Join Chef Jayson inside Lynette Zang’s Kitchen as he creates some savory sauces for canning. The focus on food preservation aligns with the idea of being prepared and having access to homemade, quality ingredients at any time. Get ready to unleash your inner chef and up your kitchen game. 🍝🍷🍓
CHAPTERS:
0:00 What’s in Store?
1:26 Ingredients
6:43 Mulberries
8:47 Arrabbiata & Yellow Marinara
13:32 Blending Mulberries
23:22 Yellow Marinara
28:14 Mulberry: Taste Testing & Canning
35:25 Arrabbiata: Taste Testing & Canning
42:05 Yellow Marinara: Taste Testing & Canning
48:32 Surinam Cherries
51:16 Thrivers Community
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
If you think that the world is headed in a direction that makes you a bit concerned for the future, and you’d like to be as self-sufficient and independent as possible, then you’ve come to the right place. My name is Lynette Zang. Now it’s time to go Beyond Gold and Silver.
All right. Hey there. Welcome back to Lynette’s Kitchen. We’ve got a couple different kinds of tomatoes you can see here. These are little orange cherry tomatoes. We’ve got regular red cherry tomatoes. These are surinum cherries. There’s two different kinds of cherries here on the property, Barbados and surinum. So I’m gonna show you what I’m gonna do. Oh, we also have some Pakistani mulberries here. And that’s some carrots and celery that we’re going to use to make marinara. So we’re gonna do a yellow marinara from these tomatoes. We are gonna do an arrabbiata sauce, which is a spicy Italian tomato sauce from these ones. We are going to bread and butter pickle these cherries, so like a sweet pickle. And then we are gonna turn these mulberries into a coolee and I’ll explain what a coolee is as we’re starting. So let’s get our sauces started. Let’s get the things that are cooking going.
So the first thing that we need to do, actually, let’s just set that down, is give our tomatoes a wash. So I’ve already pulled off all the stems and you can see there are a few in there that aren’t like totally ripe. That’s all right. We’re gonna add some tomato paste to give it our a nice color. And cherry tomatoes are great to use for this sauce because in my experience, the arrabbiata sauce is a little bit chunkier. It’s kind of a more rustic sauce, and you can blend it all the way down to like a marinara consistency too. But I like the, the chunk factor and the fact that these we had a pretty mild winter. So the skins on these are actually really thin. You know, it’s a lot of people you don’t, usually you take off the tomato skins when you’re making sauces, but we don’t gotta worry about it. So let’s toss these in a pan or in a sauce pot here. So we’ll get those in there. And I’m just gonna kind of leave these, let the bottom ones start heating up. They’ll get a little soft. And then I am going to use my potato masher. To mash ’em up a little bit once it gets there. Cool. So while that’s going let’s grab another pot and get our marinara going. Alright, so we’ve got our, our red cherry tomatoes on for our arrabbiata. And now we’re gonna work on our yellow marinara. Or you know, it’s orange, but it comes out yellow. So we just need to dice an onion. Pretty small pieces, ’cause you want these to just kind of melt into the sauce. And what we’re gonna do is sweat these off, meaning not really any color on them. ’cause If we add color to them, that’s gonna add color to the sauce. And we don’t want brown. ’cause That’s the color that we’re gonna get if we brown these off, right? So we just wanna sweat ’em out and sweating ’em out. What it does is it opens the channels that all the water in the onion where they’re kept and it allows them to come out. So we start getting that actual like onion juice and onion flavor. So we’re just gonna go in there on kind of a medium high heat. Remember we don’t, if you go on high, you’re gonna brown them. And we’re gonna put a bunch of olive oil in there. And I actually have some garlic oil. The last time I made garlic confit, I saved the oil. There’s the actual garlic confit. So we’re gonna use some of this oil to give it a little more garlic flavor without adding a ton of garlic. So now you can hear our cherry tomatoes going over here. So I’m gonna give ’em a quick stir. And you can already see these ones on the bottom are, some of them are starting to mash up and that’s good. That’s what we want. And you can see as we’re pressing it down, now the juice is coming out and the juice is now gonna heat up and help it cook even faster. Oh man, it already smells fantastic. So when we get this sauce going, I’m gonna show you an old school nana trick. And a lot of sauces, they add carrot, they add celery. You know, those are two of the three mirepoix, which is the base of most soups, onion, celery, carrot. You add those three things in pretty much equal amounts and you have a great base. You add beef or chicken to that. Now you’ve got a wonderful chicken or beef stock. So the idea is to impart that flavor into our sauce. But I don’t want a bunch of celery or carrots actually in the sauce. So that’s why we have these. So we’re gonna throw these in actually whole. And then once we are our sauce is done cooking, then we will fish these out. And so the, you let it boil long enough, the flavor is gonna come out of the celery and come out of the carrots and impart itself into the liquid in the, in the sauce. And that’s really what we want.
