Food-Canning Applesauce, A Saga

Canning feels so cozy-old-fashioned. I like to jar something at least once a year. I will only make the effort (and it is actually a great deal of effort) if I can find a great deal on the food. Free is best. Last year Harry and David's had a super sale (for locals) on their fresh peaches. I put up over 70 quarts of peaches and we currently have two quarts left only because I hid them and then forgot where I hid them. The other quarts didn't last past Christmas. And we tried to ration them.

This year I found a friend with yellow apples that she wasn't going to pick--seven trees worth. I grabbed my sister-in-law (age 13) and brother-in-law (age 15) and bribed them with visions of homemade applesauce to come help me pick apples and then can them. They came! And we filled the back of my mini-van with bags of apples.

We then started to prepare them the traditional way. We cut them in quarters, put them in water to boil. Then we pushed them through a Victrola Strainer and out one side flowed the apple waste parts and out the other flowed real applesauce. I had heated the lids and sterilized the jars and prepared the rings--everything was working so well. Then I realized I couldn't find my steam canner. I tried calling my Mom and twin sister, but neither of them could help me. That's when I had a brand new idea that should have worked.

I felt like I was figuring out a whole new way to process lots of canning jars at once. A path unavailable to the old time canners. A canning conclusion that perhaps I was the first to conclude: Use a Dishwasher!

A steam canner processes the jars of food using hot steam. A dishwasher, set on the hot water setting, on ultra wash (so it washed on the longest setting) could hold 25 jars at once--and how could its steam be any different than a steam canner? Steam is steam, right? And the outside of the jars would be sparkling clean too. It was the perfect idea!

So I loaded up the dishwasher, turned the settings on, and by the end of its cycle, only four of the lids hadn't inverted. It worked! So I did it to all 54 jars. By the next morning, only five lids hadn't sealed. So, we ate some fresh applesauce, gave my dear relatives their share, and put the sealed jars out in the garage.

The garage was as cold as a refrigerator until we hit our Southern Oregon October Week of Warmth (it comes every year). It was just after that warm spell that I decided to make granola, which requires applesauce, and I walked out to my garage for a jar of that tasty, homemade applesauce. As I picked up closest jar, I noticed a hairy blue growth on the applesauce surface.

I put it down, thinking it an anamoly, and then picked up another jar. It had orange spots "icing" the applesauce. My heart beat fast now. Another and another and another jar. Every jar but five had hairy spots of black, blue, green or orange mold growing on top. Ah, the variety of colors. But how could it be? The center of the lids wasn't popping up. So I tried to take off a lid. And off it flipped off with just a bit of effort from my pointer finger.

I could push every lid off every jar with a push from my finger.

I felt sick.

I tried to do something with the wasted applesauce. I mixed it with glue and cinnamon to make some great smelling sachets. But it required too much cinnamon to make it worth it for 45 jars of applesauce. So I threw the rest out.

And when I made pears the next month (only $1.00 a box from a church pear farm!), I used a steam canner.

So I learned the moral of the story, which is...Well...what do you think the moral of the story is?