One of the things I love about gardening is picking our own fruit and veg and finding various ways to preserve it. I'm enjoying this even more now that I don't have to cram preserving into evenings after work and weekends. It's certainly a more delightful aspect of gardening than raking the leaves from the forty plus deciduous trees we have here.
This year we've had bacterial canker in a lot of our fruit trees. So, we got very little fruit off our late apricot (thankfully the early apricot didn't get infected), no peaches or nectarines and only a few prunes (darn it, that tree was loaded for the first time this year). But the plum trees escaped infection. We have two, one is a Satsuma and one is a double graft of Satsuma and Santa Rosa. The Santa Rosa is the cross pollinator for the Satsuma. Without the Santa Rosa there would be no Satsumas. This year we had an abundance of both plums. The Santa Rosa came in first and we picked about 15 kilos. We'd just finished those when we started picking Santa Rosas. We've picked 30 kilos of those, not counting the ones we ate. That's a lot of plums to preserve. Thankfully we had our lovely family for lunch and were able to persuade them to take plums home with them. And we didn't even have to twist their arms.
I have very fond memories of bottled plums prepared by my lovely Mum from a Satsuma tree, owned by my equally lovely aunt, which was a heavy fruiter. We had luscious plums to enjoy all winter. As I have a properly functioning stove top now, I decided I'd preserve some our plums using my Vacola preserver, which I had to find from the place it had been stashed while the kitchen was being renovated. Bits and pieces were stashed all over the house and, being of a certain age, my lovely husband and I couldn't quite remember where the preserver ended up. Thankfully we found it, the jars, lids and rings without too much time wasted.
As with all preserving, the first step is to wash and prepare the fruit. I prepared the fruit and filled jars as I went along. Mainly because I didn't know if I had enough jars for all the fruit. In the case of plums the preparation means halving them and removing the stones. Or so I thought. Eight jars and five kilos in I remembered eating the plums that Mum had bottled and discarding stones on the edge of the bowl. Doh!! Needless to say, the plums for the remaining four jars were simply halved.
I used Size 20 Vacola jars which hold enough fruit for two really hungry people or two less hungry people and a friend. They're a great size but the top is too narrow for me to put my hand in. Which makes getting the fruit in tricky. It has to be layered and tightly packed. I can reach my fingers down almost to the bottom though which helped. As long as the first piece of fruit I dropped into the jar fell onto the cut side all the other pieces layered themselves nicely. Thankfully. Once the jars are filled the next step is to add in some sugar syrup. Mum used to make a sugar syrup (equal parts of sugar and water cooked until the sugar is dissolved) which she used to fill the jars. Vacola have modified their preserving method. It isn't hard to make a sugar syrup but I decided to give the new method ago. This involved filling the jars of water and adding some sugar, ergo, one less pan to wash up. Vacola provide some useful guides to help determine how much sugar you need for the size of jar you are using and the level of sweetness you want. I added two tablespoons of sugar for each jar which seems like quite a lot. The taste test will tell I guess.
Once the jars are nicely packed, and the sugar and water have been added, the next step is to make sure there are no air bubbles (I'm not sure why this step is important, but it is) then to put on the rings, lids and clips. Putting the rubber rings on can be tricky but after the first one or two I found a technique which meant the rings went on smoothly without any twists. It's tricky to describe but basically, I held the jar with one hand, making sure my thumb was over the lip, and then stretched the rubber ring across with the other hand. Going over my thumb seemed to stop the ring twisting. Next, it's just a matter of putting all the jars into the preserver (making sure you've put in the false bottom first because that stops the jars breaking), filling it with enough water to cover an inch above the jar and turning the gas on. Make sure you put the preserver on the stove before you place the jars in and fill the water. It's way too heavy to move once it's full. Then leave them on the stove until the temperature reaches 92 degrees Celsius on the thermometer and for another 45 minutes after that.
Once the 45 minutes at 92 is up, turn off the gas, remove the lid and carefully remove the jars. It is important to take the jars out of the hot water straight away. If you don't have some jar tongs, I recommend getting some as they make taking the jars out of the preserver way easier. If you're very lucky your preserving pan will have a handy tap on the side so you can remove the hot water and leave the jars in the pan to cool.
It takes a bit of time to preserve fruit but just look at the end result. Yum. Plums to last the winter.
