Marisa McClellan's Blog, page 77

Roasted Grape Tomato Pizza Sauce

Each summer, I develop two mental lists of preserves (though come to think of it, it might serve me well to actually commit these lists to paper). On one side, I line up the things I must can. These are the products like roasted corn salsa, dilly beans, and tomato products. As much as love jam (and inevitably make a goodly amount), it’s never on that must can list. However, pizza sauce always is.

Throughout the fall and winter, we make a lot of pizza and I love having some homemade sauce on the shelf to use. Sometimes our pizzas are built on a traditional crust and other times, it’s Carrie Vitt’s sunflower seed version (delicious and so good for those times when you’ve been eating too many bready things).

Over the years, I’ve made pizza sauce a number of different ways. I’ve got a small batch technique in Preserving by the Pint that I like a lot. You’ll find a honey sweetened version in Naturally Sweet Food in Jars. Truly, as long as you follow safe canning guidelines, there is no wrong way.

For this batch, I used ten pounds of grape and cherry tomatoes, roasted them down, pushed them through a food mill, and finished cooking them down on the stove. The finished sauce is a muted orange color, just thick enough to be spreadable, and tastes deeply of summer.

I like this particular approach because the tomatoes do their initial cooking off the stove top. I can prep them while making dinner and then finish them off with that before-bed energy boost I so often have.

This would work just as well with more traditional canning tomatoes or even heirlooms, but I had all these tiny tomatoes, so I made do. Of course, as with many tomato preserves, the yield will vary pretty widely on this one because of variations in water, sugar, and fiber content.

Acidity is always an issue with tomatoes, but is even more so with these small, sweet varieties. I made the call to double the recommended amount of citric acid to this batch, adding 1/4 teaspoon directly to every half pint jar, to ensure a safe finished product. The single 12 ounce jar I used got an proportionally increased amount of citric acid.

If you’re not a home pizza maker, a sauce like this is still a good thing to make for the pantry. It could be used as a starter for enchilada sauce. It’s always a nice addition to a pot of soup when you need added depth and acidity. You could even thin out a couple half pints with a glug of milk and a pat of butter and call it tomato soup. Practical canning at its best!

PrintRoasted Grape Tomato Pizza Sauce

Yield: approximately 5 pints

Ingredients

10 pounds small tomatoes (grape, cherry, or Sungold all work)
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons kosher salt, divided
2-3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 tablespoon dried Italian spices
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
citric acid

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 300 degrees F. Heap the tomatoes into your largest roasting pan (or divide them into two separate pans). Drizzle them with the olive oil and sprinkle 1 tablespoon of kosher salt over the top. Stir to combine.
Roast the dressed tomatoes for 45 minutes to an hour, until they crack and soften. I like to get a little bit of dark color on the skins for flavor. Do make sure to give them a stir every fifteen minutes or so.
When the tomatoes are sufficiently softened, remove the pan from the oven and let them cool.
Once the tomatoes are cool enough that you won't get a burn if a bit of juice lands on your skin, fit your food mill with its medium-sized screen and start working them through.
Pour the pulped tomatoes into a pan and bring it up to a low boil. Add the sugar (start with 2 tablespoons and add the third only if you feel the sauce needs it), Italian spices, and black pepper and stir to combine.
Simmer, stirring often, until the sauce has cooked down by about 1/3 and doesn't seem at all watery.
Prepare a boiling water bath canner and enough jars to hold about five pints (I like to can my pizza sauce in half pint jars, because that's typically how much we use on pizza night).
Measure 1/4 teaspoon citric acid into your half pints and 1/2 teaspoon citric acid into your pints.
Funnel the finished salt into the jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Use a wooden or plastic chopstick to stir the citric acid into the finished sauce.
Wipe the rims, apply the lids and rings, and process in a boiling water bath canner for 30 minutes.
When time is up, slide the pot off the hot burner, remove the lid from the canner and let the jars cool slowly for five minutes.
Remove jars from canner and set them on a folded kitchen towel to cool.
After 24 hours of cooling, check seals. Jars that have sealed can be stored in the pantry. Any unsealed jars should be refrigerated and used promptly. 3.1http://foodinjars.com/2015/10/roasted-grape-tomato-pizza-sauce/

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Pickle Pipe Waterless Fermentation System Launches Today!

