I don't use any non-sugar sweeteners and I don't mind using sugar in jams and jellies. I'm intrigued by their use of an apple in the strawberry jam so I'll see how it turns out. For the most part I stick with "tried and true," which is regular old pectin. I have several bags of cranberries in the freezer so I plan to also make cranberry sauce and put up a few jars. If I'm going to fire up the water bath I might as well make it worth my time.
Here is the oven fruit preserving method ….it shows how long I’ve had these instructions due to oven temps being in Fahrenheit, and pints of water for tomatoes we’ve been metric in Australia since 1966 @Krystal Shay @Beth Gallagher
I add apple to my tomato chutney when I make it about every other year , @Beth Gallagher . I make up my own recipe to our tastes , I don’t add dried fruit Unless you’ve worked in a fruit processing factory you’d be surprised what actually gets added to commercially made foods / jams …ever wondered why most jam is only a maximum of 50% fruit ? I’m can’t swear to it now day ……but years ago in my working years allot of pine melon or pumpkin was added to bulk out jams like apricot , and tomatoes were used in place of berries.
Can be deadly if foods are not handled / sterilised correctly @Don Alaska all the books I have with the exception of a very very old flowers canning book don’t recommend canning meat of any description . Aussies canned allot of rabbit when they didn’t have proper refrigeration methods to store foods, even when we was young we had a ice chest, no fridge and when we stepped up to a proper fridge it was a stinky…..kerosene fridge
In the strawberry jam recipe, the grated apple supplies natural pectin to thicken the preserves. So I won't add any pectin to the jam recipe when using a grated apple. I haven't tried this method before but I'm sure it will work fine.
The strawberry jam is really good. I'll be making that recipe again. Today I made 8 half pint jars of blueberry jam. The recipe from the Ball canning book called for 7 cups of sugar and I hope I don't regret making that. That's nearly a cup of sugar for each HALF PINT of jam! My teeth hurt just thinking about all that sugar, but we'll see. It might be good to use in unsweetened oatmeal or something. I was going to make cranberry sauce today, too, but I ran out of steam. The old gray mare just ain't what she used to be.
That is kinda why i mentioned the low-methoxyl pectin. You don't have to use non-sugar sweeteners, but you can use less sugar. Less sugar allows the flavor of the fruit to shine through better.
This video got a lot of discussion on a cooking forum. It is a real eye-opener about the dangers of not following proper canning procedures, in this case pressure canning. This woman survived botulism poisoning from her own self-canned green beans. 10 minute video
Basically, just about everything. She didn't RTFM and it was downhill from there till she was on a ventilator for 86 days. The green beans looked great, though!
Wow. That's some scary stuff. Not many people are on a ventilator that long and live to tell the tale. If I have food that is "iffy" or I can't clearly recall how old it is (I usually use dissolving labels), in the trash it goes. The only home-canned stuff I've had is jams & jellies,and some tomatoes my mother & brother did.
That's the thing about botulism... it's sneaky and has no discernible taste or smell. She said the beans tasted fine and looked good. Being a farm kid, I've eaten home canned foods all my life. I'm sure my mom and grandma used techniques that would be questionable today. I remember going with my grandma to the canning plant during the summer where she'd put up a ton of vegetables in actual cans. The place did the processing and sealed the cans after she packed them with food.
I have never heard of that. So there was no real heat processing of the food...just your grandma's stuff put into a can and the lid stamped down on it?
My mom canned a lot of stuff, and that was a big part of what we age during the winter. As a kid, I didn't much like the canned vegetables, but the jams and any of the fruit stuff was good, albeit a bit too sweet. We never got sick from any of it, though.