Preserving Apples & Pears

Apple-pear Sauce

Just before Christmas, my mother gifted me with a box each of apples and pears. Shortly after Christmas day, youngest daughter and I got together to can apple-pear sauce. She was looking forward to having some prepped snack options for after baby's birth.

I was grateful I had an apple peeler-corer-slicer (see here for one similar to mine) as this made peeling and coring several pounds of apples SO much faster than peeling and slicing by hand. These handy instruments typically have two options: a suction cup stabilizer or a clamp stabilizer. I was initially skeptical of the suction cup model, but the year I went to buy one, that was the only model available that I could find to purchase in the area. All the stores I called were out -- except the local hardware store. They had one left that they graciously put on hold for me. I have used it several times and have been quite pleased with how well it grips the counter.

After preparing the apples and tossing them in the pot to cook, we peeled and sliced whichever pears had ripened and added them as well. After we were all finished with the canning process, we ended up with six and a half quarts of apple-pear sauce.


Canned apple-pear sauce

Frozen Pears

A week later, many of the pears left in the box had ripened. I didn't have time to can that week since I was working a lot, so our youngest son prepped and froze the pears that had ripened. He ended up freezing eight pints of pears and had enough left for a pear cobbler. Freezing pears is fairly easy since you only need to make a syrup and blanch them in the syrup before putting them in freezer containers.

Dried Apples and Pears

By the following week, the last of the pears had ripened. We had half a dozen apples left as well, and since the texture was a bit on the mealy side for our taste, we opted to dry them for snacks rather than eat them fresh.

We started by peeling and slicing the apples. (I didn't use the peeler-corer-slicer for this since there were only six apples.) We then put the slices in a bowl of water with lemon juice as we finished slicing them. (The acid in the juice helps to keep them from turning brown.) 

Soaking the apples in water and lemon juice

We then drained them well and arranged them on the dehydrator trays. After the apples were on the trays, we sliced the last few pears and filled the last tray with pears.

Arranging the apples on the dehydrator trays


We set the dehydrator at 135 degrees - the dehydrator's recommended setting for fruits. I was anticipating it to take  eight to twelve hours, but it only took about seven before everything was dried to our liking. 

During the summer months, I usually put the dehydrator in the laundry room or outside on the porch. Since it is winter and very cold outside, I put it in the dining room to take advantage of the extra heat it puts off. It helped warm the house and made it smell wonderful, too!

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Earnings from qualifying purchases help to support this blog. Thank you for your support!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Water Glassed Eggs & Homemade Butter

Image
I love to experiment with new recipes, different methods of preservation, and ways to avoid waste.  Here are last week's efforts: Water Glassing Eggs  I finally tried water glassing eggs this past week.  I read about this method of preserving eggs a long time ago, but I needed to get unwashed farm fresh eggs in order to try it AND I needed to have enough eggs on hand to not cut us short in our weekly egg usage (we eat a lot of eggs throughout the week). Last week was finally the week. I got the pickling lime I had been saving for this purpose out of storage, picked out the cleanest unwashed eggs I had purchased from some friends down the road, and preserved 18 eggs in a gallon sized glass jar.  I followed the instructions from The Prairie Homestead, which can be found here . Why preserve eggs in this manner? Since we do not have our own chickens, we rely upon a couple of friends having extra eggs to sell. I wanted to preserve some eggs for those times when we cannot get them fresh
Read more

Fried Daisies, Yarrow Tea, and DIY Rose Oil

Image
We had a lot of rain last week, which "dampened" my forays into the woods to forage, so I spent some time on the website better organizing it and adding another article.  We now have a DIY project section and an article on jean quilts. Click here to see what is new! In spite of the damp weather, I spent a bit of time outside and picked enough to fill the dehydrator.  While I collected several kinds of plants, here are the ones I focused on this past week:   Oxeye Daisies I collected oxeye daisies mainly to dry for tea, but they are also wonderful to eat.  They can be battered and fried, much like fried mushrooms.  We have tried both a sweet and a savory batter for these and have enjoyed both. As with any new food, be careful to avoid these if you have an allergy to other plants in the asteraceae (daisy) family.  One of its many uses in tea is for coughs accompanied by an excess of mucous. Oxeye daisy is said to decrease mucosal secretions and calm inflamed tissues. It reporte
Read more

Garden Report - 10/9/23

Image
Last week I spent a bit of time tidying up the garden for fall. I gave my tarragon and mint their last trim for the year.  I bundled the bounty and hung it in the attic to dry along with some dill.  I had three nice bundles of orange mint, two smaller bundles of tarragon, and one of dill. I also filled the dehydrator with borage, winter savory, oregano, and mullein. I gathered some seed from the nasturtiums, dill, cilantro, and calendula. I then picked the ripe tomatoes and pulled the onions. What did well in our garden this year? Our tarragon produced very well. I think this was my third or fourth cutting of this year.  I am pleased we have enough to share with the girls and a couple of friends as well. The orange mint I planted last year also produced well as did the dill, pepper plants, and the nasturtium. We were pleased to have a nice crop of potatoes, too. The potatoes produced well for the 3 foot by 3 foot area we planted (we were following the square foot garden method).  I lef
Read more