Why Cant You Use Other Starch Thickeners Other Than Clearjel For The Canned Pie Fillings
One of the main reasons is density. Other thickeners such as regular corn starch, wheat flour, arrowroot, tapioca, etc, might prevent heat from fully penetrating the entire jar being processed. Suzanne Driessen from the University of Minnesota Extension Service says that while botulism is not a high risk with pie fillings owing to the high acidity of most fruits that people will be using for pies, the density issues with other thickeners could prevent heat getting through to the center of the jar and killing off more boring nasties such as salmonella and listeria. As well, she notes, the quality with those other thickeners in home canned products just isnt great. Many people reported getting results that are either lumpy, runny or both. After all their hard work, their home canned pie fillings were very disappointing and unappealing just from an everyday cooks point of view.
Heres what she says,
What You Can Make With Huckleberries Besides Pie
You can also use the huckleberries to make cakes, pancakes, muffins, cupcakes, and other desserts. 4.5 pounds of huckleberries should go a long way if you use them sparingly as a complement to a main recipe.
And, oh yes, there is one more thing you can do with those fresh huckleberries. You can make your own huckleberry ice cream. What better way to enjoy a hot summer evening with friends than serving up a slice of freshly baked pie and freshly churned ice cream, all made from wild huckleberries?
OMG, I have got to find my credit card right now!
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Ball Book Of Canning And Preserving
This book from Ball brings us seven pie fillings.
These pie fillings are essentially jars of sweetened, spiced preserved fruit which you turn into a pie filling after opening by adding cornstarch to thicken: typically 3 tablespoons of cornstarch per litre jar.
- Apple, Blueberries, Cherries, Peaches or Nectarines
- Pear-and-Sour Cherry Pie Filling
- Apple-Pear-Cranberry Pie Filling
Pie filling recipes for home canning as of June 2016 on the Bernardin web site.
- Peach Pie
- Raspberry Pie
- Rhubarb Strawberry Pie Filling
- Blueberry Pie .
- Lots of Cherries Pie
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More About Huckleberry Pie Filling For Sale Recipes
HUCKLEBERRY PIE! – THE BAKING WIZARD
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- Stir together the flour and salt in a large bowl. Add the cold butter pieces and work them into the flour using a pastry blender or two knives until the butter is the size of small peas. Add the lard or shortening and work it into the flour until the pieces are about the same size as the butter pieces.
- Combine the 1 cup sugar, tapioca, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt in a large bowl. Add the huckleberries and lemon juice and fold everything together gently to combine well. Let stand 15 minutes. .
HUCKLEBERRY PIE : RECIPES : COOKING CHANNEL RECIPE …
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HUCKLEBERRY PIE, HUCKLEBERRY SHAKES Estimated Reading Time 1 minSee details »
HUCKLEBERRY PIE RECIPE – HILDA …
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HUCKLEBERRY HAND PIES | BAKING THE GOODS
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- Place the huckleberries in a mixing bowl. Add the zest and juice of one lemon, sprinkle wish sugar and toss to coat. Stir in the tapioca starch and allow to sit for 15 minutes.
THE BEST WILD HUCKLEBERRY PIE RECIPE – WANDERING HOOF RANCH
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HUCKLEBERRY PIE RECIPE | MYRECIPES
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AMAZON.COM : WILD HUCKLEBERRY PIE FILLING JAR, 42OZ : JAMS …
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THE BEST 9 HUCKLEBERRY RECIPES · THE TYPICAL MOM
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Pie Filling Recipes For Home Canning
Here is a list, current as of summer 2016, of sources for lab-tested pie filling recipes.
There are over 50 lab-tested recipes from reputable sources to choose from, so you are almost certain to find a few that interest you.
Do not reduce in these recipes any acid called for in the form of vinegar, lemon or other fruit juice. The acidity is there for safety, and in the case of Clearjel recipes, may be helping the starch to gel properly as well. Remember that the lemon juice is necessary for both frozen and canned fillings. It helps to stabilize the starch. Food Safety & Preservation: Fruit Pie Fillings. OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY Extension Service. SP 50-616, Revised February 2013. Accessed March 2015. Lemon juice when called for should be bottled: they are after an assured acidity for safety.