And I think one of the reasons people add carrots is so they don’t have to add sugar. There’s a balance in the acid of the tomatoes, and you want a little bit of sugar to help balance that acid. Otherwise you just have a very tart sauce. It kind of just hits you up in the front and tastes like you’re, it’s very lemony, citric, acidy. And it kind of numbs your tongue after a while. So a little bit of sugar, you’ve got sugar coming from your onions, you have sugar coming from your carrots, and you have a little bit of bitterness coming from the celery. And all of those things combined in the right proportions will give you a really nice, really nice sauce. All right. So you can see these onions are starting to sweat. And when you say sweat, it means translucent. Like they’re starting to go a little bit clear, you can see. So we’ll let these go for about another five minutes or so. And then we will add our tomatoes.
So these are mulberries. Mulberries are, they only come out like about three weeks a year. It’s not a long harvest. The fruits form. And then they ripen very quickly and then they fall off the tree really quickly. In fact, an old method of harvesting is like olives where they will put a big sheet or a blanket underneath the tree and then somebody just shakes the tree and everything that is ripe will fall off. And that’s the cool thing about mulberries. They ripen so fast. So they are seedy. You can see each one like a, like a blueberry or a raspberry. There’s a lot of these little nodes there. And so what we want to do is make a coolee. And a coolee is a fancy uncooked. It’s not a jam, it’s not quite a syrup. It’s like right in the middle. Traditionally, or the way I learned how to make it was doing raspberry coolee for a traditional English afternoon tea. You have it with scones and clotted cream or a little butter. And it’s just a nice, it spreads a lot easier than jam. You know, it’s almost it’s like a sauce, a very, very thick sauce. So there’s a couple ways that you can thicken it up. You can either put it on the stove and cook it down. Traditionally it is it’s a puree is like if I took these and just blended ’em up and presented it. This is a puree. A coolee is passed through a screen. So we have what’s called a China hat personally think it needs a new name. So I’m just gonna call it a cone filter. So the cone filter, you can see how fine that mesh is. So we’re gonna puree the mulberries and then push that puree through this mesh. And what that’s gonna do is break down the little tiny pieces as small as we could possibly get ’em to create a very smooth sauce.
Our onions are ready. You can see now they are very translucent here. That’s like exactly what we’re going for. So now we can dump our tomatoes in there. Oh, we got a rogue red one there. There you go. So now that that is going we’ll do the same thing that we did for the red ones. And now you can see that these are all starting to split and come apart and now they just kind of mush by themselves. And that’s, that’s great. So at this point we are gonna add the thing that really makes it an arrabbiata. As far as, from what I understand, arrabbiata means spicy or a spicy version of. So if you had like broccoli, arrabbiata or arrabbiati, I think it is you would have spicy broccoli. So the spicy red chili flakes, there we go. So I’m gonna add a good tablespoon. It’s about a tablespoon. I’ve measured, this is my hand. You measure your hand, see how much a tablespoon is. There we go. And then we’re gonna throw in some garlic. That’s literally it. Now you’ve gotta do some salt of course, probably about a, maybe a half a tablespoon, just over a teaspoon. And we are gonna turn this down and let it cook uncovered because we want some of this juice here to cook off. Now I can hear my my yellow going over here. So I’m gonna get these mushed. I am gonna throw in my celery and like maybe three or four carrots, maybe four or five. And then I’m gonna add a little bit of water to this. ’cause Remember we can always cook the water off. If you don’t have enough water, you stand the chance of burning it on the bottom. Otherwise, if you wanna stand there for an hour and cook it. So I’m gonna add maybe, let’s see, about a half a cup of water. That’s about a half a cup. We’ll go a little bit more. There we go. Cool. That’s it. So we’ll let that come up to temperature and just kind of do its thing. This is doing its thing over here. Then you see all this scum that is forming on the top. That’s fine. They’re not going to, it’s not gonna kill you if you eat it. But we want to try to scrape that off if we can. Get some salt in there. A little bit of black pepper. This for posterity. Now you notice I haven’t put any other herbs in here. I haven’t put any