Everyone understands that freezing fruits and berries is the best way to preserve their valuable qualities. However, not everyone has the opportunity to purchase a separate freezer to place a rich harvest in it. No problem! Canned fruits, although they lose part of the beneficial substances during heat treatment, do not require special storage conditions. They will help to diversify the winter table and are rightfully considered the most delicious home-made preparations.
Sweet preservation includes juices, compotes, preserves, jellies, jams, jam, jam and other processing methods. We will consider the features of cooking the most popular blanks and talk about their benefits.
Is there any benefit in fruit and berry preservation
Our grandmothers did not question the benefits of homemade preserves and compotes. They fed and watered their grandchildren, and the children went full, rosy and healthy. With the advent of numerous diets, the habit of counting calories and reading the composition of products, many have thought: is there any benefit in canned fruits and berries?
Reviews on the Web in this regard are extremely contradictory. However, most housewives agree that their conservation is one hundred times more useful than the dubious freshness of berries and fruits presented in stores, especially in winter.
And it’s pure truth. Imagine: fruits were grown using chemistry, harvested in summer and early autumn, storage methods used were not always safe. What good was left in such fruits by mid-winter? So, you don’t need to be a biologist to understand: your canned strawberries, cherries or apples are much more useful than conditionally fresh, glossy fruits from a supermarket without a single wormhole. And there is scientific evidence for this.
We preserve vegetables, fruits and berries and often do not know about their benefits. And she is doubtless:
- freshly picked fruits lose only 30% of their beneficial properties during heat treatment;
- stewed fruit and preserves - a storehouse of fiber and pectin, necessary for normal digestion and reduce bad cholesterol;
- when boiling fruits, calcium, magnesium, beta-carotene and vitamin E are not destroyed;
- the concentration of the coloring pigment lycopene, which prolongs the youthfulness of the skin, significantly increases with canning;
- fruits that have undergone proper heat treatment do not contain harmful microorganisms.
But you need to remember: when we can preserve berries and fruits, the preparatory stage is no less important than the process of preparing winter preparations.
Features of home preservation
Any fruits under the influence of humidity and elevated temperature begin to deteriorate. The reason for this is the intensive development of microorganisms that exist due to plant tissues and cause fermentation processes. Therefore, most berries (strawberries, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries), as well as ripe fruits, must be processed as quickly as possible after collection or purchase, following simple recommendations:
- Do not ignore the thoroughness of washing the fruit: not only contaminants, but also the remains of the preparations used in the cultivation are removed from their peel;
- washed fruits and berries must be dried to eliminate water as much as possible;
- at the sorting stage, select fruits that are the same in size, degree of maturity and color;
- if possible, use stainless steel knives to cut fruit;
- do not exclude blanching (quick treatment with boiling water followed by cooling) - it reduces the oxidation process that destroys vitamins, improves the color, taste and smell of fruits;
- sterilize jars - heating at t 100 ° C destroys pathogens;
- for cooking fruits and berries, take a container of stainless steel.
Now consider the features of popular methods of cooking canned fruits and berries.
Compote
Tasty, sweet, rich compote is a favorite among homemade products. It is believed that in this form, fruits and berries better retain their beneficial qualities.
The most interesting thing is to preserve allsorts. If fruit, then, for example, from apples, peaches, oranges and grapes. If berry - from raspberries, currants and gooseberries. In both cases, a three-liter jar will need 300-400 g of sugar, 1.5 liters of water and a pinch of citric acid. The number of fruits and berries is arbitrary, but usually the jar is filled by 1/3. The berries are poured with boiling syrup and rolled immediately, and for fruits they use double boiling.
Jam
Every housewife knows that the ratio of sugar to fruit in jam depends on the acidity of the latter and can reach a ratio of 2: 1. Jam recipes are many. We will not list them, but give some tips on cooking:
- perishable berries (raspberries or strawberries) are filled with sugar and left in a cool place for 10-12 hours until the juice is formed, and then sent to the stove;
- so that the berries and fruits do not wrinkle, the berries are cooked in several stages;
- readiness is usually checked in the old-fashioned way: if a drop keeps its shape, the process can be completed.
Canned fruits in the form of jam and its varieties - jam, confiture and jam - should be stored in hermetically sealed containers, and not in glass coffee jars with plastic lids.
Juice
Homemade fruit and berry and vegetable juices are much more useful than their store counterparts, because they are completely natural. There are 2 main ways of making juices:
- without sterilization with the addition of sugar (100 g / 1 l of squeezed juice): the liquid is brought to a boil and immediately poured into sterilized bottles;
- sugar free: boiling juice is poured into containers, sterilized for 10-15 minutes and rolled up.
The preservative is citric acid, taken at the tip of the knife.
Juices can be from one type of fruit or berries and are difficult to compose, transparent and with pulp, but in any case concentrated and very tasty.
Jelly
Fruits rich in pectin are suitable for making jelly: currants, gooseberries, oranges, tangerines, kiwi, sour apples, blueberries or cranberries. It is better to take slightly unripe fruits: in mature and overripe, the amount of gelling substance decreases sharply. The work algorithm is extremely simple:
- in 1 kg of berries add 50 g of water, heat and rub through a fine sieve until juice is obtained;
- skip the fruits through a juicer; 1 liter of juice will need 1 kg of sugar;
- as an additional gelling component per 1 liter of liquid, you can add 5 g of dry pectin or 15 g of agar-agar;
- boil jelly until tender, carefully removing the foam.
A drop does not spread - the jelly is ready.
A very tasty and spicy dessert is obtained with a combination of various fruits and berries.
And now a few recommendations on how to properly store homemade preparations, so as not to harm health.
Storage rules
Even during excavations of the tomb of Tutankhamun, hermetically sealed clay vessels were discovered in which archaeologists found the remains of canned fruit. And this means that a thousand years BC. e. people already knew how to harvest fruits and, for sure, appreciated their taste and benefits.
Ancient Egypt had its own ways of storing compotes, but we are interested in modern city apartments, which often do not have a loggia or a glazed balcony. In fairness it’s worth saying: the recommended temperature for storing blanks is from 0 to + 15 ° C. But, as the hostesses noted in the reviews on the forums, their preserves and compotes are great in pantries, cabinets and under sofas. The same goes for marinades. Yes, there are rare cases of botulism, but they relate mainly to mushroom poisoning.
Also, lovers of home preservation note that fermented jam, cloudy compote and other spoiled billets have to be thrown away, and rightly so. We do not eat rotten fruit, so why take the risk by removing the top layer of mold under the lid and believing that the rest of the jam is completely edible?
In fact, the pores of molds spread throughout the sweet mass and, according to scientists, the use of such jam can trigger the development of oncology. This is perhaps the only harm from canned fruit, except for the indefatigable eating of sugar-containing products, even cooked in accordance with all the rules.