Berries in Jars

One of things about baking with fruits (berries in particular) is that fresh is such a short season and they stick together when frozen, especially raspberries – my favourite!

I found out from my fantastic new book, that you can hot pack berries for baking. They won’t look too pretty but would be ideal. I am thinking in particular, strawberries to keep for the fall when the rhubarb is ready for a second harvest. Even better – stew both and combine to make a delicious double batch of pie in the winter when everything is either imported, or frozen. I’m thinking February (because you are still trying to burn off the holidays in January, so that will feel too guilty), or even March, when you start to get impatient for playing in the yard.

Here’s what I did with the blueberries: I bought them from the market, washed and checked for stems. Covered them with just enough water so they didn’t stick and heated through in a saucepan over medium-low heat, stirring ocassionally. I filled sterilized wide-mouth pint jars with ½” of headspace and processed for 15 minutes (for quarts and pints). If you find there isn’t enough liquid to quite cover the berries, top off with boiling water.

For my first batch, I did 1 pint of blueberries mixed with just shy of 1 cup of crushed raspberries for the liquid. No sugar was added to this one because I will mix ¼ cup each morning to mix with yogurt and oatmeal for breakfast. The yield was spot on 3 jam jars.

The strawberries I made the mistake of adding ½ cup water. That wasn’t necessary! Instead, hull and halve, then cover with 1 tsp of sugar each time you fill a layer in the pot and let stand an hour. This will help draw out the juices as they heat up. I sliced four quarts, split into two pots for even heating, and the yield was just shy of 6 pints. If I omitted the water, it would probably be more like 5 pints and I could mix the remainder with crushed raspberries instead.

I had plans for my everberry (late harvest) strawberries to make a strawberry-rhubarb pie filling, but the apples I need for the base (for their pectin) won’t be ready for another two week and this might work even better. I will freeze the rhubarb and toss in a jar of berries mixed with a bit of cornstarch to make pie later in the season.

Since I was on a roll and the canner was filled with hot water, I pulled out 8 cups of frozen raspberries and mixed them with 2 Tbs lemon and 1 Tbs sugar. This only yielded 4½ cups of berries and I wanted to do a whole batch in the canner, so I defrosted another 5 cups to finish off the 7 jam jars. These will also be great on oatmeal with vanilla yogurt. Since I have 10 jars, it will be a special treat one week of each month until the summer when they are back in season … ha! I know which week 😉