By Lorie Ham
Summer is beginning to wind down and many of us are thinking about how to take advantage of the last of the warm weather. You may be thinking about doing some summer barbecuing or taking the family on a picnic. The first thing you should always keep in mind is food safety, especially on these hot days. You can check out one of our past articles for some food safety tips for picnics, and find more food safety tips in our article last winter about cooking safety.
Beyond food safety, if you live in an area that produces a lot of fruit, such as the San Joaquin Valley of California, you may be wondering if there are ways to keep enjoying that delicious fruit after summer is gone. We chatted with some Valley farmers for some suggestions.
Paul Buxman of Sweet Home Ranch farmed for 50 years and started making jam 25 years ago with his wife Ruth after a hail storm scarred their fruit and they weren’t able to sell it fresh. “We started by using commercial kitchens in restaurants nearby, then I built a commercial kitchen here on the ranch,” says Paul. “We make about 6,000 to 8,000 jars per year depending on orders. Our jam is mostly ‘soft set’ meaning that it is very spreadable.”
Their preserves are sold in bakeries, small independent stores, and from their home. Paul shares a bit of their jam making process. “When the fruit is ripe we pick it and then slice, peel, and remove the pits. The sliced fruit is then mixed with a small amount of sugar and ascorbic acid. We then put it into Ziplock bags which contain exactly ten pounds of fruit. The bagged fruit is then put into a three-door upright freezer with shelving. The freezer can hold 42 bags. The bags are patted flat and placed on aluminum pans, two bags per pan. Overnight the fruit freezes. We then transfer all the bags to our eight chest freezers which we fill each summer. When an order comes in, we thaw the number of necessary bags of fruit the night before and make the jam the next day. Some orders are small, like about 100 jars, but others may be for over 800 jars. Ruth and I can comfortably make about 150 jars per day so an order may take only one day to make or it may take up to a week. We hand-label each jar. Each label is hand signed.”
If you would like to try your hand at making jam, here is a simple recipe for apricot jam from the Buxman’s, which happens to be their most popular jam.
Ingredients:
- Ten pounds of halved apricots (semi-firm)
- One cup of pectin
- Eight cups of sugar
You will need 20 half-pint mason jars or 10-pint jars. These will be put into an oven and heated to 250 degrees to sterilize. The lids should be placed in a pan of water and brought to a boil, then take them out of the water and put them into the rings, ready to put on to the filled jars.
Cook the apricots in a large pot till soft. Use a potato masher to crush the fruit into chunks. If you prefer a smooth jam use an immersion blender. Now add in the pectin till dissolved. Next, add in the sugar and stir constantly till dissolved. Increase the heat and bring to a rolling boil. Stir often!
Cook until the jam comes off the wooden stirring spoon in more than one place. Pour the cooked jam into three Tupperware type half-gallon pitchers. Pouring jam into your jars from these pitchers is much easier than using a ladle and jam funnel (and much less messy!)
The jam will seem runny when pouring but will firm up perfectly in the jar when it cools. This will be a “soft set” jam. Soft set jam is very versatile. It’s great on any kind of toast, in oatmeal, over ice cream, mixed into Cole slaw, baked into cookies, or basted on ham or roasted chicken.
Another way to enjoy fruit all year long is through dried fruit. Valley farm Blossom Bluff Orchards makes dried fruit on a large scale using multiple tons of fresh fruit each year. Bryce Loewen, who has taken on a leadership role at Blossom Bluff for the past 16 years, has been involved with the family farm for most of his life. According to Bryce, they sun dry and dehydrate multiple varieties of their leftover fruit each year, trying to use as much of it as possible. In the summer, they grow apricots, peaches, nectarines, plums, and pluots. They also dehydrate persimmons in the fall and mandarins and other citrus in the winter. The final product is then sold at farmers’ markets and through their website (blossombluff.com), as well as sold in bulk and pre-packaged products to some stores for resale.
When asked about the process for drying the fruit, Bryce shares that for sun drying they slice the fruit to remove the pit and then lay it skin down on wooden raisin trays. “They bake in the summer sun for 5-10 days depending on conditions and are then washed and re-dried for packaging/storage,” continues Bryce. “We have an industrial-grade dehydrator we use for fall/winter fruit, and for that, we wash the fruit first and slice it thin. That process is faster, it takes only about 20 hours to dry.”
Bryce recommends enjoying the dried fruit straight out of the bag, but also feels they make an excellent addition to a cheese plate or grazing board.
If you would like to try your hand at drying fruit yourself, this article on WikiHow has some simple instructions. Taste of Home has 50 recipes for cooking with dried fruit that include Date-Nut Pinwheels, and Moroccan Apple Beef Stew.
So, as the summer begins to wind down be sure to make the most of it, be safe with your outdoor eating and cooking, and take advantage of some of the ways to keep enjoying summer fruit all year long! Do you have a recipe or suggestion you would like to share? We would love it if you would share on the Mennonite Insurance Facebook page.
