Smokey Mountain Breakdown

Our weather has turned nippy late this year. Usually I start thinking about my fall season jams much sooner than November, but the heat and drought has made it difficult to imagine standing over a hot stove for so many hours.

Apple butter is a long standing tradition in this area. It was made out of doors over a wood fire in a large cast iron cauldron. This technique requires an entire day and much stirring. You have to have very strong arms to keep watch on a 50 gallon tub of bubbling apple butter.

The version I'm sharing with you today can easily be made in the home kitchen and is a festive addition to any holiday table. The red Hots Candy that is dissolved in the mix turns the apple butter a brilliant red. As with all apple butters, constant minding and stirring is key. A few tricks I've picked up since the first time I made this recipe is to run my apples through a food mill first, after steaming them in a colander. The mill will remove the seeds and skins. Another trick some of the old wives employ is to pour the half finished apple butter into a shallow baking or cake pan and finish in the oven. This preserves the color and keeps the apple butter from scorching.

Whatever you do, be careful of the bubbling hot mixture...this jam tends to bubble up and spatter easily. You will notice, if you have never made apple butter from scratch, that the texture is much more like a jam than the apple butter you buy in the store. Apples have lots of pectin in them, so really, those store bought apple butters are really more of a spiced thick apple sauce. Real apple butter has body and holds its shape when you spoon it out of the jar.

I usually have tomatoes coming out of my ears this time of year. The drought took care of that problem for me. I still have three tomato plants surviving, but they probably won't do anything until September...or if the rains come back. It's shaping up to a dry August.

But last year, I had more brandywine tomatoes than I could handle. And lots of fresh basil and very spicy oregano growing in the garden. I had been doing most of my fruit and vegetable straining the old fashioned way, through a colander, but I treated myself to a Victorio Food Strainer last year. This is a must have kitchen gadget if you are going to do canning of sauces, fruit butters or any such thing that you are dealing in bulk amounts of tomatoes, apples or berries.

Making your own marinara from absolute scratch is actually very easy. I didn't really follow a recipe for this so I don't have a recipe to share with you. I was making it for canning so I kept it fairly simple. Oils and meat can safely be added when you decant the sauce to prepare. You know how you like your marinara...so be creative with your spices and ingredients. If you plan to can sauce with meat, that involves pressure canning...doable, but you need to make sure you know your pressure and timing to keep it in the canner. This information is readily available in The Ball Blue Book.

Start with fresh vine ripe tomatoes, preferably from a home garden. Blanch them for about 15 minutes. I prefer to put mine in a colander and steam them over a pot of boiling water until they are slightly soft and releasing their juices. Then transfer your tomatoes to the foodmill. Mill out the pulp and you will have a lovely thin tomato juice with very fine pulp. Transfer this to a large stainless pot and reduce on low until the juice develops into a sauce. This will take hours. As I said...this is very easy...but somewhat time consuming. The good news is that you don't have to stand over it the entire time.

Add your spices toward the last few hours of the cooking down process. Be very careful with strong Mediterranean spices since they can turn bitter if cooked too long. This should not be a problem if you are dealing in fresh herbs but dried can be a bit of a problem. Tomatoes can vary widely in acidity, so to be on the safe side, do add a few tablespoons of citric acid. This will preserve color and make them safer for hot water bath canning.

One of the wonderful things about doing this is the intoxicating smell of the sauce as it is cooking. Keep a loaf of Italian bread and some olive oil handy for sampling.

When it is just how you like it, decant into quart jars and seal. Then process in a boiling water canner for about 15 minutes.

I still have plenty left over from last year's canning adventure....so this year's disappointing tomato crop is no great loss.

Manga!

I'm down to my last jar of these babies and they have been calling to me. You can keep your fried green tomatoes...Dill Pickled Green tomatoes are the absolute best! I'm going to make lots more next year. They are now my favorite pickle.

You can take these and put them on an antipasto plate with some fresh goat cheese and olives, then drizzle with Pompeian olive oil or Good Season's Italian dressing. Serve with some crusty Italian or French bread.

I used The Ball Blue Book's recipe for these. I probably put more garlic cloves and messed around a bit with the dill ratio, but that recipe is good to go. I think I packed some jalapeno peppers in some of the jars as well. I probably left out the bay leaf.



Canning is super easy and very rewarding. If you use the Ball Blue Book and follow it religiously, you will not have any trouble. Always use the most recent edition of the Blue Book. Canning arts and sciences are constantly changing. What you find in your granny's old Norge Cookbook is probably no longer considered safe canning practice. Following USDA guidelines for home food preservation will take much of the fear out of your own canning experiments.

I have a long standing relationship with canning. It started when I was a child when each year, my mother would make dozens of pints of fig preserves. My father just couldn't get enough of the things, and they were very delicious. He liked them in peanut butter sandwiches, but I've always preferred them as a side to Smithfield ham.

We didn't have a fig tree, but there was an old black man named Sammy who lived on Calhoun Street in Bluffton who had some of the most beautiful fig trees you ever saw. More importantly, Sammy knew how to pick those figs just so for preserves. You see, you have to leave about an inch of stem on the fig when you pick it. That way, when you take one out of the jar, it already has a little "handle" to hold the sweet dripping fruit by.

This was something we did each summer. Sammy would deliver the figs in brown paper bags from the Piggly Wiggly and we would get started immediately cleaning them and getting them ready for the big vat of sugar, lemons and water simmering on the stove.

Mother also enjoyed making a number of other acid-based preserves. Not my favorite was the watermelon rind pickles. Indeed, no one seemed to like the watermelon rind pickles. They just seemed to sit on the holiday table as a testament to my mother's summer domestic endeavors. They were really pretty. I'll give them that.

I didn't start playing around with the other sort of canning until I moved here. That's basically because I'd been traumatized by my grandmother's exploding pressure cookers as a child. Mutt loved a pressure cooker. Every time she drug it out of the cabinet, I was escorted to a safer place in the house. I'm not sure there was a safe place. My grandmother's pressure cooker was the original IED. I can still remember the sound of that thing blowing the hood off of the stove and the falling shrapnel of the spice cabinet in the aftermath of the explosion.

But, I've cautiously re-acquainted myself with pressure cookers. Now I can green beans, soups, and other safely canned low acid foods. I do sort of cautiously back away from it when it starts making that rattling, hissing noise.

It's just one of those domestic arts I think everyone should have a go at. It's not that time consuming or difficult, but people do tend to get intimidated by it. Here in the mountains, many men also can. Pickled hickory king corn and beans is a favorite of my buddy Aurthur. The gentlemen also enjoy canning hot sauces, pickled peppers and barbecue sauces.

Do give it a whirl. There is nothing more satisfying than watching the appreciative faces around your dinner table in mid-winter when you put out something that tastes so strongly of those warm fruitful days of summer.