Dear Reader,
I’ve had a longstanding date with my friend’s raspberry patch set for about once a year. She only calls me when it gets desperate in her patch and she’s struggling to catch up; her main goal is to fulfill all the demand that others have for berries from her patch and I usually take about half of the berries I pick. This year has been a great year for raspberries and she said she had more than she could handle, so I bought extra from her. That meant I’ve been busy working raspberries for the past few days. Since my preschooler helped me pick the berries, I figured she would also be interested in helping me process them, as well.
Obviously, this activity would have to be tweaked if you don’t have a food strainer, but you could easily mash berries with a potato masher! It just doesn’t involve a cool crank, too. My food strainer is called a Victorio, but based on the internet search dive I just took, they must have changed their name? either way, it looks like this. My preschooler could both turn the crank handle and mash the berries, and it was kinda fun watching her get so excited at something that is really technically a chore. She loved making “squished berry juice” and I loved both the help and the time with her. All in all, she lasted quite a while! Equal to about 4 quarts of raspberry juice/pulp. We added a little sugar and canned it that way.
I’m adding the activity scales here even though it’s not the end of the post because if you’re only reading for the activity, the rest of this is a little dry, but since this blog is also a chronicle of my gardening/canning adventures, I need to include the following information (mostly for me…)
All in all we had 6 gallons of berries (6 large clam shells) and it made:
- 2 batches of jam with lemon peel pectin (aka 8 cups of berries, 6 cups of sugar, an entire bag of my homemade lemon pectin – about 10 tablespoon cubes but they were old and nearly impossible to separate from the bag, hence the large batch, and 4 T lemon juice (it just needed the lemon). It set pretty well, but I understand why they tell you to do it in small batches. Some of the jars are extra firm gel and some are barely set).
- 2 gallon ziplocks of whole frozen berries (filled 2 xl cookie sheets and 3 regular sized (they’re Pampered Chef large size)
- 3 1/2 quarts of raspberry juice (it required a whole cup of sugar to make it not so tart) and then I went to the store and bought a regular sized clamshell of strawberries, a large clamshell of blueberries, a whole bag of grapes, and a small clamshell of blackberries and that plus the remaining raspberry juice (and half a cup of sugar) made another 2 1/2 quarts so I processed it all together – 5 quarts, 2 pints – and although the canning guides said 1/4″ headspace, I think I really needed a whole inch of headspace because they bubbled out everywhere and 3 didn’t seal (2 ended up in my fridge but I didn’t notice the 3rd until I didn’t wanna trust it),
- pulp for fruit leather (filled a quart bag but its currently still in my fridge. I’ll update when it’s leather). I used the strainer and only ran it through once, so it’s really just pulp and seeds without any liquid. The liquid was bottled in the quarts above).