For all recipes, when they tell you to blanch the fruit before proceeding, do it its to get air out of the fruit. If you dont, not only may you have a poorer quality product, but the air may escape instead in the jars while the jars are being processed, carry sticky liquid up and over the rim, and prevent a seal.
All jars of home-canned pie filling must be heat processed to be shelf stable, no exceptions, even if the lid seems to have sealed on its own. Otherwise, freeze in straight-sided jars or other containers.
All of these recipes are online at the National Center for Home Food Preservation.
Cherry Pie. Skeeze / Pixabay.com / 2014 / CC0 1.0
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Home Canned Pie Fillings
Filed Under: Pie Fillings, Seasonal SummerTagged With: Pie
Pie fillings are a great option for home canning a sudden glut of summer or fall fruit, whether its grown or bought during those few weeks of the year that stores practically pay you to take it off their hands. These jars will provide a year ahead full of instant, delicious, wholesome desserts.
And they arent just for pies. They can also be used as toppings on other desserts such as ice cream, or be used in making Danishes, crumbles and cobbers. Canning them in a few different sized jars gives you maximum flexibility, so that youre only opening exactly how much you need at the time.
Click this link if you want to skip the background pre-amble and just get right to the recipe list for home-canned pie fillings.
Oregon State University Extension Service
Oregon State University Extension Services adds two bits of knowledge to our Clearjel pie filling tool-kit.
The first is that they suggest that where the USDA ClearJel recipes call for water, you may wish to substitute an appropriate juice in the same quantity, for enhanced flavour.
- Apple Pie filling: you can use apple juice instead of the water
- Blueberry Pie Filling: you can use berry or grape juice instead of the water
- Cherry Pie Filling: you can use cherry or berry juice instead of the water
- Peach Pie Filling: you can use orange or apple juice or other light colored fruit juice instead of the water.
Canning author Linda Ziedrich agrees with using juice instead of water:
The Extension instructions also call, strangely, for water1 & frac13 cups of it. Thankfully, the recipe says you can substitute juice for the water. Ziedrich, Linda. Home-canned ClearJel Filling. A Gardeners Table Blog. Posted 7 December 2013. Accessed June 2016.
The second new piece of knowledge from Oregon State is that they suggest making a Blackberry Pie Filling by taking the Cherry Pie Filling recipe, swapping out the cherries and replacing them with a similar volume quantity of blackberries:
Thats different from Washington State, which bases its Blackberry Pie Filling on the Blueberry recipe. Youd have to try both ways to see which you liked.
Pie filling recipes for home canning as of June 2020 on the Ball web site.
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About The Clearjel Pie Fillings
Clearjel is a white, powdered, modified corn starch thickener that was approved for some applications in tested home canning recipes. For the most part, various home canning professionals have so far used it in pie fillings.
The research work on using Clearjel was done in the first half of the 1980s by Kuhn et al. at the Pennsylvania State Center of Excellence.
1985 news story about the Clearjel pie fillings. Garris, Eleanor L. Home-canned pie filling will carry summer to winter. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: Gettysburg Times. 4 September 1985. Page 6. Click to enlarge.
At the time, there was apparently some anticipation by the researchers that the manufacturers of Clearjel would be making it broadly available commercially, so that it would be easy for consumers to get hold of. That hasnt happened. Thankfully, though, thanks to the Internet coming along, its now easily procured in bulk at relatively low cost from Amazon, etc. Many local bulk stores also carry it. You just need to plan ahead to have it on hand, if you have a recipe you plan to use it for.
Price Disclaimer
Heres what Washington State University Extension says about Clearjel,
Note: the Apple, Blueberry and Peach Clearjel Pie Fillings all call for 3 ½ cups of fruit per litre / quart jar. The Cherry Pie Clearjel Filling is the odd man out, calling for 3 & frac13 cups of fruit, for some reason.
For more information on Clearjel® in general, see our page dedicated to Clearjel.
