Last night, I took on the adventure of pickling some beets, thinking that it all seemed pretty easy and straightforward…shouldn’t take too long (cursed).
The process begins with preparing the beets:
A mess of beets
Boiling beets
A good scrubbing under some cold water. What I neglected to read was that these guys had to be boiled for 20-40 minutes…ok. I’ve time. So, let’s boil them.
Meanwhile, I made my pickling liquid. I had to have onions in the mix.
Pickling liquid
Once the beets were soft, I drained them and rinsed them under cold, running water per Ball’s Book of Canning’s instructions…and “slipped the skins”…which I hadn’t done before, but after boiling beets, just running your fingers over the exterior beet causes the skins to “slip” right off. Very easy! Then I sliced instead of quartered.
Ready to pickle!!
Such pretty colors! Golden, Red Ace, Merlin and Chioggia beets.
The sliced beets got added to the pickling liquid and brought to a boil. Then hot jars were packed with beets and liquid (some got whole cloves per another recipe) then processed.
After processing, the jars were allowed to cool. Here’s the line up:
Good morning pickled beets!
So, my hour and a half long project really was more like 3 1/2 to 4 hours long. Such is how it goes when I think something will be “easy.” Honestly, though, it WAS easy and fun….and delicious (I sampled a few pieces while packing the jars)….I just need to be sure to read the sidebars to recipes for better time estimations! :)
Filed under: Canning, Cooking, Farm, Food, Fun, Recipes Tagged: Ball's Book of Canning, beets, canning, Deliciousness, Farm, food, Fun, Good eats, hot water processing, pickled beets, pickling, recipe
