Blueberries Canned!

Success! Monday night I rushed home from work after stopping to buy 5 lbs. of sugar, logged onto the Internet to check out how to can blueberries and called my friend Shauna to have her on stand-by to answer any "help me" questions. Shauna and her mother-in-law are Queens of Canning (I nearly said "Queens of the Can" but that wouldn't be accurate nor flattering).

I was going to can my blueberry pie filling, but there were technicality issues with using tapioca or cornstarch as the thickening agent. I didn't want to mess with any technicality issues on my first experience, thinking it's best to keep it simple. pickyourown.org

Here is a simplified version of what I had to do, but please check out knowledgeable websites if you want to do this at home. There are a lot of safety precautions associated with canning.

1) First, I had to clean all the bottles and lids in hot soapy water.
2) Next, I sorted, cleaned and removed any stems of 2 gallons of blueberries (took a millennium). 3) Then I calculated my sugar and water ratio for the syrup using the handy dandy table on the pick-your-own website (for 7 quarts, I did 12 cups of water to 2.5 cups of sugar-light syrup).
4) Began heating the syrup to near boiling.
5) Added my 2 TBSP lemon juice to each of the jars.
6) Packed in the berries and heated the jars in very warm water so that when I poured the hot syrup into the jars, they didn't crack.
7) Tighten the lids semi-tight, but not very tight
8) Steamed the jars on a fruit steamer for 20 minutes (once the steam built up to full steam)
9) Remove jars and tighten lids tight, tight.
10) Shauna says that her mother-in-law says that flipping the jars upside-down afterwards is the trick to getting them to seal properly. It worked! None "popped" open as they are known to do sometimes.

Here are the blueberries with the syrup and lemon juice ready for steaming..

...on the steamer..
... and flipped to prevent popping, cooling overnight.

Note: don't uses any nice towels for this. Since the lids are not ultra tight on the steamer, the juice ran all down the jars and all into the steamer tray, so that when I took them out I got blueberry juice all over this nice white towel.