Pie in a jar
For a sweet taste of summer all year, can your own pie fillings
For a sweet taste of summer all year, can your own pie fillings.
Is there a food more evocative of summer in Wisconsin than the luscious fruit-filled, crunchy-crusted, ice-cream topped pie? ❚ We savor each morsel of that freshly baked peach pie, knowing the fleeting seasonal fruit will once again be a memory, while we thank the intrepid baker who loves us enough to “hot up the house” for a summer pie. ❚ But you can actually enjoy “summer pies” year-round — by canning (or freezing) your own pie fillings.
The pie — a sweet or savory filling enrobed in a pastry crust — is first noted in early cookbooks from the eastern Mediterranean and appeared soon after the advent of wheat farming and grain milling. Pies, though they weren’t called by that name until the mid-1200s in England, were the first convenience food.
Travelers and soldiers could carry a stew that had been baked into a sturdy crust. Early crusts were made of only flour and water and cooked to a hard finish; they were discarded much as today we would throw away a plastic container. A few centuries later, the addition of salt and fat to the
dough rendered it delicious.
Keeping qualities
Pies also served as a form of food preservation. A rectangular pan, made of ceramic and later metal and called a “pie coffin” was covered with the dough, which sealed the filling from the air and outside contamination.
Extending the life of food by a mere day or two might not seem of great consequence, but when food was scarce, another opportunity to eat a hard-won meal was critical to survival. Our modern pasty brought to Wisconsin from Welsh and Cornish
miners is descended from those ancestral pies.
The preservation quality of sugar had been observed and known by Arab cultures well before that. Sugars — and that includes honey, maple syrup and other sucrose-rich liquids — bind with the water in a fruit, leaving none available for microbes. It was a natural next step for early cooks to combine fruits with sugar and then encase them in a crust to make the fragile food last even longer.
Knowing a little pie history arms us with information we need to work our kitchen alchemy by canning pie fillings. It may seem daunting at first, but pie fillings use the same canning science used in jam- and jelly-making. If you make jams and jellies, you’ll be a success at pie fillings.
Required ingredient
The bane of many a pie maker is the dreaded runny filling. Four out of five runny pies are the result of impatience. If a fruit pie is cut open before it has entirely cooled, the juices that have been released from the fruit during cooking haven’t had time to bind with the thickener of choice.
Canned pie fillings are prethickened. This makes them ready to use and eliminates any of the preparation work needed when making a fruit pie from the start. You get the convenience and homemade properties at the same time.
The essential ingredient for home-canned pie fillings is a product called ClearJel. Developed by the Center for Home Food Preservation (a consortium of universities throughout the United States), ClearJel is a finely milled and refined cornstarch for pie fillings.
Home-canned pie fillings should ONLY use ClearJel for thickening. The other traditional starches (flours, cornstarch, tapioca, etc.) are not safe for processing. Other starches coagulate into a disgusting solid mass as the jars process in the canner. It looks gross and is unsafe, as the heat required for safe processing can’t penetrate the floury goo.
ClearJel is available as a regular or instant product. Do not use Instant ClearJel; it’s primarily used in restaurants to thicken foods without using a heat catalyst. Regular or “cooked” ClearJel is for canning.
About sweeteners
ClearJel is not produced in a low-sugar form, so there isn’t an option for reducing the amount of sugar in the recipes. I have already tested and adjusted these recipes to use the least amount of sugar and ClearJel. You can replace the sugar with honey or Splenda, but that may result in a less thickened slurry. It’s pie. It’s going to be sweet.
ClearJel is not a product you will find in your neighborhood grocery store. It is, however, readily available via multiple online sellers including Amazon. Amish or Mennonite stores always stock ClearJel, as well as many other food preservation supplies.
If ClearJel doesn’t appeal to you, I suggest canning fruits in syrup. Then, when you want to make pie, make a pie slurry out of the canning liquid using your preferred thickener.
