Canned fruits and berries: features, recipes, properties and reviews

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

Everyone is well aware that freezing fruits and berries is the best way to preserve their valuable qualities. However, not everyone has the opportunity to purchase a separate freezer to accommodate a rich harvest. No problem! Canned fruits, although they lose some of the nutrients during heat treatment, do not require special storage conditions. They will help diversify the winter table and are rightfully considered the most delicious home-made preparations.

Sweet preservation includes juices, compotes, jams, jelly, confiture, jam, marmalade and other processing methods. We will look at the features of preparing the most popular blanks and talk about their benefits.

Is there any benefit in fruit and berry preservation

Our grandmothers did not question the benefits of homemade jams and compotes. They fed and watered their grandchildren with them, and the children went full, ruddy and he althy. With the advent of numerous diets, the habit of counting calories and reading food ingredients, many people thought: is there any benefit in canned fruits and berries?

Reviews on the Web in this regard are extremely contradictory. However, most housewives agree that their own preservation is a hundred times more useful than the dubious freshness of berries and fruits presented in stores, especially in winter.

And this is the pure truth. Imagine: the fruits were grown using chemistry, harvested in summer and early autumn, not always safe processing methods were used for storage. What is useful left in such fruits by the middle of winter? So, you don’t need to be a biologist to understand: your own canned strawberries, cherries or apples are much more useful than conditionally fresh, glossy fruits from the supermarket without a single wormhole. And there is scientific evidence for this.

We preserve vegetables, fruits and berries and often do not realize their benefits. And she is undeniable:

• freshly harvested fruits lose only 30% of their useful properties during heat treatment;
• compotes and jams - a storehouse of fiber and pectin, necessary for normal digestion and lowering bad cholesterol;
• calcium, magnesium, beta-carotene and vitamin E are not destroyed when fruits are boiled;
• The concentration of the coloring pigment lycopene, which prolongs the youthfulness of the skin, is significantly increased by canning;
• fruits that have undergone proper heat treatment do not contain harmful microorganisms.

But you need to remember: when we preserve berries and fruits, the preparatory stage is no less important than the process of preparing winter preparations.

Features of home preservation

Any fruits exposed to humidity andelevated temperatures begin to deteriorate. The reason for this is the intensive development of microorganisms that exist at the expense of plant tissues and cause fermentation processes. Therefore, most berries (strawberries, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries), as well as ripe fruits, need to be processed as soon as possible after harvest or purchase, following simple recommendations:

• do not ignore the thoroughness of washing the fruits: not only dirt is removed from their peel, but also the remnants of preparations used in cultivation;
• washed fruits and berries must be dried to eliminate water as much as possible;
• at the sorting stage, choose fruits that are the same in size, degree of maturity and color;
• use stainless steel knives whenever possible to cut fruit;
• do not exclude blanching (quick treatment with boiling water followed by cooling) - it reduces the oxidation process that destroys vitamins, improves the color, taste and smell of fruits;
• sterilize jars - heating at t 100 °C destroys pathogens;
• for cooking fruits and berries take stainless steel containers.

And now let's look at the features of popular ways of preparing canned fruits and berries.

Compote

Delicious, sweet, rich compote - a favorite among homemade preparations. It is believed that it is in this form that fruits and berries retain their beneficial qualities better.

The most interesting thing is to preserve assorted. If fruity, then, for example, from apples, peaches, oranges and grapes. If berry - from raspberries, currants and gooseberries. In both cases, a three-liter jar will need 300-400 g of sugar, 1.5 liters of water and a pinch of citric acid. The number of fruits and berries is arbitrary, but usually the jar is filled by 1/3. Berries are poured with boiling syrup and rolled up immediately, and double boiling is used for fruits.

Jam

Every housewife knows that the ratio of sugar and fruits in jam depends on the acidity of the latter and can reach a ratio of 2:1. There are many jam recipes. We will not list them, but will give some tips on cooking:

• perishable berries (raspberries or strawberries) are covered with sugar and left in a cool place for 10-12 hours until juice is formed, and then sent to the stove;
• so that the berries and fruits do not wrinkle, the berries are boiled in several steps;
• readiness is usually checked in the old-fashioned way: if the drop holds its shape, the process can be completed.

Canned fruits in the form of jam and its varieties - jam, confiture and marmalade - should be stored in hermetically sealed containers, and not in glass coffee jars with plastic lids.

Juice

Homemade fruit and berry and vegetable juices are much he althier than their store-bought counterparts because they are all natural. There are 2 main ways to make juice:

• without sterilization with the addition of sugar (100 g/1 liter of squeezed juice): the liquid is brought to a boil and immediately poured into sterilizedbottles;
• sugar-free: boiling juice is poured into a container, sterilized for 10-15 minutes and rolled up.

The preservative is citric acid taken at the tip of a knife.

Juices can be from one type of fruit or berry and complex, transparent and with pulp, but in any case concentrated and very tasty.

Jelly

Fruits rich in pectin are suitable for making jelly: currants, gooseberries, oranges, tangerines, kiwi, sour apples, blueberries or cranberries. It is better to take slightly unripe fruits: in mature and overripe, the amount of gelling agent decreases sharply. The algorithm of work is extremely simple:

• add 50 g of water to 1 kg of berries, heat and rub through a fine sieve until juice is obtained;
• Pass fruit through a juicer, 1 liter of juice will need 1 kg of sugar;
• as an additional gelling component per 1 liter of liquid, you can add 5 g of dry pectin or 15 g of agar-agar;
• cook the jelly until tender, carefully skimming off the foam.

The drop does not spread - the jelly is ready.

A very tasty and spicy dessert is obtained by combining various fruits and berries.

And now a few recommendations on how to properly store homemade preparations so as not to harm your he alth.

Storage rules

Even during the excavations of the tomb of Tutankhamun, hermetically sealed clay vessels were discovered, in which archaeologists found the remains of canned fruit. And this means that a thousand years BC. e. people have alreadyharvest fruits and, for sure, appreciated their taste and benefits.

Ancient Egypt had its own ways of storing compotes, but we are interested in modern city apartments, which often do not have a loggia or a glazed balcony. In fairness, it is worth saying: the recommended temperature for storing blanks is from 0 to + 15 ° С. But, as the hostesses note in the reviews on the forums, their jams and compotes are great in pantries, cabinets and under sofas. The same goes for marinades. Yes, there are rare cases of botulism, but they mostly refer to mushroom poisoning.

Also, lovers of home preservation note that fermented jam, cloudy compote and other spoiled preparations have to be thrown away, and rightly so. We don't eat rotten fruit, so why risk removing the top layer of mold under the lid and assuming the rest of the jam is perfectly edible?

In fact, the pores of mold fungi spread throughout the sweet mass and, according to scientists, the use of such jam can provoke the development of oncology. This is perhaps the only harm from canned fruits, except for the indefatigable eating of sugar-containing foods, even cooked according to the rules.