Q and A: canning tomato products, Mehu Liisa, canning fruit, and canning zucchini recipe

Canning tomato products

We have been subscribers for years now and enjoy your articles and cook books. We just found out that the Iowa Home extension office advises that tomato products be water bathed for 90 minutes now instead of 45 minutes for quarts. What do you think? They advise pressure canning tomatoes for 25 minutes on quarts.

Cindy Allbee-Peterson
Blanchardville, Wisconsin

I know the Extension offices recommend this but several folks I know did the 85-90 minutes and blew the liquid out of the jars! I feel very comfortable with the old times and water bathing tomatoes. I do make sure that we grow and can only acidic varieties of tomatoes. The reason the times changed and pressure canning became recommended is that many folks started growing low-acid “sweeter” tomatoes and the fact that they are low acid made them more unsafe to can with the old times. — Jackie

Mehu Liisa

Please help me understand the Mehu Liisa that you referenced in a posting on making crabapple sauce and juice. Isn’t the Mehu Liisa a steamer used to get juices for jellies? I’m a little confused, because when you make applesauce, you use the fruit’s liquid to keep the sauce from getting too thick. Doesn’t extracting the juice from the crabapples make the resulting pulp too dry for sauce? Also, I thought the Mehu Liisa was just for soft fruits, like berries. Aren’t crabapples pretty hard, even when ripe? Please help me understand.

Gerri
Nashville, Indiana

Yep, crab apples are hard, just like eating apples are. When I use the Mehu Liisa, I only remove part of the juice, leaving much in the sauce. (If I should take too much out and the sauce is too thick, all I’d have to do is mix in some of the juice that was extracted.) The steam softens the apples and extracts as much of the juice as you wish; I stop after about an hour or so and find that’s about right. The resulting applesauce can be mixed with sugar or made into apple butter very easily to can up. — Jackie

Canning fruit

Your instructions for canning peaches without a syrup worked GREAT! Best peaches I have ever canned. Can the same thing be done with apples & pears or are they too dry?

My tomatoes are barely starting to get ripe & it is going down to 29 degrees tonight. Should I just pick the ones I know the frost will ruin? The ones on the bottom should be okay for a while. Is there a way to can the green tomatoes to make mock apple pie later & how low can the sugar go in both canned apple pie filling or mock apple pie filling.

I did pick most of the peppers, still have Thais to go. Also, green beans from the barrel need to be picked. We dried at least 20lbs of carrots last month from my volunteer crop. Left some nice large ones for next years seeds and spread out the small ones to have room to grow larger.

Julia Crow
Gardnerville, Nevada

Any method you use for peaches will work for apples and pears.

I’d pick all of the decent-sized tomatoes at around the 29 degree mark, even covering them may not do enough. Tomatoes will continue ripening in the house with no special treatment. We just store ours in plastic totes, buckets, washtubs, etc. until they ripen. I do sort them as I pick; yellow ones in one bucket, light green in another, and dark green in another. That way I don’t have to dig through all the tomatoes to find ripe ones to can.

I haven’t had any luck trying to can mock apple pie filling yet. And I wouldn’t cut the sugar in the regular apple pie filling recipe. If you wish to use less sugar, how about just canning up the apple slices in a very light syrup, then just using the slices as your filling, mixing up the recipe of your choice as you make the pie. That’s what I usually do.

It’s great to hear about all your dehydrated carrots. They are so easy to do and are really useful later on. I plan on dehydrating a bunch of ours as we had a bumper crop of carrots this year. — Jackie

Canning zucchini recipe

I enjoy zucchini cooked with tomato filets, garlic, and white wine, and I would like to can this. I have not seen a recommendation for processing this concoction. Could you please help? We live at 6000 foot elevation.

Tom Sanguigni
Snowflake, Arizona
 
I’m afraid I don’t have a recipe either, but I really doubt that you’d like the results. As you are trying to can zucchini with the tomatoes and the rest, you’d have to process in a pressure canner for 30 minutes (pints) or 35 minutes (quarts) and your tomato slices will get pretty soft. This is one dish you probably should enjoy fresh. — Jackie