[Spana]

This morning i've stewed apples and plums together with sugar until just soft and potted it into hot jars. They are all now being heat treated in a water bath.

Is there reason that i've missed why this shouldn't work? I've looked through all my books but cant find any info at all for doing fruit this way.    

My thinking is that i can just open a jar to serve over ice cream at a moments notice without having to defrost, if it was frozen.

Any one tried this? Whats your opinion, will it keep  


Edited to add, just done a google and found a site  doing it just as i've done but no mention of sugar. Have i made a mistake adding sugar?

[mumofstig]

with the jars heat treated (in a water bath or just in the oven) was how my mum used to preserve plums and apples 

[Spana]

Did your mother cook the fruit with sugar mum?

[mumofstig]

If I remember correctly, she just used to slice apples and halve and stone plums and pack the raw fruit tightly in jars, then cover with sugar syrup, before putting on lids and heat treating.

[Spana]

OH

Well, at the worst I'll just have to use it quickly I thought it was such a good idea but did wonder why this method wasn't in any of my books

[mumofstig]

Vals got a bit about bottling fruit here
http://www.allotment-garden.org/recipes/bottling-canning/preparation

I should imagine that the fruit will keep longer if you've already cooked it, as you've killed the enzymes which make it go bad, before you've heat treated them - just like a tomato passata 

[Trillium]

Sugar helps keep the fruits tasting better, and the water bath process finishes the cooking and bottle sealing for you (provided you've used a sealable bottle).

This is no different than doing peaches, cherries, applesauce, etc. Your plums and apple mixture are fine since they'll have a bit of juice in the mix to actually boil and create the vacuum for sealing, which should be about 15 minutes.

[Spana]

Thank you girls :happy:

Perhaps it will be OK then. It looks very nice and the seals have gone down tight. I wonder why there aren't any recipes for bottling stewed fruit with sugar, they all seem to use raw fruit in syrup, like mums mum did.  If it keeps OK it will be so easy to use. I've got bags of frozen apples in the freezer from past years that will probably never be used because i cant wait for it to thaw  out, and then its not cooked.

I've done some plain apples cooked without sugar as well just to cover my bets.

[Trillium]

The thing with bottling fruits is that you need some liquid to build the needed heat to kill bacteria and nasties, and you can't always be sure that someone will make the recipe with enough liquid to do the sealing job correctly. So, with the tendency toward litigation these days, few people are willing to post those sorts of recipes.

It's one of the reasons why you won't see recipes on how to bottle pureed squash. It's so thick and has so little liquid that not even pressure canning it will get it to the right 'safe' temperature. Commercial canneries have different methods that are safe, but home canning is not safe for pureed squash/pumpkin.  So, it's recommended that you bottle it in chunks with some liquid to do the proper job. When opened, you drain off the liquid and puree the squash.

Apples will always have more liquid than squash so you're usually okay to puree it and bottle it, even mixed with the plums. If you ever find that the mix is quite dry, add some water to it for this reason.

[sunshineband]

Also I understood that you also have to take the acidity into account.

Fruit is generally acid enough, as are tomatoes, but as soon as you start to add other veg to the tomatoes like lots of onions and courgette etc to make suaces, then the acidity is reduced.

You then need to be able to heat the bottles to higher temperatures that we can at home to ensure that all botulism bugs are dead... so passata style sauce for me