves today. WOW! Carmine Jewel is awesome tasting. Super good cherry flavor. It smelled fantastic when making it. One of the best jams this year.
I also made green ketchup. The recipe needs work. It’s good, but too much clove and ginger. I’m only going to use a pinch in the future. Also the red wine vinegar, and brown sugar kind of made it olive color. Next time I’m going to add 1/4 lime to preserve color, and use white vinegar and white sugar.
I made a small batch. Two 12 ounce jars. The jars pictured are 12 ounces. I like these quilted jars a lot for jam. OK darn the Carmine Jewel cherries were so good, it would be a waste to make only juice. The cherries were rather hard, and I expected the skin to be tough or chewy even. it is not, it’s has perfect melt in your mouth texture. I say darn as it took me a good hour to remove pits. I so glad I have this tree! Well two of them! The trees are in pots, but the bigger one is going in the ground in the fall. I hope to give the other tree away. Maybe some of the ther Romance cherries are bigger and sweeter, but for cooking this cherry is as good as it gets! What fantastic flavor here. The currants really didn’t do much, it’s all about the cherries. All currant seeds and skins removed.
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Looks great, Drew. It’s nice to have the produce and all you have to do is add a bit of sugar and just cook and can it. Are Carmine Jewel cherries sweet or tart?
My wife came home with a big bag of those mediocre apples from up the road last week, and we decided to make some more apple butter. We cooked them down like you’re supposed to, but it was still a bit watery, it needs to be thick. We had it in a big glass pot, cooking it down. My wife had other things to do,so I was in charge of it, as in, don’t let it burn.
Well, I thought it was taking too long on the small burner, so I put it on the big burner, and went back to the office, and got on the computer. I had kind of lost track of time, and after a few minutes, I smelled something burning. Yep, the butter had cooked down, and it was starting to scorch on the bottom. So I turned it down, and about then the Mrs walked in. She smelled it too, and I thought I was in for it. So, we tasted it, and I thought it had a bit of a smoky taste, not good for apple butter. But, she didn’t think it was that bad.
So, I told her I would can it, because she was going to bed. We ended up with 4 quarts of AB. It looks darker, but I haven’t tasted any of it. The worst part is the burnt apple fused to the bottom of the glass pot, and it was almost impossible to remove. It was like carbon. I let it sit in hot water and soap overnight and tried to clean it the next day. It was so bad, I had to get a small screwdriver to chisel it off, what a chore.
Ok, sorry for a novel about a mundane task as canning apple butter. Oh, I didn’t take any pics, either. Guess I’m ashamed of my work…
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Tart. It is a cross between a tart cherry and a Mongolian cherry tree (a different species than tart or sweet), which are small and cold hardy. Stays as a bush, maybe as high as 8 feet, mine is 4 feet 3rd or 4th leaf. Developed for colder area, Can be grown in zone 2. It technically took 70 years to develop. What happened was the research was dropped and picked up again in the 80’s or 90’s. Grows on it’s own roots. A new very good, and interesting hybrid.
Yeah I can see how one can burn anything, I have done it too. Well my ketchup is OK, but not what i wanted. I will tweak the recipe until I get what I want. Clove is out, not even a pinch. Ginger is enough, and barely any. Both those spices can take over a dish. I would rather taste the tomatoes, and compliment them. I like ginger in jerk sauce, and allspice, as even though they are overwhelming flavors, so are scotch bonnet peppers, and they win. So the mix is very good. I’ll keep working on the recipe. Worcestershire sauce maybe even some soy, looking for that kind of flavoring. Molasses, not brown sugar, oh the darkness, back to white sugar. Maybe in 4 or 5 batches I’ll figure it out! 
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Drew, those cherries look amazing. I love journaling and tweaking recipes. Had you frozen the cherries until you had time/enough to process? Does that make a dif?
Any tips on pit removal? Are the pits large? And do you weight your produce before you can? If so, how many pounds cherries per 12oz jar preserves?
And are the cherries good for fresh eating?
