Jarred Sugared and Salted Fruits

For those looking at the title, yes I did say salted fruit. This was another cooking class that I did through the Aurora Public Library. Check out your local library to see what classes and activities they offer. When I first signed up for the class I thought that we would be making something like Tanghulu, which is Asian sugar coated fruit. Here is a video of how Tanghulu is made, filmed at the On Havana Night Market:

But instead it turned out to be a quick jarring class. Quick jarring is a process where you don't use heat and the end product has a much shorter shelf/ fridge life then the normal jarring process. These goods must be refrigerated and not just shelf stored.

Here are pictures of the process.

For this each person could choose to do a sweet or savory option. All you need are the fruits you are going to be using, jars, and either salt or sugar.

For mine I decided to go with the salted lemons. I had never tried a salted lemon before and I was intrigued by the concept.

My mother who went with me decided to go with the sugar option. The program had several different frozen berry options for people to choose from. Mom decided to just go with strawberries. The instructor had chosen to use frozen fruit due to all the health issues around parasites right now. Personally I very much appreciated her thinking about that and it is also good for you to think about if you try to make these.

For the lemons she recommended that we cut them in half and then squish them into the jar. Personally if I were to do this again I would slice them and then layer them in the jar with the salt so that I could get more even coverage.

For both the berries and the lemons the process is the same. You layer in the fruit with either the salt or the sugar. For the frozen berries they shrank a little as they warmed up, so we had some extra that we squished on top. The trick is you always want the fruit below the liquid line. The salt and sugar will pull moisture out of the fruit and the jar starts filling withe the liquid. This process was faster with the lemons then with the berries.

Here are our final jars as we left. In a couple of days the strawberry one had a somewhat thick syrup in it that we used on pancakes and in club soda for a tasty drink. The lemons on the other hand were odd... in the class she said that some cultures use salted lemons in their recipes and doing this process you can eat all of the lemon including the rind. I tried them and they were odd, also the juice/liquid felt way too salty to be useful for anything. In the future I may experiment more with the salted lemons, but for now I think I will just stick to the fruit process.

Top picture From: https://www.tastingtable.com/1347548/canned-fruits-always-have-pantry/