basil. I haven’t put any thyme or oregano. Not every sauce has a ton of herbs in it. Now the marinara, I’m gonna put a little bit of basil in there. The arrabbiata not putting any other herbs in there. This is like three things. Tomatoes, garlic, red peppers, and then salt and pepper of course. But this looks good, starting to look good. It’s got a nice color. We’re gonna let that go for about 15 minutes or so. And then we’re gonna add some tomato paste. Let it go for a little longer. And you know, every few minutes or so we’re scraping the bottom, making sure none of these tomatoes are settling or burning. And that’s the biggest thing you’ve always heard. You know, stir the sauce, stir the sauce. ’cause Once it gets thick, once this water starts to evaporate then we’re gonna have a bigger problem of it sticking to the bottom and burning. So this stage you don’t have to pay attention as much, but once it does start losing all that water weight, then we’re gonna have to check it in a little bit more. So let’s get our mulberries going.
So the mulberries, we are gonna puree. And the first thing we have to do is take out some of those big stems. It’s not super important you get every little bit of stem out ’cause we are gonna puree it. But these big kind of ends right here. We definitely want to at least pull those off. But this is how I do it. And it is a little messy. So I would get a cloth or a napkin or a piece of foil or just something to protect your area. ’cause I still have mulberry stains all over my cutting board. You can see right there . So what I do is I pinch it in the middle and then you can kind of like slide it off there, that pinch in the middle. Oh see that one I pinched a little too hard. But like I said, it’s not detrimental. You get every little piece of stem outta here.
Mulberries are one of those things. It’s like this little it’s got that good berry backbeat, but it kind of has this pear, citrus flavor. And there’s a lot of different types of mulberries. But the Pakistani, this is the biggest variety I think out there. We have another mulberry, I think Lindsey called it a, a weeping mulberry. I don’t think that’s the actual name. But the fruit is a lot smaller, a lot, lot smaller. I mean like thumbnail size compared to these, you know, pinky size. Oh, here you go. So these are the, these are the little ones compared to that. And they’re good. They are good. But you can see they’re a lot darker. They’re almost black compared to like the purple of like even that one you could still see the purple hue. But yeah, delicious. And the little ones who, I mean they barely have a stem, so you can just toss ’em in there.
All right, just giving our tomatoes a stir, giving our tomatoes over here, stir with my marinara. Usually only cook it for about 30 minutes. Doesn’t need that much longer. I mean, marinara is really supposed to be a quick sauce, not an all day. You know, you have a jar of canned tomatoes that you brought from your garden and they’re beautiful red, you don’t have to do much to it. ’cause Those tomatoes, a lot of times you’ve already cooked them in canned them, right? So they’re good to go. Just basically an unfiltered tomato sauce so you don’t have to do much to it. Salt little bit of, little bit of basil and you’re good to go.
So we’re
Gonna pull out some basil. Let’s see. We don’t have to use much. I mean that’s like maybe a half a teaspoon. It’s probably good. So we want, with marinara, you want the tomatoes to be the star. So we’re just trying to enhance the flavor of it, not make a basil sauce, You know? Yeah, I mean herbs can. I went to a place the other day and had a chicken sandwich and I swear to God I was just eating in a pile of oregano. And it was frustrating because the chicken itself was juicy and perfectly cooked. But the breading on it, it numbed my tongue. There was so much oregano. It reminded me of a Bob’s Burgers episode where Jimmy Pesto makes a straight up oregano burger in a contest. And they’re like, what’s on it? Jimmy says, A whole bunch of oregano . Oh, I love this sauce. Check out how yellow this is bright yellow. This is already, it looks awesome. That looks good. That looks good. We’ll give it one more scrapy scrape before we move over to the mulberries. So we have pretty much taken out all the stems. I’m not adding anything to these. This is just mulberry. So we’ll just pulse it a couple times and I’m gonna let this go for about 60 seconds or so. Now with the cone filter, it pays to have something tall like this. That way you can, it sits right in there. If you try to set this down on the bottom, it doesn’t really work that well. They do have some that are flat, but I still find it rolls all over the place. So I’m just gonna do it right there.
