I'm learning, okay? Decided to try to bottle/can some of the plum harvest from the orchard here at Struan Farm. This is the first year we've had enough to do so, hooray!
Step one: I bought some one litre jars with lids. Step two: read about how to do this in the Edmonds Cookery Book. Step three: picked fruit and selected enough ripe fruit without blemishes for several jars. Step four: washed jars and put into 100C oven for 30 minutes or so. Step three: put lids in a pot, boiled for 5 minutes then simmered until ready to use. Step five: put one cup of sugar and two cups of water to make sugar syrup for each jar, plus extra. Brought to a boil and then simmered for five minutes. Step six: put washed plums into the simmering syrup, left until skins started to split. Step seven: put hot fruit into jars, topped up with hot syrup and sealed.
Now here's what happened when I tried this for the first time:
Seems I hadn't read the instructions properly about the amount of fruit, oops. And so it floated to the top, above the syrup. One jar sealed, the other didn't. While I can keep these in the fridge for awhile, these won't store for long the way they look, with the fruit exposed.
I decided to try again, we've got heaps of plums! I also went to read a bit more and found a good blog post by Wendyl on how to bottle plums. While Edmonds goes on about the weight of fruit per jar, etc. Wendyl just says to fill the jars and top them with syrup.
Here's take two:
A much better result, and I used all of our unblemished fruit. TA DA! And all you people out there who have been bottling for years, please don't laugh, okay?
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