Canned Figs
Ingredients
- Make up a syrup of sugar and vinegar. Use equal parts sugar and
- vinegar by volume. Use good quality white vinegar, not cider
- vinear. I recommend Heinz white vinegar for this, because it is
- truly neutral in flavor. Heat until bubblng. Add aromatic spices.
- I like cinnamon, whole black mustard seeds (available from Indian
- grocery stores,) whole yellow mustard seeds, a couple of whole
- cloves, some sliced fresh ginger, eetc. Quantties are not critical
- but you need enough syrup to do this:
Instructions
Put the whole fruit into the simmering syrup and return to a simmer. Lift out the fruit to a clean glass container large enough to hold everything. Pour over the syrup. You need enough to totally cover the fruit. Cover with a lid of plastic wrap and fasten the plastic in place with a rubber band. Allow to sit on counter for 24 hours. Next day, pour the syrup off the fruit, into a pot, and reboil. The syrup, not the fruit. When the syrup comes back to a full rolling boil, pour it over the fruit and re-cover with plastic. Let sit another day. Do this a second and a third time, separated by 24 hours each time. If the syrup level seems to decline too much, just add some additional sugar and vinegar. After three or four days of this treatment, the fruit will be "pickled" clear through, and delicious. It'll keep for a long time if you load it into sterilized jars, top off with boiling syrup, cap, and keep in the 'fridge. This is not a long-term storage method. Bugs won't grow in a strong sugar/vinear medium, but by no means is this is an official preserving recipe. I've kept whole figs for several months in the regrigerator after this treatment, and there's no reason why it wouldn't work for peeled peaches, apricots, kumqats, whole cherries, etc. While I'm thinking about it, you can also do this trick with straight honey and aromatic spices. But most of us don't have a half gallon of honey sitting around. What happens is, the water in the fruit gradually is drawn out by the sugar solution, thereby diluting the sugar syrup. When you reboil it each day, you drive off the extra water and also resterilize it. I've made sweet pickle slices this way and everybody raves about them. People love the taste of sugar and vinegar and sweet spices.