You are lucky your glass pot didn’t explode 
I had it once with burned jam in a glass pot. Using stainless steel now 
I did freeze them for both reasons. My trees are young (low yield). Not sure on effect of freezing, really had no other choice as I waited for all berries to ripen. I think they all ripened in a week’s time. I may have had time to do it fresh, but I was way too busy.
Not really!! The hardest part. Pits are small. Pit removing machines would not have worked. The cherries ran small this year too because of drought conditions.
Yes, with jam or preserves though I go by volume. With the low sugar pectin, 5 cups of prepared fruit. In this case I had only 3 cups of cherries, which were pitted, heated to liquefy. So I added 2 cups of red currants to get my five. I always do five as I know if I add 2.5 cups of sugar, and another 1/4 cup of sugar with pectin, and 1/4 cup of lemon or lime juice, it will gel every single time. The acid/sugar/pectin ratio seems optimized. The stuff gelled perfect! Also I had little time and after prepping puree I had to freeze it again as I didn’t have enough time to make jam.
I removed pits by hand by squeezing cherry. It went fast after being frozen.
The yield was 5x 12 oz jars, unsure of weight? I probably had more than 5 cups, This process works with 4.5 to 5,5 cups. You get 4 to 5 jars.
Because of the drought, the cherries were small and hard as a rock too, kinda dry. I really thought the skins, or dry pulp even would ruin the batch. it did not, the skins just melt in your mouth, absolutely delicious.
I like them, but no, for most people they would be too tart. The Romance series is interesting and all 6 cultivars have something to offer. Some have larger pits so a crank pitter would work. Juliet has a brix of 20 I bet Fruitnut could get it to 25. Very high for a sour or tart cherry.
I had Romeo, and Cupid, but they were at my cottage and they did not make it. I was not there all the time to care for them. Cupid I got from Canada, still not here in the states (I live 10 miles from Windsor Ontario). I may have to go back and get another! [quote=“galinas, post:46, topic:6946”]
You are lucky your glass pot didn’t explode I had it once with burned jam in a glass pot. Using stainless steel now
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Good point! I have seen jam pots and they are nice with volume measurements on the pot. I really could use that! Although I super like my corningware pot. It is a porcelain pot. It’s slow to heat up and slow to cool down. Water boiling in the pot will boil for 30 seconds to a minute after removing from heat. Heat is way more uniform in these porcelain containers. Exactly what you want for jam, or processing for apple butter for that matter!
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I wasn’t worried about it exploding, I had the burner on low, so not a lot of heat. It’s just that the butter had started to really cook down when I moved it to the bigger burner, and I left it a bit too long. If we ever make it again, I might put it in a Crock Pot and SLLOOOOWWWW cook it.
I still haven’t tried any of it. I put a jar in the fridge, hoping that might make the slightly smoky taste go away. I was in charge of a pot of pinto beans once, and didn’t monitor it enough, and it started burning and sticking to the bottom of the pot. If you burn a pot of beans, you might as well pitch it, the little bit of burnt beans ruins it.
That glass pot though, I had to take a mallet and small screwdriver and chisel that black carbonized apple off. A metal scrubber didn’t hardly put a dent in it. Lesson learned.
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I have burned lots of things over the years but I never had to chisel it off. I might have weighed my options for buying a new dish lol. Of course every time I do something like this it is in my wife’s favorite dish or one that has sentimental value.
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Looks like I am lucky my hubby has no interest in cooking
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Regarding botulism and food poisoning generally, it might be useful to consider the impact of cooking/heating canned goods when they’re opened up. This might happen automatically with some things, soup, for example. Correct me if I’m wrong, and verify anything I say before you rely on it, but my understanding is that C. botulinum isn’t harmful itself. In other words, eating the bacteria or the spores won’t hurt you. What is harmful are the toxins that the bacteria produce when they’re growing, as for example, in low acid canned goods that weren’t pressure canned. C. bot can grow in such canned good in part because C. bot spores are extremely heat resistant. My understanding is that the toxins that C. bot produces aren’t very heat resistant at all, though, so theoretically it would be just fine to eat canned goods full of botulism so long as the contents were simmered for several minutes after opening the can. I’m not saying I would knowingly do that, but it might be an added precaution worth taking if you’re bending any rules already. In any case, cooking after opening canned goods could make a huge difference in risk and is probably something worth considering, at least with certain types of canned goods.
