Borscht

After making the 10 jars of pickled beets I still had a ton of beets left over. I decided to make some Borscht! Now I make Borscht a little differently. My recipe is basically Beets, Water, Vinegar, Salt, Garlic and sometimes Cloves. I'd like to tell you the proportions but I really don't know, I just go by taste.

To prepare the beets you need to peel them, which is so much harder and messier than peeling them after they are boiled, but you need them clean as you are going to keep the water for the soup base. After the beets have boiled for 30 or so minute (until they start to get tender), I pull them out and let them cool for a little bit. Once the beets can be handled now it's time to start Shredding them. Shredding takes a while but to me it makes all the difference in the taste and texture of the soup.

Ok, now the beets are shredded, transfer them back into the soup base add vinegar 1/2 a cup to start, 4 cloves of garlic and some salt. Simmer the soup on low-med for another 15-20 minutes to allow the flavors to mix in.

I ended up making three different batches of Borscht, canning them into 7 Jars. Then I found out that "Unlike fruits and tomatoes, soup is a low-acid food and cannot be safely preserved using the boiling water bath method". I either need to find a couple people who like Borscht or I'll be eating a lot of Beet soup in the coming weeks... 

Pickled Beets

After my first attempt at canning was pretty successful I figure that I could do it again. Its early August and the St Jacobs market is full of Pickles, Dill, Beets, Peaches and all kinds of other goodness.

Step Number 1 – Buy all the ingredients. Beets, pickling salt, vinegar, garlic and cloves.

Step Number 2 – Carry it to the car… The bag was like 40 lbs! Now 40 lbs isn’t that heavy until you have to carry it about half a kilometer away. That sucked…

Now that I have all the ingredients at home it’s time to get started. I pulled out all the jars and filled up my giant pot with water to start it boiling. I put the 15 mason jars into the dishwasher on sanitize. While the jars were sanitizing I started with boiling the beets. The Beets boiled for about 30 minutes, then I pulled them out, pilled them (they pill so easily once boiled) and chopped them up. I prepared the brine but between the Beets and Brine it was only enough to fill up two jars…. Oh man, this is going to take forever…

I boiled up the next batch, made the brine and filled up 3 jars this time. The next batch was 2 jars, then on to the last batch, 3 more jars. After what seemed like forever I finally completed 10 jars of pickled Beets.

2013/11/14 Update - This was a very early post so I didn't list all my ingredients or the process I used to make the beets. I used a couple of different recipes (Batches) but the one I want to comment on right now is the Batch I made were I left the cloves in. BAD IDEA! don't leave the cloves in! Recipes tell you to pull the cloves out for a reason and that reason is because if you don't pull them out then your beets will end up tasting like cloves... Luckily for me this mean only one lost jar but it was a learning experience. And as an FYI, the other jars I have opens have been really good! One or two have been a little bit on the vinegary side but my sister likes them that way so when I come across those ones, I just give those ones to her :)