I Took a Canning Break

I took a small canning break.

Let me explain. My husband has had a favorite fruit salad recipe from childhood that calls for Royal Anne cherries - a light not-so-sweet cherry.

They usually have these cherries in June. Often it is very hot in June and I don’t always get around to actually canning them. Well, this year I actually ran out of all of the ones I had canned from previous years and decided it was necessary to can some more.

We couldn’t find the lightest ones I wanted, but managed to find some that were sort of light and not quite as sweet as the dark bing cherries.

In the end I bought about 9 lbs (4 kilos) as I thought it would be about 1 kilo per jar.

I did pay the equivalent of $6.81 for each kilo or about $3.09/lb. None of these things seem to be a great deal anymore here in Poland like they used to be. Anyway, I can’t buy these sweet cherries at any price in a jar, so if I want them later, I need to do them myself.

So, I did.

I took off the stems and put them in a container waiting to be pitted.

I almost forgot to take a picture of my unpitted cherries.

Then I pitted them.

It is possible that some of you have never seen a pitter, so I made this little video of my using it.

 
 

Then I put them in clean jars which I had prepared a couple of days ago.

I put hot water on to boil in my big canner.

Then I boiled the lids and rings as I used my American jars for this.

Prepared the sugar syrup.

I made a little video for you for that.

 
 

I ladled the syrup in the jars, wiped the rims, put on the lids and tightened the rings and put the jars carefully in the big pot which the water was lightly boiling.

Once the water was boiling again, I put on a timer for 25 minutes and let them boil.

Once the 25 minutes was gone, I turned off the heat, removed the jars and let them cool. They all sealed which is indicated by the lids going “down” in the center.

It was interesting to see how awful the tops and rims looked at this point.

Once completely cool, I removed the lids, washed the lids and jars off from anything sticky.

You can see that the color of the cherries - well, they kind of lost their color didn’t they? That happens for me with these cherries.

I marked the top with the year ‘26 so I could know at a glance when I did these.

All that for only 6 quarts!

But these are done. I may look for some lighter cherries in a week or two and do some more. A true Royal Anne cherry is a white cherry- but while my husband’s cherries are ready in our yard, I wasn’t able to find any for sale. Some said theirs were not ripe yet.

So we’ll see. But at least I have some canned cherries for that fruit salad!

Thanks so much for coming along with me on this journey.

Have a great day wherever you are reading this.

Oh wait…if you are interested in cherries - we have some amazing cherry fabrics!

Becky PetersenComment