Remember on Monday when I hinted that the folks at Masontop were about to launch a really awesome new fermentation product? Well, today’s the day. May I introduce you to the Pickle Pipe.

This little device is a waterless silicone airlock designed to fit onto a wide mouth mason jar. All you do is fill up your jar, set the Pickle Pipe on top and fix it in place with a regular old band. The valve has a small slit in it that allows the CO2 to escape from the jar, without allowing any oxygen back in.

I’ve used the Pickle Pipe on several recent ferments and I’ve been really impressed with its performance. I also really appreciate the fact that it’s just one piece (I’m always misplacing pieces of multi-part airlocks).

To learn more about the Pickle Pipe and to reserve a few for yourself, check out their Kickstarter.

Disclosure: Masontops is a Food in Jars sponsor and gave me one of their Pickle Pipes a few months ago so that I could play with it. However, I do mean every word of what I said here. 

Oh, and while we’re on the topic of Kickstarter campaigns, there are two really awesome cookbook projects currently being crowdfunded that you might be interested in. Hank Shaw’s Buck, Buck, Moose and Kathy Strahs The 8×8 Cookbook.

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Giveaway: Pickle Packer and Pebbles from Masontops
Giveaway: Chalk Tops from Masontops
Tiny White Turnips, Fermented

End of Season Tomatoes and Drying Tiny Tomatoes

A few weeks ago, I found myself feeling anxious about the state of my tomato preserves. I’d already sauced 50 pounds of heirlooms, but hadn’t managed to get any Roma or paste tomatoes to can whole or in halves. In a frenzy only other canners will understand, I started reaching out to some of my regular tomato sources, hoping to get another 25 or 50 pounds to preserve.

In the end, I was too late. Unable to get my hands on any tomatoes appropriate for canning whole, I settled for two flats of tiny tomatoes (they were mostly grape and Sungolds) and another ten pounds of heirlooms. Not exactly what I wanted, but in the end, they managed to calm my inner pioneer.

I roasted and canned the heirlooms according to Kaela’s instructions (though I included a bit more of their liquid than she does). I wound up with seven precious pints, and they will be carefully rationed throughout the winter.

The small tomatoes became three separate products. I made a batch of honey sweetened tomato jam. I roasted, milled, spiced, and simmered ten pounds into pizza sauce (more on that tomorrow). And I carefully halved and arranged the remaining eight pounds on dehydrator trays and dried them into tomato candy (two batches through the dehydrator, in all).

I posted pictures of my racks of drying tomatoes on Instagram and got a number of questions about how I do it and how I use them. The how is easy. I wash the tomatoes, pick them over to ensure that I don’t have any that are starting to go bad, slice them in half, and arrange them on the trays. Over the course of the next 12-14 hours, the machine does the rest (set at 135 degrees F, the suggested temp).

Once the tomatoes are entirely dry, I unstack the trays and let them cool. I spread a towel on the countertop and use a combination of shaking and banging to remove the from the trays. They get stored in either a jar or a zip top plastic bag and my dried tomatoes are done.

After I’ve admired them for a week or two, I start using them. I stir them into quinoa salad. I make Tara’s zucchini noodle salad. I use them to garnish soup. I make batches of savory granola and use the dried tomatoes instead of raisins. Sometimes I nibble a few while making dinner. They are always a welcome addition to my pantry and when they run out, I wish I’d made more. Such is the way of preserving.

Do you guys dry tomatoes? How do you use them?

