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If you can believe it, I'm almost out of canning jars - at least the ones that are recommended to use. I have plenty of the old fashioned kind with the rubber rings. The recipe is from Ball's Complete Book of Home Preserving. I used purple peppers and hungarian wax peppers. I also had to go out to my local funky foodstore (Rodman's) to get the horseradish and as always seems to happen, I ran into someone I knew. Happily, it was an old friend and we spent a few minutes chatting.
Zesty Zucchini Relish
Makes 5 pint jars
12 cups finely chopped zucchini
4 cups copped onions
2 red bell peppers, seeded and chopped
1 green pepper, seeded and chopped
1/3 cup pickling salt
2 1/2 cups sugar
2 1/2 cups white vinegar
1 tblsp ground nutmeg
1 tblsp ground tumeric
4 tblsp prepared horseradish
1 chili pepper, including seeds, chopped.
In a large glass or stainless steel bowl, combine zucchini, onions, peppers, and salt. Cover and let stand in a cool place for 12 hours or overnight. Transfer to a colander placed over a sink and drain. Rinse well with cool water and drain thoroughly. Using your hands, squeeze out excess liquid.
In a large stainless steel saucepan, combine drained zucchini mixture, sugar, vinegar, nutmeg, turmeric, horseradish and chili pepper. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally. Reduce heat and boil gently, stirring frequently, until liquid is reduced and mixture is the consistency of a thin commercial relish, about 45 minutes.
Meanwhile, prepare canner, jars and lids. Ladle hot relish into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Remove air bubbles and adjust headspace, if necessary, by adding hot relish. Wipe rim. Center lid on jar. Screw band down until resistance is met, then increase to fingertip tight.
Place jars in canner, ensuring they are completely covered with water. Bring to a boil and process for 15 minutes. Remove Canner lid. Wait 5 minutes, then remove jars, cool and store.
Chopped zucchini
Sean, chopping peppers
Finely chopped peppers
Sean crying from chopping onions
Onions
Mixture with salt
Next day, continuing with relish
Relish to go in the fridge
There's the relish!
A couple of points which are meant to be nice and not nasty....
ReplyDelete1. Ditch the plastic chopping board. These were made compulsory in Europe and resulted in a huge increase in food poisoning instances. The knife will cut a nick in the surface, the plastic lifts and drops, trapping food particles underneath. Even running it through a dishwasher will not free the trapped particles. With a good wooden board the pores of the wood open up when washed, freeing any particles.
2. You appear to have cut the peppers way too fine. Take a stroll around the interwebs and see others who have used this same recipe which is based upon a traditional Amish/Mennonite recipe BUT comes from the Ball site where they have the ingredients wrong - the measures for the nutmeg, turmeric, and horseradish should be TEA spoons and not TABLE spoons. Make another batch and see what I mean about the difference in taste. One is overpowering, the other a 'fresh' relish.. The relish is meant to be slightly chunky and, with the greatest respect to how tasty yours probably is, yours appears more 'slurrified'.
3. You have too much head space in your jars for safe canning and your processing time is off as well for a (I assume) water bath canning process - if you are in the Boston area then your altitude is not too high above sea level.. You should check out processing times at the link below. They base their processing time using peaches which are tender and a good average to follow.
http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/general/selecting_correct_process_time.html
Happy canning.