Hi all,
I made the NCHFP apple butter recipe. I used quarter-pint jars, processed at 10 minutes for my elevation.
https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can/canning-fruits-and-fruit-products/apple-butter/
However, I put the jars in the water bath canner in 3 batches. I didn’t have a wire rack or other method of preventing the cans from touching each other (a kitchen towel was floating/aggressively moving the jars due to the roiling boil)
I didn’t realize until after I was done that processing time takes into account only about 10 minutes between getting the hot food into the jar and then into the canner.
I am absolutely beat, and cannot reprocess these now. Would I be safe to reprocess these jars tomorrow (all at once, I’ll find a way to make them for safely).
by CatTrickx
2 Comments
I’m confused. Did you process them for less than the 5 min required in the recipe for processing? Or did they sit on the counter filled in jars for a significant amount of time prior to going into the hot water bath? Where do you think you went wrong?
It sounds like you fill all the jars and left them on the counter cooling while doing batch after batch. This is not proper processing. The apple butter should stay in the pot and hot until you can fill jars to put in the canner
If they were improperly processed, you have a 2 hour window to refrigerate them, then you’d have to empty the jars into a pot, bring to a boil, refill clean jars and new lids and reprocess. If they were improperly processed and not refrigerated, you cannot reprocess
If you can tell which jars are from the first batch you could keep those. But yeah unfortunately this was a learning experience and the rest likely didn’t have the proper heat in the middle for heat penetration as the recipe relies on them being hot