Second thing you need is a spatula. I might have cranked this up just a little. All right. Oh, so now we have this like gorgeous, gorgeous puree. Look at that color. And we’re just gonna pour all of this into this cone filter. Just like that. Just let it sit for a second and drain. And then we’ll scrape it out. So I’m gonna really scrape the hell out of this inside because these mulberries only come so often and every bite is worth saving. So you can see it’s actually just sitting there. It looks like a liquid, right? That’s how tight this screen is. So now, although you are in the splash zone what you’re we’re doing is we are coming through and we’re pressing against the side and coming up like that. And what’s that? What that’s doing is it’s actually forcing, you can see it right there. It’s forcing it out that sieve. And now we’re starting to get a little bit of liquid flow there. So this is what takes a while. And why of, you know, of course English people have to make everything difficult and fancy. But I will give them that this is awesome . It’s so smooth once it comes out, but it’s just kind of a pain. See it? Mm-Hmm. . And now I’m, you know, scraping, scraping down and you can see as I keep going down, it keeps getting thicker and thicker and thicker. And I’m by the end of it, kind of left with something that looks like that. It’s all kind of dried out in a little dull. But this is from the last batch you can see. That’s like, I actually rinsed this pitcher out a little bit. So I’m gonna add some sugar and this and try to make fruit leather. Fruit leather is just fruit puree and sugar baked at a low temperature. So I’m gonna see if I can, I have some jaggery that we made from our sugar cane, so I’m gonna try it out. And this is the whole thing, like would you think about keeping the leave-in? No dude, would you think about keeping this? No, but I’m gonna try to make, it might be terrible, who knows? But if it works, then now I have like waste waste outta sugar and now I have a new thing. And that’s the idea about sustainable farming, agriculture, sustainable living in general is to figure out all the ways that you can use the little bits and pieces that you have left over. So let’s keep working on this. And you know, I just took that break to get my arm a breather, but it’s almost done. Yeah, now it gets a little messy ’cause you can see, look how little is left in the top here. So we’re gonna keep going until it’s either dry or we just can’t push it through anymore. Super important, unless you want to grab another one of these, rinse this off. You just spent all that work pushing it through the sieve and we have to actually scrape it off the outside. And you don’t want all those chunks that are on your spatula to get into your super smooth puree. So just make sure you rinse it off or grab another one. So I’m just gonna scrape this off on the outside you can actually see this side has, Jesus has a lot more. And that’s, that’s all puree right there. So after all that, it’s about how much I’ve got left. So I’m gonna add this to what I already have. And then I’m gonna actually rinse this thing out with the water that I have.
Alright, now that our coolee, you can see that’s what it looks like. And that’s just the, the fruit, the juice. So we’re gonna add a little bit of sugar to this and put it on the stove and we’re gonna let it go. Maybe 15 minutes. We’re gonna add a little bit of corn starch. You can add potato starch, tapioca starch. The last time I made it, I used cassava flour and it seemed to work pretty well. It did take a little bit of the glossiness away from it, that corn starch uses or the corn starch imparts. But I can’t use corn starch. Like we don’t really do corn in this kitchen, but you can.
