Sunday, February 8, 2015

Cranberry Juice Again

If you have been following this blog for years now you may remember me making cranberry juice and jellied cranberry sauce from marked down cranberries. The post is here.  Well, yesterday the bags of cranberries happened to be $ .50 in the store and I got 8 bags of them. However I didn't get started until 3:00 in the afternoon because Phil and I had to go to town and then went to visit with my brother. Plus after we returned I noticed I didn't happen to have any pectin so the jellied cranberry sauce will have to wait until tomorrow or the next day but the juice did get made today.
You start with picking through the berries. These bags have sat in the store since Christmas it is only common sense that they aren't ALL going to be good. If they were all good, they wouldn't be selling them for $ .50. I pick out any of the berries that have any brown in them, because those I know have some kind of rot going on inside and any that are mushy and soft.
Then you add the water and they go in the pot to boil and pop.

Eight bags is a LOT of cranberries. 


After they cook I strain them. It is a messy job and I was running out of big pans so had to strain some in a pan then transfer it to a bowl and then strain more in the pan. Then you add the sugar (1 cup per bag) and they are put in the canning jars. 


Last time I boiling water bath canned these for 10 minutes but some of the jars didn't even make it a year before they started to become cloudy so this time I canned them for 20 minutes, just to be on the safe side.


I did a canner full of 7 quart jars then there was a whole pitcher (the same 2 quart pitcher in the other post) and 1 1/2 quart jars left which will go in the refrigerator to be drank in the next few days.

16 comments:

  1. Have you tried making your own pectin? It is really easy. When ever you make anything with apples keep the peel and core you don't use and pop into a box or bag in the freezer. When the bag is full, pop in a sauce pan and cover in water. Boil and boil and boil (adding more water if necessary to stop it drying out) for about 45 minutes, and then strain or sieve, pushing through as much liquid as possible, and then you have apple pectin. I am sure there is a more accurate method out there, put that is usually enough for me to do 10 jars of jam. xxx

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    1. If I had a producing apple tree of my own I would try it but right now I don't have access to organically grown apples and really don't want to use the ones in the stores to make pectin. I also have not seen any specific posts on how to really use the homemade pectin.

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  2. I love cranberries I have been nurturing my cranberry plants for a couple of years we get a reasonable crop from them,
    I will have to keep a look out for reduced cranberries :-)

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    1. I wish we could grow them here but it is just not cold enough in the winter.

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  3. Hi Becky! What a self-sufficient idea! I bet it tastes better than store bought sauce! Let us in on the sauce-making process! Blessings from Bama!

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    1. It definitely tastes better. You can follow the link and see how I made it last time but I am going to post about this years cranberry sauce making as well.

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  4. Using the Cranberries when they are on offer like that makes good sense from the Economics perspective. You have to play the retailers at their own game. The water-bath technique you describe is not used much here in the UK though.

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    1. Water bath canning is used to higher acid vegetables, pickles and jellies and jams that don't need the high temps of pressure canning. You really need to learn both to do canning.

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  5. Becky,

    I always picked up all kinds of cranberry bags when on sale at the store and throw them in my freezer. I really never thought about making cranberry juice, always thought about making cranberry jelly. Thanks for the recipe, I will be borrowing it in the near future.

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  6. Ok, I know what you are going to say, I only like Cranberry juice with Vodka and cranberry sauce the shape of the can it came out of, 8-) lol.

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    1. You just haven't had it out of the jar, lol, and I hadn't thought of the juice with vodka...what a wonderful idea!

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  7. I'm surprised you need pectin for the sauce as cranberries have so much of it. Though since you strain out the juice first, maybe it come out in that.

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  8. Nice to have your own shelf-stable juice. I agree on learning both pressure and hot water canning. Excellent skills to have.

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  9. What weight are the bags of cranberries? This sounds too good to not make, but I don't know what size bags of cranberries to use. Thanks!

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