Preserving the Apple Harvest
We dig into the art and science of preserving—and talk about preserving apples— with Sarah Page, a contributor to the latest version of the Bernardin Complete Book of Home Preserving: 400 Delicious and Creative Recipes for Today.
Page, who works as a recipe developer and tester, is a trained consumer chef and home economist. She loves creating new recipes with local and seasonal harvests.
Preserving Tips
Two of Page’s top tips for successful preserving are:
Use a tested and approved recipe
Use fresh produce
And her tip for first-timers? “Don’t be intimidated at all!”
“If you can cook, you can can,” she says.
Apples
Page, who grew up in a household where her mother served applesauce regularly, loves to work with apples and shares a few of her favourite ideas:
Apple-cranberry butter
Preserving apples for pie filling later in the year
Apple sauce with a savoury flavour (e.g. chipotle)
Leaving the skin on pink apples when making apple sauce to give the sauce a pink colour
No Pectin?
Apples contain lots of pectin and sugar. Page explains that that makes them a useful addition when making jam with low-pectin fruit, because they can be used in place of commercially prepared pectin.
If you’re planning to preserve a lot of apples, Page says that an old-fashioned hand-crank food mill is a worthwhile investment.