So we are gonna take our our marinara off. It’s been about 20 minutes or so, 25 minutes. And you can see like that’s wilted. Those carrots are hiding in here somewhere. There’s one right there. And I can push right through it. I’m not going to, ’cause I don’t want a bunch of carrot pieces in there. But I’m gonna take this over and we are just gonna pull these out. Don’t wanna take too much of the tomato. Get that out. There’s a carrot. Oh, there’s some carrots. You know, this is nana style, meaning, you know, old Italian grandma, you know, they have, they’re such amazing cooks because they have the patience to do these little things. Like in commercial restaurants it’s really hard to do these little details. And that’s why your grandma’s cooking always tasted so much better. Because she put that low. One more rogue carrot. I think we got ’em all. I don’t see any green, I don’t see anything big and orange and chunky. So I think we’re good. Now our next step because we want this smooth, we actually want not like puree smooth tomato paste smooth, but we want this pretty smooth. So we are going to go to our equipment bay and we are gonna pull out our stick blender or immersion blender or whatever you want to call it. I call it the stick blender. I know the technical term is immersion, but there we go. We’re just gonna hit this ’cause we want to kind of break down those skins. But you could see how thin they really are. I mean that’s like almost translucent. Whereas you come across some romas and beef steak tomatoes, the skin is really thick. So here we go. Now the trick is to get that angle so you can actually see all of it moving. See that? And if you do that, pretty much everything gets sucked right underneath your blender. All right, now we’ll cook it down a little bit more. See that? There it goes. I turn this back on, on medium. Beautiful. Check out our our Arrabbiata over there, looks great. So now we are gonna add our tomato paste. Use the best tomato paste you can afford. I promise you, you get the hunts stuff, it’s fine. It’s like a buck a can I get it? If you can spring a couple extra bucks for this stuff, anything from Italy is gonna be superior because they just use superior tomatoes, they have better farming practices. It’s just a better product. And you can actually see these are verified. It’ll always say have that stamp made in Italy. It’s vegan of course. I don’t think they put chicken in here. I hope not. But that’s it. Usually the best stuff that I found comes in tubes like this. So we’re gonna add about two tablespoons. You know, this is the fun part about these tubes. Blo. We’re gonna add about two tablespoons and if you wanna see what I’m gonna squeeze it in. But if you wanna see what two tablespoons looks like, that’s one, that’s two. Most chefs I know have figured out what that, what a tablespoon looks like in their hand. ’cause It’s so much easier to just boom, boom, saves you time in the kitchen.
Now you can, you can hear it’s actually a little bit stuck to the bottom. Listen right there. I think I’m gonna add one more tablespoon of tomato paste. Whoop, we’re gonna let that go for a little bit longer. Our sauce over here, our marinara is gonna cook. So we’re gonna cook some of the water off of that so it becomes a little bit thicker. Same thing with our Arrabbiata.
The next thing we want to do, you know, we will actually, let’s move now in order to activate corn starch, it does need to be heated up. Now the secret with corn starch, whenever you use it, can’t just dump it into hot liquid, you need to add it to a cold liquid first. So what I’m gonna do, I’ve got a little bit of this right, small container, little bit of cold liquid cold, right? We’re gonna add our corn starch in. It’s about a tablespoon. I’m gonna go a little bit more ’cause we don’t have to add all of this. What we’re gonna do is add it, make sure this is mixed really well. ’cause If you don’t mix it, see those little chunks in there, those will come through. They won’t break down in the hot liquid. So you wanna make sure that you are completely mixed down here. And corn starch kind of separates pretty fast. So, so there you go. You’ve got your puke colored slurry and we are gonna just add in about half of this. You see, it doesn’t really change the color of it that much and that’s one of the nice things about corn starch.
Next thing I want to do is we’re gonna can these things but in order to can high acid or to make sure that all of these things are high acid, meaning there’s enough acid in the mix that bacteria isn’t going to form, botulism isn’t going to form. And that we can process it at a lower temperature. 185 degrees compared to pressure canning at 250 degrees. 250 degrees will get rid of any spores that cause botulism. That’s why we have to go that hot. But if it’s high acid botulism can’t live in there. It’s a safety concern. But what we are gonna do is add lemon, lemon vinegar, anything that is going to increase the acidity in your mixture. So I’m gonna stir this real quick.
So check these out. These are, anytime I get like a bag of lemons, I use two or three, but I always have some extra. So I juice them, freeze them, boom. Lemon cube, I mean you use this for cooking, you can do this with stalks, whatever. I have like green curry in there. I have rosemary butter cubes, I have lemon cubes. Like these trays are awesome because it makes it easy to just add flavor when you need to. So I’m gonna drop, I’m one here, I’m gonna drop one here and I’m gonna drop a small one in the mulberry. And for the mulberry it actually adds a really nice flavor. So let’s check this out. You can see I added that corn starch. I’m gonna get another one of these and you can see, look, it’s already thicker. So this is the consistency before. This is the consistency after. And remember, this is warm, so when it cools down, it’s gonna be even thicker. But we’re going to, we want it to be a little bit thicker than that. And a cool trick, I’ll show you ice in a bowl. The idea is that you want to rapidly bring down the temperature of your coolee. You could do this with jam, you could do this with compote. Anything that you’re trying to thicken and you want to know the true thickness of it. Lemme give that a stir real quick.