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Giveaway: Pickle Packer and Pebbles from Masontops

Over the last couple of years, I’ve gotten more and more interested in small batch fermentation (these dilly beans and last week’s batch of hot sauce are two good examples). Throughout my slow-motion tumble down the lactobacillus rabbit hole, I’ve gathered a useful collection of gear designed to help my little ferments turn out well.

Late in the spring, a pair of products I’ve come to use a lot fell into my lap, thanks to the folks at Masontops. They had reached out in the hopes that I’d write about their Chalk Tops (which I did), but also included a Pickle Packer and a set of regular mouth Pickle Pebbles in the package they sent, just so I could see their whole product line.

I use the Pickle Packer nearly every time I make a batch of sauerkraut (which ends up being at least a couple times a month). It allows me to quickly bash the cabbage and salt together and then compress them neatly into a quart or half gallon jar. And the Pickle Pebbles are great for weighing down the veg so that the top doesn’t rise up above the liquid and then dry out, discolor, or mold. They are just simple, useful products.

On Thursday, the folks at Masontops are launching a Kickstarter campaign for a new product, which I do believe is going to knock the socks off those of you who do a lot of fermentation. I’ll have more about that product on Thursday as well. In the meantime, I’m giving away one of their fermentation sets, which includes both the Pickle Packer and Pebbles. Here’s how to enter.

Leave a comment on this post and tell me what you’re cooking, canning, or fermenting this week.
Comments will close at 11:59 pm eastern time on Saturday, October 10, 2015. Winners will be chosen at random and will be posted to the blog on Sunday, October 11, 2015.
Giveaway open to United States residents only.
One comment per person, please. Entries must be left via the comment form on the blog at the bottom of this post.

Disclosure: The Masontops folks send me a collection of their products for photography purposes and are providing the fermentation kit for the winner of this giveaway. They recently become a Food in Jars sponsor. However, all opinions expressed here are my own. 

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Links: Plum Ketchup, Roasted Tomatoes, and Winners

Over the last several days, we’ve settled down into some of my favorite weather of the year. I love the cooler days and chilly nights, as well as the alternating days of rain and sunshine. Autumn, you are always welcome here! Now, some links!

Redheart plum and raspberry jam. This is one to bookmark for next year!
Plum ketchup! You might still be able to get some end of season plums for this one.
Ginger pepper jelly. Good for holiday giving, perhaps?
Roasted tomato sauce. I made a batch like this a few weeks ago and LOVE It.
Speaking of tomatoes, you might still be able to get some to make oven roasted tomato paste.
Accidentally open an under-ripe avocado? Pickle it!
Rosemary sugar. A fun way to incorporate rosemary flavor into sweet things!
An interesting look at preventing apples from browning.
Tips for cooking up a pot of beans in a pressure cooker (useful if my recent post piqued your interest).
Simple bar cookies made from peanut butter, eggs, and sugar.
I am so intrigued by the idea of batch cooking salmon in a slow cooker.

A big thanks to everyone who took the time to enter last week’s giveaway, sponsored by Mason Jar Lifestyle! The winners of the two $25 gift cards to the site are #142/Katie B. and #220/RG. Congratulations to all the winners!

If you didn’t win, but spotted something you desperately want, don’t forget that you get 10% off your purchase by using the code “jars10” and that shipping is free if you spend $25 or more (if you order less than that, shipping is $4).

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Links: Roasted Tomatoes, Basil Salt, and a Winner
Links: Late Summer Jams, Soggy Pickles, and Winners

October Sponsors: Cuppow, Mason Jar reCAP, Fillmore Container, MightyNest, Mrs. Wages, Jar-Z, Fermentools, & Hobby Hill Farm

It’s the beginning of October and that means that it’s time to acknowledge and thank all the businesses who help keep the lights on over here at Food in Jars HQ. I am continually grateful for their support!

