I have a ton of stuff to write about, and the last on the list is as good a place to start as any.
Canning sort of transports you to the past, to a time when preserving food was really a necessity. I like it, and own a bit of the paraphernalia needed to appropriately perform the task. I have one dozen of pint Mason jars, and another dozen of 8 ounce Mason jars, plus plenty of lids and bands. The jars were all bought when we lived in the US, and they have followed us everywhere. Every time I travel to the US I always stock up on lids - those can be used only once. The other piece of equipment I own is a jar lifter, which may sound a bit overboard but is actually quite a useful gadget:
I have canned jams, crushed tomatoes, peaches, and plums. I have only had success stories, and, although there's quite a bit of work involved in the process, the rewards have been high enough to convince me to go through it many times.
I follow the directions written on the Mason jars boxes to prepare the jars for canning, and then do what's called water bath canning, which means boiling the filled jars completely submersed in water for a certain amount of time. There are tables which tell you how long you should boil the jars depending on what you are canning, about 10 minutes in this case. The website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation (yes, there exists a national center with that name!) has all the information needed, plus a bit more. Butolism is a serious condition that may result from consuming home-canned food that has not been properly handled.
On to the cherries. We bought a box of cherries on sale: 5 kg of them! The cherries were very good, but were ripe and there was one here and there that was about to rot. On a whim, I decided to attack the task of making cherry jam.
It is a lot of work. You need to pick the good cherries, wash them, and pit them. That requires a lot of patience. A cherry pitter makes the task more bearable, but at the end I had 3153 g of pitted cherries. That's a lot of cherries to pit!
I put all the cherries in my trusted Le Creuset pot,
added half the weight of sugar, and slowly started to cook the cherries on low heat. I read about a ratio of sugar to fruit much higher, and about the addition of pectin. I try to add as little sugar as possible, half the weight if the fruit is already sweet, and I have never added pectin. Acidity seems to be important, which I understand, so at a certain point I squeeze in some lemon juice.
How long should one cook the jam? I go for the 'road test': put a bit of jam on a plate, let it cool a bit. If when you draw a line on the jam with a spoon - the 'road' - that road stays on for a few seconds, the jam is done. This has to do with syrup boiling point, which is determinant for the jam being able to last. One day I'll read about the science behind all this, up to now eye-balling has been enough.
The jam turned out really nice. The cherries retained their shape and a bit of texture, and are immersed in a syrup that is slightly runny and that actually tastes like cherry, not like caramel. In total, there are eleven 8-ounce Mason jars properly sealed. We filled another jar that was not processed and that was eaten right away. Let's see when do we eat the last of the jars...
Picture of the finished product:
