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.
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 🙂
Note: avoid using any plastic or wood cooking utensils for this — the berries will stain!
Read the captions for my step-by-step process.
2 quarts of berries into the pot with two cups of water.Jacob graciously offered to crush the berries while they simmered.While Jacob crushed berries, I zested one lemon’s worth of peel straight into the mixture. Use the same lemon for lemon juice later in the recipe.My new Foley food mill! This is a bigger, stainless steel version of the one my grandmother and mother used to have.After simmering the berries, zest and 2 c. of water for about 5 minutes, turn the mixture into the food mill over another pot. Process the berry mixture through the mill until the skins are all that’s left. This is stage 1 of the straining…This is my setup for stage 2: a quadruple layer of cheesecloth clothespinned to a colander suspended over a large bowl. If you have a jelly bag, that will work for this also.This is where I learned that this is a SLOW process. I didn’t realize that you should allow TWO HOURS for the mixture to drip through the cheesecloth. I tried to hurry things along by pressing through the mixture with a spoon. I got about 3 cups of syrup after all the straining was complete. If I had allowed the full two hours, I might have gotten closer to 4 cups.When the berry mixture has about 30 minutes worth of dripping left, get the syrup started: 4 c. water and 3 c. sugar. Bring this to a hard boil and let it boil for about 20 minutes. If you have a candy thermometer, let it get to 225F. If you don’t have one, use the cold water technique to cook the mixture to the “thread stage”: a drop of this mixture will thread when dropped into cold water. This is 220-235F, learn more about boiled sugar science through the Exploratorium’s website.Pour the strained berry mixture into the boiling sugar water. Bring this to a boil for one more minute, then add 2 Tbsp. of fresh lemon juice.Ladle into prepared canning jars to within 1/2″ of the top. Lid and band the jars. The pot on the far left is what I chose to use for the few jars this would yield. Ordinarily I would use my bigger canning pot.Process jars in a boiling water canner for 10 minutes. Since I only had 3 jars, a large soup pot sufficed.And there you go. I canned three pints and had about 4 oz. left over that went into my salad dressing cruet. It can be kept in the fridge.