Where To Buy Huckleberries In Stores
As spring winds down and summer starts to heat up that most famous of culinary berry seasons is almost upon us: yes, dear friends, the huckleberries are almost ripe and ready to be plucked. Soon the bears will be heading above sea level to find those delicious little fruits that only seem to grow properly at altitudes ranging from 2000 feet above sea level to 8000 feet above sea level, and they love acidic rich volcanic soil better than anywhere else.
That is why the best huckleberries are found in the northwestern United States in states like Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. And, of course, Canadians know that British Columbia is a great source of huckleberries, too.
But where can you buy these delicious, healthy berries? If you live outside the Great Northwest youll find that your local stores and restaurants rarely if ever carry huckleberry products.
You may have come here from our Huckleberry Wild website, in which case you know we list a number of stores and companies that sell huckleberry products. But truth be told if you want to buy huckleberries and cannot make it to a store or restaurant that sells them, you can just .
If you are traveling in the northwest the Huckleberry Biz Website has written about some of the local huckleberry festivals many towns hold every year. These are not huge Superbowl-quality events but youll enjoy the taste of local huckleberry products and experience the hospitality of downhome folks.
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How To Make Fresh Blueberry Pie Filling
Alrighty then. Heres how it goes down
Youre going to start with a slurry kind of mixture. This is your sweetener and thickening. Its cornstarch and water and sugar and a pinch of salt.
Stir it over medium heat until its fully combined. Its a little like making a simple syrup. You dont need it to boil, just heat it until everything is nicely dissolved. The heat just gives the sugar a little hand with that.
Then, add your fresh blueberries, but dont add all of them. We only need 4 out of the 6 cups of the berries for this step. Reserve the rest.
Now youre going to bring that mixture to a boil and let the thickeners do their work. Cook it and stir it until is thick and bubbly. This will only take a few minutes.
Once its thickened, remove it from the heat. Now its time for additional flavor and texture.
You know a shot of citrus brings wonderful freshness to cooked fruit, so were going to add some lemon zest and some lemon juice.
Just a reminderalways remember to zest your lemons before juicing. Zesting a cut lemon is much more difficult and definitely less safe since you have less lemon to hold on to.
Thenheres where the amazing texture comes inadd the rest of the fresh blueberries. Stir them in until theyre well combined and coated with all that thick syrupy goodness.
I know. It seriously sounds like a nothing burger. But that little addition of fresh blueberries is a serious game changer.
What did I use this delicious filling for?
What Is A Huckleberry
A huckleberry is a common name for small wild berries that sometimes look like blueberries. The word huckleberry appears to be an American word derived originally from hurtle-berry, a corruption of the Saxon heart-berg or the harts berry. Huckleberries range from deep red to purple in color. Theres a ton of range of taste, habitat and appearance because there are over 30 species in North America that people generally refer to as huckleberries. Out of the 7 species that occur in Montana, only two are commonly found in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem! To complicate things even further, many of these species classifications are in dispute. The Globe Huckleberry and Mountain Huckleberry are considered the same species by the USDA.For the purposes of this article, well focus on the mountain huckleberry, which if youre harvesting huckleberries in Montana or purchasing huckleberry products, thats what youre probably dealing with!
Shown here is an example of reddish huckleberries. Huckleberries range from red to blue. Image courtesy of MTPR.
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Where Can I Find Huckleberries
As someone visiting Montana from California, I had so many questions about huckleberries! The first of which was where to find them. From what I understand, they grow best in partially shady areas with acidic soil and can be found across the northern United States and Canada in places like Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Michigan, New York, and even parts of Northern California.
The season for picking huckleberries is typically mid-July to September, although it can vary from year to year depending on lots of environmental factors like rainfall and heat.
While we never had any luck finding them in the wild, we found some alternatives that worked while we were there and I have a few ideas for anybody who doesn’t live in huckleberry country .
What Does A Huckleberry Taste Like
What does a huckleberry taste like? Well, it really depends on the plant and ripeness of the fruit. The tastes range from tart in the red berries to sweet in the more purple berries. Huckleberries often have small hard seeds that can add bitterness to them as well. These seeds are safe to eat and dont need to be removed or anything like that.
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