So side note, this Arrabbiata is at that stage where we’ve really gotta pay attention to it and scrape the bottom every couple of minutes. See how thick it’s getting. Like when you push, you can see the bottom of the pan. So that’s what we’re kind of going for there. All right, so we just put our spoons in here. We want to get ’em nice and cold. Usually you do this five minutes, 10 minutes ahead. So these are, you know, ice cold, dry it off. Do you see how it’s just barely beating up now it’s not even dripping off. So that’s actually pretty good. Look at that. If it wasn’t ready, that would be dripping off. See, you could see that’s a great consistency. It’s just staying where it’s supposed to. It’s not dripping down. It’s not bunched up on the top of my hand, but that’s a great consistency. Nailed it. Mm. And this is without sugar too. This is without sugar. I wanted to do a batch without sugar. Because we do have some people that don’t do sugar in the household. I have a batch with sugar. I have a batch now without sugar. So let’s turn that off. That’s done. We’re just gonna let that cool. And we’re gonna let it cool in the jars is what I meant to say. You know, all my, all my jars are sterilized. Our dishwasher is a monster. So I can sterilize stuff in there. I’m just gonna pour it right in.
You know what I think is a little four ounce, well it’s not quite full, but we’ll just stick that one in the fridge. We want to make sure we wipe off the top just like that. Boom. And then I’m gonna flip this upside down. And what that does is saves me a step of having to heat up a pot of water. We’ve already been cooking this, so any stuff that’s in here since we added the acid, there’s gonna be no mold. There’s gonna be no bacteria, there’s gonna be nothing. We just boiled the hell out of it. Remember? so what this does upside down is it heats up that rubber ring to give it a better seal on the jar. We’ll come back here in an hour. This’ll be cooled down. We’ll flip it over and you’ll hear tink and this’ll actually go down and be ready to set on the shelf. So there you go. Mulberry is done and we’ll just put a lid on or not put a lid on this one yet. But we’ll get a lid ready and we’ll just let this one sit on the back and cool down. Let’s check our sauces over there.
So the Arrabbiata is looking good. Look at that. It’s nice and chunky. But I’m gonna hit about half. I’m gonna just kind of blend up these little, little pieces of garlic. I’m just gonna hit it with the stick blender. All right, I’m just gonna hit these pieces of garlic real quick. Saw one over there. Should have really chopped up my garlic and thrown it in there. But I’m an idiot. You know what I’m doing hitting this garlic is I’m just kind of blending half of the sauce. Now look at that. It’s still kind of chunky and rustic but it’s just a little bit smoother. Looks good to me man. So let’s give it the taste test, see if it needs salt or pepper or anything else like that. Oh dang. You know what it does need? And you know I talked about using carrots for the sugar over in the marinara. This is very acidic. Now it tastes good but it’s got too much of a bite. A little tip about the people are like, oh, well why did you add that lemon? Well the lemon is to make sure it’s acidic enough so we don’t get sick. But I don’t taste lemon. It’s just kind of that tartness. When you cook with lemon juice, the lemon flavor goes away. If you want lemon flavor, wait till the end, don’t cook it out. What we’re doing with the lemon is we’re just using that citric acid that’s in there. So I am gonna add like half a tablespoon, maybe a teaspoon of sugar to this and see if that kind of smooths out that top bright edge. Be right back. Alright, sugar that is about a teaspoon. Doesn’t, you don’t need to lie. You don’t want this to be sweet. Have you ever had a sweet spaghetti sauce? It’s awful. That’s somebody that didn’t know how to balance their sugar with their acid. So just mix that right up and then wait a couple 10 seconds or so to make sure that that sugar’s like melted in there. You don’t want to, I think that’s what ends up happening is people throw a handful of sugar in there, taste it and they’re like, oh, it’s not sweet enough. And then they throw another handful of sugar in there and then the first batch of sugar has already dissolved. They taste it and they’re like, oh, that’s good. And then the second batch of sugar dissolves and then you’ve got like ketchup. It’s not fun. So here we go. I think that this is, I think this is gonna be perfect there.