In the top spot, we’ve got Cuppow! They are the creator of the original mason jar travel mug topper and the BNTO, a small plastic cup that transforms a canning jar into a snack or lunch box. They also recently expanded their product line to include branded jar coozie and they’ve teamed up with the EIO Kids Cup folks to bring the manufacturing of that kids drinking system onto US soil.

Mason Jar reCAP is a company based right here in Pennsylvania. They are the producers of the original reCAP pour lid and have since expanded to include the reCAP Flip (check out their new glow-in-the-dark lid). Recently, they launched a Kickstarter to help fund their newest innovation, the reCAP EXPLORE. It glows and has a build-in magnification lens.

Fillmore Container is a family-owned business based in Lancaster, PA and sells all manner of canning jars, lids, and other preservation gear. They also publish a blog that is a very useful resource for canners. Recently, they wrote about knowing when to can or freeze, and posted about the new honey jars they’re carrying. Make sure to check their blog on Monday, when they launch a giveaway of Brown Eggs and Jam Jars.

MightyNest is an amazing resource for non-toxic, natural, and organic products for homes and families. Check out their new subscription program called Mighty Fix. For $10 a month, you get a reusable product and everything else you buy ships for free! Subscribe using the form in this post and get your first month free (offer good until October 10).

Mrs. Wages makes pectin, vinegar, and more canning mixes than I can count. Their website is an incredible preserving resource and I can’t say enough good things about their salsa mix. Sign up for their newsletter for monthly installments of canning goodness.

Jar-Z is new to the sponsorship line-up and I’m so happy to have them on board. They make neoprene cozies for jars that slip on easily, provide insulation, and offer an easy grip as well. You can order basic covers, or place a customized order for weddings, parties, and family reunions!

Fermentools offers a brilliant fermentation starter kit that involves a heavy-duty glass pickling weight, an airlock, a lid with a reusable rubber seal, and mineral-rich salt. Get one (or several!) to help turn your CSA goodies into naturally fermented pickles.

Hobby Hill Farm is another new sponsor. Based in Powhatan, Virginia, they sell locally made jams and preserves, homemade pretzels, candies, and cheese making kits. What’s more, if you’re in the area, owner Sharon regularly teaches cheese making classes around central Virginia. They’re launching a brand new website an minute now, so make sure to head over see how great it looks!

If your company or small business is interested in becoming a sponsor, you can find more details here. I offer discounts for multiple month purchases and am always happy to work with your budget.

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July Sponsors: Cuppow, iLids, Fillmore Container, MightyNest, Mrs. Wages, Fermentools, Orchard Road, and Preserving Now
May Sponsors: Cuppow, iLids, Fillmore Container, Mighty Nest, Mrs. Wages, Fermentools, and Preserving Now!
April Sponsors: Cuppow, Fillmore Container, Spice Ratchet, Mighty Nest, and Fermentools

CSA Cooking: Fermented Hot Sauce

I made my first batch of fermented hot sauce in 2012. It was one of my very earliest fermentation projects and while technically the making of it was uneventful, the finished batch was so incredibly spicy that even one drop gave me immediate heart burn. At the time, I figured that homemade hot sauce just for me and moved along.

Then last fall, I was visiting Alana and had a chance to taste her hot sauce. It was bright, funky, spicy,  and made everything it touched just a bit better. I decided that I’d give making my own another try when next I had the chance.

Well, that chance finally came earlier this month. My September Philly Foodworks share included a pound of hot peppers and a pound of sweet. Wanting to avoid my previous error and not make a sauce that would incinerate my digestive track, it appeared to be the perfect combination of ingredients.

I took inspiration from a number of sources for my batch. I referenced Alana’s post, took a little inspiration from Well Preserved, and also made sure to see how Amanda over at Phickle does it. (By the way, all three of those bloggers have books coming out soon. Alana’s and Amanda’s books are hitting this month. Joel and Dana’s book will be out in the spring).

