Canning and food preservation
‘Tis the season for putting up food, if that’s a thing you do. Thanks to this site last week, I think, I learned about basil salt as a thing to do with my current abundance of basil and I’ll be making that this weekend. I have a lot of fresh herbs and plan to make some herb purees to keep in the freezer; not really pesto, just mashed up.
Learning about basil salt made me curious about other recipes or approaches someone might want to share. Recipe links will go into moderation but I’d love those too. I make a lot of jams, jellies and chutneys, occasional pickles mostly for others, and just made a batch of green tomato caponata to use up the last of the green tomatoes I froze at the end of the 2025 season before I’m back in the thick of it.
Maybe you want to share a favorite recipe, a new one, and a future one? First ones that come to mind for me:
A recipe I really love: Sweet & Salty Pickled Cherries on MilkGlassHome. Chinese five-spice powder makes these really amazing.
One I made for the first time this year that I’ll probably put on repeat: Chocolate Cherry Jam, on the Ball Canning site.
One I’m going to try for the first time this year: Black Currant Chocolate Chili Jam on Larder Love, although I’m going to swap blackberries for the currants (I live in western Washington and they’re everywhere for the picking). I also might use the Ball Canning approach of using cocoa powder for the chocolate flavor. Larder Love uses an actual 70% cacao bar of chocolate. I don’t know what that does to acidity levels and she’s in the UK so she doesn’t hot-water bath anything. I figure Ball must have done some testing. (And yes, chocolate appears to be a theme, although I’m stopping at two.)
Another theme could be “I will never make this again.” My list for that includes ketchup (so much work for results that aren’t as good as the smoky spicy tomato jam recipe from Food in Jars, which is what I use in place of ketchup now), and dehydrated seasoned green tomato slices from some site or other that tasted simply awful. I didn’t even want to use them up in soup, and I put just about anything into soup.
What are you putting up, and how? What will you never make again, and why?