Oh my god, that’s so much better. It’s crazy how that little bit of sugar just kind of rounds off that jagged bright edge. I like my tomato sauce to still be bright. It should be, especially with cherry tomatoes, you know, they’re a little bit more sour. Not sour tarts, you know, sour, they’d be terrible. But this sauce looks great. Check it out. Still a couple little hunks of garlic in there, but who cares? Nobody’s gonna be too mad. So now what I’m gonna do is I’m actually gonna jar this up. I’m gonna clean off a space here. Invaluable. I don’t know if you have one of these. If you don’t get one, it’s like five bucks. It saves you so much time and hassle. Boom. I am gonna go right to the bottom of that rim ’cause that is eight ounces. You gotta leave at least a half inch room on the top for the sauce to expand as you’re canning it. You can always go back and add a tablespoon or take a tablespoon away. But you know, you don’t wanna mess around with, with pressure and canning and stuff like that. Just do it right the first time. So I will intentionally leave a little extra room in this one
And then carefully, you know, you don’t want it spilling all over the place. Just a little bit more there. Now I think that this one can use another tablespoon or so. We’ve got just the right amount in here. I don’t know if you guys get your jars from somewhere. A lot of the times people use ball or no jars. We get ours from Uline. You can get a pallet of them. They are, they don’t have the ribs and all the on the outside so they’re easier to identify. Like you can see what’s in it a lot easier. You can really see the true color of whatever you’re putting in there. And and I’ve never really had any issues as far as the durability or boiling them or anything like that. And to be honest, I , although I’m not a big gold person outside of holding gold in my hand, I think the gold looks really cool on these. So we’re going to, we’re getting these ready. We’re actually going to can these, ’cause the temperature is a lot lower than that Mulberry. And I don’t know if it is hot enough to
Get that good seal on the bottom, but we’re just gonna get ’em started anyway and look at that. So now we have, what did I say earlier? 40 ounces. This is 40 ounces. Exactly. 40 ounces. These are eight ounce jars. Five of ’em. I’m a maths ain’t too good, but I’m pretty sure that’s 40. Love it when a plan comes together. So these are, these are good to go. We’re gonna set these aside to go into our water bath.
Now we’re gonna check on our marinara and we can move this to the front here. But look at this color. I mean, you don’t really see a lot of tomato sauces like this. This looks like we’ve added saffron or curry or turmeric. Remember this is just tomato and onion and some garlic oil and a little bit of basil. I think this is ready to go. That looks great to me. So now I’m actually, I’m gonna show you the difference. So I just probably need maybe one more jar. There’s probably about 32 ounces in there. So I’m gonna show you what it looks like from, this is pure PUR quilted on the outside. Check it out. So let’s, let’s taste it. Make sure it’s got enough salt. Maybe it, those carrots weren’t enough. We wanna make sure it was enough. So grab a little tasting spoon here. Oh man, that looks good. God, that looks like butternut squash soup. It’s like that bright. I’m glad we tried it. It needs salt. Definitely needs salt. And you know what, we’ll give it a couple cracks of pepper too. Not black pepper. I don’t want like big black. We spend a lot of time making this like nice and yellow. And with the herb I can already see like these little black chunks in there. So let’s use white, white pepper. White pepper is just pepper that’s been ground down to its like most powdery form. Look, you could see it’s still tiny little black flex in there. So it’s same pepper. It’s just like very, very finely ground and a little goes a long way. In fact, I’m gonna put a little bit back. Don’t ever overdo it with the white pepper. It will ruin your dish. Absolutely ruin it. Now let’s try it again. Always use a new tasting spoon. Hold on. I think it does need a tiny little bit of sugar. I hate to say that ’cause I don’t like adding processed sugar. What the hell did I do with it? I mean, I half a teaspoon. Let it sit for a minute. I think that’s good. I think it’s good. You know, it’s not so much a marinara. Now you know what though? It, it, it tastes, it’s got the marinara vibe to it, but it’s just kind of like an unadulterated tomato sauce, which is pretty much what a marinara is. I think if I add a garlic to this, it would give it a little bit more of a depth of flavor. I think I’ll just do it when I’m gonna can these, and when I do pull them out, I’m just gonna add a little bit of garlic to it with whatever I’m doing.