After reading their various techniques and mixing it up with what I generally know about fermentation, I started my batch. I chose to make a brine (1 quart filtered water and 3 tablespoons fine sea salt) rather than directly salting so that I’d end up with a goodly amount of liquid for my final puree (I like a drippy sauce rather than a chunky one).

I combined the peppers (sweet and hot), a full head of garlic (peeled, of course), and a big hunk of ginger in the bowl of my food processor and pulsed until I had a relatively uniform mash. I scraped it into a half gallon jar, added the brine, popped an airlock on top, tucked it into a corner, and forgot about it for a couple weeks.

I deemed the sauce finished when it had gone from bright green to olive drab, it was super tangy, and I found myself entirely happy to sip the liquid from a spoon. I divided the sauce into two batches, ran it through the blender, and was done. While different from the sauce that inspired it, it is still bright, tangy, and so, so good.

PrintFermented Hot Sauce

Yield: 6 to 7 cups

Ingredients

1 quart filtered water
3 tablespoons fine grain sea salt
1 pound hot peppers
1 pound sweet peppers
1 head garlic, peeled
4 inches ginger, peeled and roughly chopped

Instructions

Combine the filtered water and salt in a quart jar and shake it well to help the salt dissolve.
Remove stems and cores from peppers and roughly chop them. Heap them in the bowl of a food processor along with the peeled garlic cloves and ginger and process until you have a uniform mash.
Scrape all the pepper, garlic, and ginger mash into a half gallon jar and pour in the brine.
Fit the jar with an airlock of your choice and let it bubble away for two to three weeks, until the color fades and you like how the sauce is tasting.
Puree until the sauce has a texture you like. Pour into jars or bottles and stash in the fridge.

Notes

After the fermentation process is finished, the pH of the sauce is typically low enough that you can heat the finished sauce, funnel it into jars, and process it in a boiling water bath canner for 15 minutes if you want it to be shelf stable.
This treatment will kill off the probiotic bacteria in the sauce, but if you can't spare the fridge space for your sauce, it is a way to make it stable and stashable in the pantry.

3.1http://foodinjars.com/2015/09/csa-cooking-fermented-hot-sauce/

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Giveaway: Mason Jar Lifestyle Gift Cards

Friends, let me introduce you to a website called Mason Jar Lifestyle, a one-stop shopping site for a very wide array of canning jar accessories! We truly live in the golden age for mason jar lovers.

They’ve got silicone drink lids, fruit infusers, silicone jar seals (great for those times when you want to ensure that your jars aren’t going to leak), copper regular mouth lids (fun for gifts!), and even pin cushion toppers.

They carry straws of all shapes and sizes. You can get glass ones, stainless steel ones, super skinny ones, and even rounded-end straws with a little bump so that they stay put inside the drink topper. They also carry brushes designed to clean straws, so that you don’t get any funky growth.

You’ll also find an array of useful fermentation gear available on Mason Jar Lifestyle. One particularly clever thing is that they’ve created a line of silicone toppers that work both with straws and airlocks, so you can choose how you use them. Here’s the complete fermentation kit.

Other cool items they have in stock are soap dispenser pumps (in so many different finishes!), wax warmers, a mason speaker for your phone, solar light inserts, and mason jar handles and caddies.

If some of this gear is floating your boat, and you don’t want to wait to see if you win the giveaway below, I have a couple offers for you. The first is that all Food in Jars readers can get 10% off your purchase by using the code ” jars10.” Second, shipping is free if you order more than $25 worth of gear (if your order is less than that, shipping is a flat $4).

Now, for the giveaway. Maggie from Mason Jar Lifestyle has offered up two $25 gift cards to the site. Here’s how to enter.

Leave a comment on this post, sharing a jar accessory you’d like to have.
Comments will close at 11:59 pm east coast time on Saturday, October 3, 2015. The winner will be chosen at random and will be posted to the blog on Sunday, October 4, 2015.
Giveaway is open to US residents only (and is void where prohibited).
One comment per person, please. Entries must be left on the blog.

