Adventures in Canning

This Sunday marked my first successful adventure in canning!!! My husband and I found some wild Mustang grapevines along our street. We gathered a bakery box full and took them back home (he later went back and filled a five gallon bucket full for wine-making).

I have never canned anything in my life so we did some Internet searching (they have the Internet on computers now??) and found a Mustang grape jam recipe.

First: let's meet the grapes. Mustang grapes are very, very acidic, so acidic that if you handle the grapes and get the juice on your skin, you start to itch. The skins are very bitter but the fruit inside is tart and palatable. The seeds are large, like a smaller version of lemon seeds. You can eat the grapes off the vine but I recommend squeezing out the fruit and eating that, spitting out the seeds. We had a vine on our fence when I was growing up in Joshua but we rarely ate them. Sometimes, if we did eat them, our mouths, lips and throat would itch! Not fun. :)

So I began the canning process by removing the skins, leaves, and stems. Then I put the grapes in a hand "grinder/sifter": something with holes and a crank so I could turn the grapes to get the juice out. I put the grapes in the blender to chop them and the seeds up. Next you cook the pureed grapes with pectin and a sweetener. At first, I was opposed to any sweetener but the Mustangs are so tart, they needed something. Honey was the alternative that we chose because it just didn't seem right to put in sugar or Splenda.

The canning process involved lots of sterilizing the jars, then warming them up, then putting the cooked mixture into the jars, then sealing them. I think the sealing process is by far the most important process. If something goes wrong, you will get bacteria into your jam or you will have the potential for getting bacteria into the jam. The seal should be tight enough that if you press on the top of the lid, nothing should pop back at you.

For two weeks, the jam jars sat in a cabinet, protected from light and other annoyances. And then: jam! I made homemade biscuits Sunday morning for our jam debut. Well.....the biscuits were disgusting (note: shortening is gross) so I thought the jam was tainted. After more biscuit testing, I determined it was not the jam. The jam made it's workplace debut on Monday morning.

It is tart but palatable. The seeds did not get chopped up small enough to not have a noticeable crunch but it's like eating crunchy peanut butter...except that it's jam. People at work were very kind and said that the jam was good.

Next time I will try straining the seeds out so we don't get the crunchiness. But, overall, I said it was quite a success and I will happily do it again!