My Ten Best Offbeat Jam and Jelly Preserving Tips

There are so many things you learn when you practice any craft over and over. Most of them are little idiosyncratic practices that you'd never think to tell anyone. Here are ten tips I've encountered through experience or the advice of others. Most of them are so ephemeral they didn't even make it into my book, and so fiddly they'd be too much information to tell a true newbie, but they're all worth knowing.

1. If you're trying to guess how much jam or jelly you'll get from a given recipe, no matter what the ratios, you'll generally end up with about as much jam or jelly as there are cups of sugar in the recipe.
2. Open your paper sugar bag over the sink to save cleanup; there's always about a teaspoon's worth of sugar trapped under the flap and it's a nuisance to get it all over the counter.
3. When you're filling your canner with empty jars to heat them up, fill each jar with water first so they don't bob around and clash together.
4. You can heat your lids in the same water as the jars; use a strainer basket with a handle to make it easy to collect them out of the pot.
5. Whether you're heating lids in a strainer basket or pot, lay them out in a one-up, one-down arrangement so they don't stick together. Prying apart stuck-together lids is a great way to scald yourself, and possibly to mess with the seal and sterility of the lids. (Joel at Well Preserved is one of the people who shared that tip with me.)
6. When holding a candy thermometer in a jam pot, rest a wooden spoon across the top of the pot, close to the edge. You can balance the tips of your fingers on the spoon to minimize the chance of burns, and to help keep the tip of the thermometer steady and away from the bottom of the pot.
7. Label the tops of jars, not the sides. You'll just throw that lid away, so you'll never have to worry about getting the label off it. (Thanks to Yvonne Tremblay, author of 250 Home Preserving Favorites, for that one!)
8. If you have a lot of extra jar bands (rings), thread them on a string, tie it and hang them somewhere out of the way.
9. Store reusable, lidless jars upside-down. You'll still have to wash them when you get around to using them, but they won't have dust, dead moths or (eek!) mouse droppings in them.
10. If you have lots of apples at the end of the summer, but not enough time to turn them into jelly or something more elaborate, you can quickly boil them to mush, strain them and jar up the liquid without sugar to be used later. It will come in handy to thicken wine jellies and so on. You can also jar unsweetened grape juice; either of these could be used for vinegar experiments as well.

Got any great tips to share?

Thanks to Niamh Malcolm for this amazing photo of my rhubarb conserve.