Disclosure: I received an assortment of gear from the folks at Mason Jar Lifestyle for review and photography purposes at no cost to me. My opinions remain my own.

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Links: Chocolate Applesauce Cake, Chard Stalk Hummus, and Winners

Last Wednesday night, just before we slipped out of town to escape the weekend of Pope-centric festivities taking over Philadelphia, I spent the evening canning (as I often do just before a trip). I canned up a roasted sungold sauce and processed some fermented hot sauce (heating it does kill all the beneficial bacteria, but I just don’t have the fridge space for half a gallon of sauce). I’ll have both those recipes for you guys this week. Now, links!

Preserving fruit and a chocolate applesauce cake.
Pickled squash with cilantro.
Mirabelle plum jam.
Making sauce with fruit that has been used to make fermented soda.
Prickly pear syrup, anyone?
Plum, vanilla and thyme jam.
Chard stalk hummus (a brilliant way to use up those unloved stalked!).
Jalapeno cheddar biscuits, cut with a mason jar ring.
Mango passionfruit jam.
The scientific reason why adding acid helps your jam set up.
The folks that brought us the reCAP have a new Kickstarter on offer!

Time for winners! This week, I have two giveaways to wrap up. First is the T-Fal Clipso Pressure Cooker giveaway that I posted on Monday. The winner there is #25/Jo-Ann (congratulations!).

Second up is the $100 gift certificate from The Home Depot, that was offered in conjunction with the release of all those Can-It-Forward videos last Tuesday. The winner there is #70/Nikki A. Hooray!

Thanks to all of you who took the time to enter!

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Sponsored Post: Adopt a Beehive with Cox’s Honey

Honey is magical stuff. Made by bees from nectar, enzymes, and hard work, it is wonderfully sweet, tastes of its time and place, almost never goes bad, and is even said to have healing properties. I always have a few varieties in my kitchen and use them daily to sweet preserves, enhance my tea, or mellow the sharpness of a homemade vinaigrette.

I have always longed to have my own hive, but as an adult, have never lived in a place where it was possible (darned high rise living). As a consolation, I make a point to support the bees by buying honey raised and gathered by conscientious humans and being educated about the honey bee situation in our country.

Back in the spring, I got an email from someone at Cox’s Honey, asking me if I’d like a beehive of my very own. Intrigued, I wrote back. Sadly, they hasn’t invented a hive I could attach to my 20th story window. Instead, they were inviting me to join their Beehive Adoption program.

There are four levels of beehive adoption (bronze, silver, gold, and platinum), with various price points to match. No matter what level you choose, you get a welcome kit that includes a Certificate of Adoption, the GPS location of your hive, glossy pictures of your hive and the bees, a 12 ounce honey bear and 20 ounce container of creamed honey, and 10% off all online purchase at coxshoney.com. Cox’s Honey will also donate 10% of your payment to The American Bee Federation.

You also get regular shipments of honey with your adoption. The amount depends on the level you select (bronze level memberships get 9 pounds over the course of the year, silver gets 15, gold gets 20, and platinum gets 30). You can pay in either monthly installments or in a single, monthly payment. So many options!

Being the honey lover I am, I said yes to Beehive Adoption and soon after, received my first shipment of Cox’s Honey. I love using their clover honey in my preserving projects because it has a mild flavor that complements fruit incredibly well. I recently made a batch of this Pear Vanilla Drizzle sweetened with honey and it is ridiculously good.

I realize that for some of you, it might be too early to start thinking about this, but if you’re beginning to ponder holiday gifts, a Beehive Adoption might be just the thing for someone on your list. Bee fans and home canners alike will appreciate both the thought as well as the quarterly shipments of honey!

Disclosure: In exchange for writing this post, the folks at Cox’s Honey enrolled me in their Beehive Adoption program at the platinum level, which has a value of $270. However, my thoughts and opinions remain my own.

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