Today I made blueberry syrup. This was a request from Jacob, who loves the taste of blueberries but doesn’t care for the texture of the skins or the seeds.
It looks strange in a jar, I know, but I can keep it in the pantry this way. I have a Good Seasons dressing cruet that can hold the current syrup in the fridge for day-to-day use.
The recipe I used was mainly from the Ball Blue Book canning guide and I chose it because it called for two quarts of blueberries, which was exactly how much I had in the freezer. Just ignore the part of boiling the sugar water to 260 degrees, that doesn’t seem right to me…that’s “hard ball” candy stage so I only boiled to 225F, which is syrup stage.
In terms of the technique, this blog post from Simple Bites fits the bill for describing the steps.
While canning foods is old hat for me — I’d been doing it since canning homemade pasta sauce from homegrown Ohio tomatoes in 2001 — boiling sugar and double-straining berry juice, such as what you might do for making jelly, were new techniques for me. I didn’t realize how SLOW straining berry juice would be, nor did I realize how long it would take to boil down the sugar water to syrup stage. Allow 2 hours for straining the berries and about 30 minutes for boiling down the sugar enough to make the syrup.
Now that I know this, I can be sure to multi-task during those stages 🙂
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