So I’m ready to can these, let’s can ’em, let’s clear all this stuff out. All right, now let’s do our topping off here. Give that one a couple. What’d I say? 32 ounces. So let’s crack on our lids here. Let’s make sure that those rims are wiped off, which I think I did on the last ones. Always use a paper towel. I use a paper towel. It’s just easier Clean rag, brand new rag you can use too. But you just wanna make sure there’s no schmitz on your rag that gets caught in these seams. ’cause Then it won’t give you a proper seal. Or if there is food stuck in that rim cap then it will sit on your shelf and go bad. It’s not fun. So here we go. So remember I said like look at the color. I just like being able to see what’s in there. Unadulterated. This like looks cool if you’re entering it into a county fair or something, but if you’re just putting it on your shelves, this is my favorite way to go. Plus they’re about half the price. Like this jar I think is $2 each. I think these are a $1.20 each. So there you go. Let’s get some lids out. Good to go. Let’s put those over there.
Now the last thing we’re gonna make, and this is probably the easiest one requires very little dishes and time. So these are
Surinam cherries, is that right? Okay. Surinam cherries. So we want to take that little green tuft off, but what we’re gonna do with them is a sweet pickle. So I already had a couple. This is like the first harvest. This is the syrup that I’m using. Oh geez, I still got tomato schmitz left on here. This is the syrup that I’m using. And this is a syrup. This is coriander mustard seed, black peppercorns in a coffee filter just as a pickling device. If you had another pickling device or a nut bag or something like that, you can use that. And this is equal parts four things. Sugar, water, apple cider vinegar, white vinegar, one cup, one cup, one cup, one cup a gallon, a gallon, a gallon, a gallon, a thimble, a thimble of thimble…You get what I’m saying? So it’s equal parts of those four things. And this is a basic bread and butter pickling solution. You don’t even need to add salt to it. So I had some ready to go and I’m gonna just sweet pickle these, these are just gonna sit in this brine. I’m just gonna toss ’em in here. I mean, you don’t even need to do anything. These can sit in the fridge for like a month. That’s the cool part. That one’s a little greasy. We’ll take him out. But you want to take that green part out ’cause it’ll muddy, kind of muddy the liquid And these do have pits in ’em. But these will be awesome on salads. These will be just kind of great by themselves on a charcuterie board. I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of these, but they are a little herby. They have a cherry front and then they kind of have this savory Herby semi-sweet kind of quality. It’s not like a a cherry that you know, and especially a lot of people that are like, think maraschino cherries are natural. . So these should be good to go. I’m just gonna go put ’em in the fridge and let ’em sit. They’ll probably be ready by next week. We can pop ’em out and try it. Boom, boom. Pop our lid on there and we’re done. We’ll get a pot of water on to can our boys here. And and that’s it.
So I hope that was enlightening. You know, we did a lot of stuff here today. You can see how kind of trash the kitchen. But we did two tomato sauce preparations. One, two, we did a mulberry preparation. Three we did a cherry preparation. That’s four. And I feel like I’m missing one. Am I missing one? No, that’s it. Yeah. So we did four preparations today. So anyway, we were just wanted to show you, and this is kind of a precursor hopefully when you see these videos or you join us live on Thrivers or wherever you find us. The idea behind everything that we did today is preservation, it’s food preservation. How do you maximize what you’re doing out there for your kitchen? So we have, look at this. We have almost a case 10 jars from what we did in that couple of hours. We have 10 jars of usable food. This is, oh, I move this, these are tomato sauces, single serving for spaghetti or whatever. Two people, I got two jars. You know, like that’s, that’s all it takes. And it makes you feel so much better when you just, oh dude, I don’t even need to go to the store. I got pasta and I got my homemade sauce and I’ve got meatballs in the freezer that I made a big batch of a couple weeks ago. You’re ready to go. And that’s one of the things I think is hard about kitchens or people maybe are in intimidated or apprehensive about cooking is it’s just a lot of work at once. You gotta set up, you gotta cook and then you gotta clean and cleaning’s usually the thing that people hate most. So I know I, I’m not a big fan, but that’s why if you’re gonna do it, do it in big batches. You’re only cleaning whether you do a small batch or a big batch, you’re still cleaning, right? So do as many as you possibly can so you only have to jack up the kitchen once. Cool. So we’re going to put a pot of water on and I guess I’ll see you later.
