Days of Canning, Dehydrating, Pickling, and Juicing
We are fully into our canning season here at Stone Edge Farm. It seems like I’m finding a new vegetable or fruit to conserve every day.I have to say that my favorite category is pickling. Pickling is a form of canning where you are first making a water,vinegar, and salt brine and then pouring that over what you want to pickle-in this case, cucumbers with dill,and then processing the jars in boiling water. Canning is very easy as long as you follow the recipes exactly and are careful about sterilization of the jars and lids.
We set aside two full days just for canning tomato sauce. This has been a very cool summer in Sonoma-so cool that we didn’t get ripe tomatoes until late July. Besides eating fresh tomatoes in every way possible, I like to conserve their fruity goodness through canning. I prefer making sauce instead of the whole tomatoes because the flavor is more concentrated and when you have a pantry full, space is at a premium. We have a few other preservation methods for tomatoes-one is to cut them in half and put them in the dehydrator for several hours until dry but still soft and leathery. The other is to slow roast cut tomatoes with olive oil and salt for several hours and then freeze in plastic bags.
We acquired a new steam juicer mostly to make apple juice. We have a dozen or so beautiful apple trees that give us way too many apples all at the same time. Eduardo is busy making apple juice in the most efficient and simple method for turning fruit into juice. The apples are gently steamed for about 30 minutes in a special double boiler. When the fruit is soft, the juice flows out . We collect the juice and can it so we have a ready supply the rest of the year.