Or, try your hand at a pie filling recipe that does not require additional thickening. The Vegetarian Mincemeat and Green Tomato-Orange Pie Filling recipes here are historic pantry staples updated for modern safety standards that do not use ClearJel.
Making the pie filling
ClearJel requires both a heat and chemical catalyst to activate thickening. Meaning, when the ClearJel and sugar mixture dissolve in the liquid under heat, it won’t begin to thicken unless lemon juice (or orange juice) is added to the boiling slurry. This chemical reaction happens quickly, so keep stirring.
Always keep a large measuring cup filled with a few cups of water on hand as you’re making your pie filling to add to the pot in case the filling becomes too thick. (You’ll know it is too dense if it won't stir and begins to scorch.)
Many cooks loathe blanching. It’s often viewed as an unnecessary step in any cooking process, but when making pie fillings, blanching the fruit pushes the air out of the cells and reduces the amount of expansion that occurs later in the jars.
Peaches are defacto blanched in the peeling process, so there is no need to do it again. Dense fruits like apples and pears expand the most during processing and must be blanched. Only berries and cherries get to skip blanching; just add them to the cooked and thickened slurry and cook about five minutes longer to help them release their air and juice.
Headspace matters
Make close note of the headspace when filling your jars. Pie fillings tend to expand in the jar much more than other sweetened preserves, as the ClearJel thickens the juice that releases from the fruit during processing. There are few more sorrowful things in a kitchen than when a quart of cherry pie filling oozes out the bent lid or the jar cracks open due to overpressurization.
The recipes here are for Wisconsin favorites using fruits that are (or will soon be) in season. Try them. Each recipe also includes variations in tweaking the flavor.
You’ll notice that there are zero recipes for any dairy-based or egg-based pie fillings. Milk and eggs are low-acid and high-fat, making them unsafe for hotwater bath canning. All the recipes call for using a quart-size jar, as one quart fills a standard 8- to 9-inch pie plate. You can also use pint jars; the processing time remains the same.
Pie fillings made with ClearJel also can be frozen. Two methods work very well.
The first is to portion out a cooled, pie sized amount into a freezer-safe plastic container, keeping 1 1⁄2 inches of headspace from the edge to prevent it from expanding over the top or cracking the plastic. Defrost filling
before baking the pie.
The second method involves pouring the cooled mixture into an unbaked piecrust and placing the entire pie into a gallon-size plastic freezer bag. When baking your frozen pie, bake 20 minutes at 425 degrees and then reduce temperature to 350 degrees and continue baking another 40 minutes.
How to use after canning
Home processed pie fillings have a recommended shelf-life of 12 months. As with all canned goods, clearly label what’s in the jar and the date it was made. Store in a temperature-stable location out of direct sunlight.
Making your pie is as simple as unrolling a premade shell or preparing your favorite pastry recipe. There are debates in baking circles about blind-baking crusts for extra crunch and lattice tops vs. fullcoverage top crusts, but what you and your family enjoy eating should determine how to make your pie.
The real secret of home-canned pie fillings is the versatility. There are absolutely zero rules. Use it as the base for a sweet biscuit topped cobbler, spoon it onto ice cream, mix a dollop into yogurt or oatmeal or use it as a topper to luscious cheesecake. You may find yourself adding it to just about everything!
All recipes assume that you’ve prepared your canning jars according to the best practices described in the hot-water bath canning Instructions included here. If you’re using a dishwasher to sterilize your canning jars, start the cycle before you begin cooking.
If you’re hot-water bath processing, your canner should be filled with water and underway before you start cooking the pie filling. Pie fillings take a minimum of 25 minutes to process in the hot-water bath canner. An atmospheric / steam canner does not produce enough steam for that length of time. Don’t use one here; use the hot-water bath canner instead.
Recipes can be cut in half; however, for the amount of work, you’ll want to make a big batch. (Canned pie fillings make great gifts!)