Beautiful color from yellow squash, turmeric, and red bell peppers
So in addition to the harvest I showed on Tuesday, this is what I got on Thursday, so making summer squash into relish was on the schedule. I had read a bit about making summer squash into pickles and the main thing is to not cook it much.
I drew from this recipe and from this one. But mostly I used my step-mom’s Bread and Butter recipe as a guide.
The main change was to reduce the sugar to 1½ cups. The other thing I kept in mind was that this recipe was about twice the other 2 for squash amount.
They called for 2 – 2½ lbs of squash. So I set to slicing what I had and I would weigh the result.
The main reason I did it that way was because some of the squash were old and the seeds tough. I would not be using that part and would send it up to the hens.
In the above photo you can see where the ends of the seeds have started to turn darker. That was the clue. I also tested them with either fingernail or teeth to see if they would break up easily.
I ended up with 10¼ lbs of sliced squash. I went with the 2½ lb recipe for proportions, so that was just over 4 batches. I also chopped up 4 large red bell peppers and 8 medium Walla Walla onions.
The recipes called for ¼ cup of salt, so I put 1 cup into the largest stainless steel stockpot with all the chopped vegs and covered them with water.
I used a dinner plate and my heavy Fiestaware bowl to keep the vegs submerged in the salt solution for 2 hours.
Once the 2 hours had past, I rinsed, twice, all the vegs and let them drain.
Ingredients for vinegar syrup: sugar, apple cider vinegar, turmeric, mustard seed, ground cloves, celery seed
I made 4X the recipe of the vinegar syrup and heated it to boiling. I had rinsed out the stainless stockpot and put the vegs back in. Then I poured the hot syrup over them. It didn’t cover them by at least 2”. So I made up another 2X recipe batch and that was just right. The vegs soaked in that for 2 hours.
I used the stainless cover to a pot with the Fiestaware and a quart jar of water to submerge the vegs. I was afraid the turmeric would stain the dinner plate.
I was turning the veg into relish so I got out my meat grinder. It’s a little larger than my food grinder and I had a LOT of vegs to grind up. I had a lot of vinegar syrup leftover when I got done.
Even though the vegs had sat in the syrup for 2 hours, I wasn’t sure the acid level would be sufficient for canning without all the syrup in the jar. But I didn’t want really soupy relish either. So I added back 4 cups of syrup, 1 cup per batch.
I heated the vegs until just boiling and filled the quart jars I’d already sterilized and sealed them. My biggest canning kettle will hold 9 quart jars, but I only needed 6½ of them. Without so much syrup, I used fewer jars.
I processed the jars for 15 minutes and let them cool overnight. The whole process had taken me 9 hours to do. The 4 hours spent for soaking was a lot of it. I managed to get the dehydrator unloaded during one of the times. But it sure was a long, very hot day in the kitchen!
I now have a year’s worth of relish and it’s pretty relish too!