Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Canning = Sugar?

I got started on some canning today. I made a batch of icicle pickles, a batch of raspberry-banana jam, and a batch of raspberry-mango-banana jam. All the raspberries were picked locally, the bananas and mangoes not so much ;) but we had them so I used them up.

My partner and I have been talking about our dependence on sugar lately...white, refined sugar specifically. We're wanting to cut way back on our use of it. We figure that for baking we could use raw cane sugar and start looking into other alternatives like stevia. I've taken to using honey in my coffee, it took some getting used to but it's fine now. But canning-without sugar?? We did read that you can use up to 50% honey in place of white sugar in jam making but we make a lot of jam here so financially it's not really an option. Today I used 5 cups of sugar rather than the called for 6.5 cups of sugar (that's per BATCH of jam!) yes, that's a lot of sugar even at my cutting back. And the pickles (being a sweet pickle) took 3 cups of sugar. That's 13 cups of sugar I used today-in those jars in the pictures!! Really if you have any ideas on canning with less sugar or other alternatives please, please share!

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