The official rules do seem to leave plenty of room for bending. I know lots of people that can tomatoes the way their grandmothers taught them. Assuming the people I know are roughly proportionately representative of all the Americans that can tomatoes, there must be tens of thousands, if not hundred of thousands or millions of Americans canning tomatoes in water baths without adding any extra acid. (I’m one of them. I follow a recipe from a 1970’s Blue Book.) I know one or two families that don’t even use a water bath; they just add the tomatoes to the jar really hot and put the lids on. And despite all these people canning tomatoes “improperly” for generations, I’ve never heard of a case of botulism from home canned tomatoes. Admittedly I haven’t really researched it, but I have heard stories of botulism with other things (Irish potatoes, flavored oils…) Has anyone ever heard of a story with tomatoes? Can anyone find a story? My guess is that the supposed risk is purely theoretical and not based on real world epidemiology.
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The toxin is destroyed by heat when temps reach 185F for 5 minutes. The bacteria cannot grow in acidic, salty or high sugar environments. Most tomatoes are acidic enough to not need anything. But some are borderline. I always add lime or lemon juice just to make sure it’s acidic enough. I use 1/4 cup. Boiling will not kill spores. So having an acidic environment is very crucial IMHO. Pickling in vinegar is very safe, and I do for most other vegetables. Although I only can a few. Not a huge canning freak. Very few items taste good to me canned.
Another trick is to save your preserves refrigerated. C. bot spores do not come to live when refrigerated. I have spare fridge for my preserves.
As we all know most people used to can out of necessity and they canned large quantities of everything they could. My grandmother canned a lot and she frequently told a story about a family that all ate canned food that was contaminated with botulism and we’re all found dead. If you looked at the amount of home canned food being eaten at that time , the number of deaths I bet would be far less than those caused by other activities they engaged in daily. The thought of poisoning your loved ones with a can of green beans is just so terrible that it really sticks in your head.
What also really important is to keep your produce and equipment clean. This is the reason you can’t can mushrooms at home - there is no way to clean them completely. But things with smooth skin like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants clean up much better, you just need to take time to do it with precautions.
True, but eating spores is harmless.
Green beans seem like one of those things you might as well warm up (to at least 185 degrees for 5 minutes, going by what Drew said.) Wouldn’t you want your green beans warm anyway?
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Tastes like Chicken! 
For me no, I like them right out of the jar. Most excellent. I use a specific recipe for green beans.
Spicy Pickled Green
Beans
Ingredients
5 ounces (about 18) green beans, washed and cut to fit height of the
mason jar
3/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup filtered water
4 dried red chile peppers, pierced once or twice
1 teaspoon five-pepper
blend peppercorns (or 3/4 teaspoon black peppercorns and 1/4 teaspoon whole
allspice berries)
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon whole coriander
1/4 teaspoon dried dill weed
1-2 bay leaves
1-2 cloves of garlic, pounded once
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon honey
Directions
To sterilize mason jar:
In a very large pot, bring water to a boil. Submerge glass mason jar and lid,
and continue boiling for at least 12 minutes to sterilize. Use tongs to remove
jar and lids, and place on a clean kitchen towel to dry. Keep large pot on the
stove to process jar later.
To make pickles: Fill
mason jar with green beans. In a small saucepan, combine all other ingredients.
Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Pour brine on top of
pickles using a funnel, leaving about 1/4 inch of head space. Apply lid, wipe
rim clean using hot water, and screw metal band on firmly.
To process jar: In the
large pot of boiling water, lower jarred green beans, submerging jar in at
least 2 inches of water. Process for 10 minutes. Use canning tongs to carefully
remove hot jar, and then set it in a cool, dark place. As the jar cools, listen
for the lid to snap, signaling a proper seal. Wait five to seven days before
opening the jar. (If jar does not seal correctly, then refrigerate once it
cools to room temperature and use within two weeks.) Refrigerate upon opening.
Discard opened jar after two weeks.
Eric, I love your pantry. Guess you don’t live in an earthquake zone. I’d be tempted to put a strap or ledge on those shelves. Just sayin’