Monday 12 January 2015

Carrots!

After canning all those apples (and still having a ton left over for just eating), my next project is carrots. This year was pretty good for the carrots, I grew different coloured ones: purple skinned with orange interior, orange, yellow and white. After eating lots fresh, I figured I could try canning some as well.





I feel a lot of nutritional goodness is in the skin, so I just gave them all a good clean and scrub. I discovered I couldn't scrub too hard with the purple ones, otherwise the purple comes off! (Next season I plan on growing purple carrots that are purple all the way through). There were also some neato mutant carrots that looked like they were legs:



I figured carrots, much like when making pickles, would be pretty basic: make the brine, add your seasoning to the jars, etc., which is pretty much how it turned out. I wanted to do sticks of carrots so that the different colours would be highly visible and hopefully keep some crunch to them. I perused my various canning books (and the internet of course), and this is what I came up with.

Pickled Carrots

6 pounds of carrots, cleaned and cut up into sticks as uniform as possible
5 cups of water
5 cups white vinegar
3 tablespoons pickling salt
garlic cloves, peeled
spices/herbs to taste

Prepare jars, canner and lids. 

In a big stainless steel pot, bring to a boil the water, vinegar and pickling salt. Turn down heat and let simmer about 5 minutes.

In your (hot) jars, add your spices and one clove of garlic. (Some people will put in dill, but my husband hates dill so that's a no go in our house; I added a half teaspoon each of mustard seed and cumin seed). Pack your carrot sticks wedged in tightly. Ladle in the hot brine to about 1/2 inch from the top, removing any air bubbles and adjusting headspace as necessary. Wipe down rims, place hot discs on jars and screw down with lid until fingertip tight. 

Place jars into boiling canner and once the water has come back to a boil, cover with lid and time it for 7 minutes. After 7 minutes remove lid, turn off heat and let sit for 5 minutes. Place jars on the counter on a towel and cover with another towel and let sit for about a day undisturbed before putting away.

I ended up with about 8 jars of carroty goodness. They ended up having a bit of a crunch which is quite nice. I think if I were to do it again I might add some curry powder to the brine which would taste pretty darn good.





I don't have much canning left to do, I might do some more hot pepper jelly and I definitely need to put in smaller jars the Rumtopf I made this year to hand out. Will let you know how it turns out!


 

2 comments:

  1. Sounds awesome.
    I wonder how they would turn out using white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar - that would be a yummy experiment. Or maybe canning them with hot peppers and make fire-cracker carrots. I want to do more canning, but we never seem to have any time ... working sucks ...

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  2. Sam, we can always get together sometime and do a canning day; I did one last year with the girls for pickles. Right up there with a sausage making day :)

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