Canning Apricots

Friday Afternoon Brad picked up 20 pounds of peaches and 20 pounds of tomatoes.  Since Apricots are at the end of their growing season, we got 40 pounds of apricots free! We have been munching on them; however, there is no way that we can eat them before they go bad so I've been looking up recipes for canning.  The first box of Apricots were canned Friday night.  I tried two different syrup recipes: one with sugar and another with honey.  I have the process listed below.

One of the great things about canning Apricots is that they can be cold packed.  Cold packing allows the fruit to be placed into the jars without cooking them first.  I love this method because it is one less step to complete.

For the syrup I tried two different mixtures:

• 2 cups sugar with 4 cups water
• 1 1/2 cups honey with 4 cups water

To make the syrup simply dissolve the sugar/honey into the water and boil.

Wash the apricots, slice in half and remove the pits, but leave the skin.  Fill quart sized jars with the apricot halves.  TIP: place all halves in the jars with the cut edge facing downwards - this will allow more fruit to fit into the jar.

Once the jars are full, fill with the boiling syrup leaving 1/2 inch headspace.  Screw on the lids and process in a hot water bath canner for 25 minutes.  If these apricots had been hot packed (i.e. cooked before packing) then they would not float to the top like this.  I'm not canning for looks so I'm sticking with the cold pack.

There are going to be a lot of canning recipes in the coming days as currently in my garage there are:

• 20 more pounds of Apricots
• 40 pounds of Peaches (we found a clearance box at Carpinitos yesterday)
• 20 pounds of Tomatoes
• 10 pounds of blueberries
• Giant bag of Basil
• And a Fig Tree that has been producing fruit like crazy

Stay tuned to see recipes that I make with each of these items!

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