Apricots galore
If you have, or have ever had an apricot tree, you probably know that they don’t do well every year. And you probably also know that when they do well, they go a little crazy.
One apricot tree, in a good year is enough to keep anyone rolling in apricots for a few days. You will probably end up giving a lot of them away as well.
Well, that being said, we have four mature apricot trees! Needless to say, on the years that we get apricots we are swimming in them for a few days or weeks.
We recently bought a freeze dryer which is great and it means we don’t have to store apricots in the freezer because they will be shelf stable for over 20 years. But it takes 30 plus hours to run a freeze dryer cycle and we still have So. Many. Apricots!
We have made jam (post to come), and we have made fruit leather and we have given away a lot. But you can barely tell that we have picked any, our trees are still so loaded. So my husband and I were brainstorming ideas for how to use up all the apricots. In the past my grandma and mom have always made apricot nectar, which is just basically like apple sauce but with apricots. But it never really tasted that great. We always added it to koolaid which, is tasty, but what isn’t when added to Koolaid? So I wanted something a little better.
When I was growing up I remember doing apricot nectar in my grandma’s kitchen. We would boil the apricots to get them soft. Then we would fish the soft apricots out of the boiling water and run them through the “Victorio Strainer” a big hand cranked food mill. It would push the fruit through a mesh cylinder leaving the skins to come out in a bowl. It was always such a hot sticky mess. I have fond memories of taking a turn at the hand crank as a kid. It was not really something that you could do alone. It didn’t stay attached to the table and always dripped so much. And as I mentioned, the results left much to be desired.
A few years ago my husband bought me a Kitchen Aid, because he loves me. Then a year or so after that he bought me attachments to go with it. One of which is a food mill. It has made my life so much easier with all the fruit and veggies we have around here. It does the same thing as my grandma’s food strainer, but it uses the kitchen aid motor, so I don’t have to crank it by hand. It also stays put. I can do it by myself. In fact my kids can do it by themselves (under supervision of course).
We decided that we didn’t want to boil or even steam the apricots (if we didn’t have to) because we didn’t want to add water. The whole goal was to use as many apricots as possible. I also feel like adding water means you lose flavor. Which means you need to either add sweetener or you get bland apricot nectar. So, anyway, we tried running the apricots through the strainer raw because they were pretty ripe. It totally worked! The resulting apricot nectar was sweet and thick. When we drink it we plan to add water or mix it with other juice to thin it out a bit. We might even try freeze drying it later, like in the winter, when we don’t have fresh stuff to put in the freeze dryer. But I digress.
After our test run we went out and picked a couple boxes full of apricots. Then we came in and got the whole family involved in an apricot nectar assembly. Tyler was opening them to take out the seeds and cut off anything bad, then he would hand them over to me and the kids to put into the food mill. After a bit, Avery (7 year old) was running the food mill by herself while I was washing and sterilizing bottles for canning. We figured out that if Tyler cut each half once it really sped up the process. Avery was saying, “I need more apricots!” every 5 minutes or so after that.
She can run it by herself!
Once we got the apricot nectar we put it into our biggest pots and brought it to a boil with some lemon juice to keep it bright. We checked the pH level with some litmus strips I bought last year and it was all below 3.5 so we figured we were good to can it. We tried to mix up the batches a bit because some of our boxes were riper than others and we wanted to keep it all pretty consistent.
We simmered the nectar for about 30 minutes to make sure it was safe for canning and to reduce it down a bit. (I think 10 minutes would be enough for safety reasons.) Then we ladled the hot nectar into sterilized jars. We wiped the rims, put on lids and rings then put them in the steamer for 30 minutes. (20 minutes for hot pureed apricots then add 2 minutes per every 1,000 feet above sea level)
We ended up with 14 bottles of apricot nectar canned and ready to put on the self. We had some left over but since it wasn’t going to be a full batch (my steamer only holds 7 bottles at a time) we decided to serve it as a drink at our next neighborhood party, which was that night. We stuck it in the freezer once it had cooled then served it with 7up. Like those sorbet floats. You know what I’m talking about? We always called it “Mormon punch”. Anyway, it was a big hit. Yay! I think it was proof that our experiment was a success.
Have you ever made this stuff? What did you think?
