Canning: Pickled Beets

Well, canning season seems to have continued into the fall, despite school starting! I still have a second batch of blueberry maple pecan compote to mix up, but after a bonanza at the last day of Crampton's Market, I've got lemons to preserve and I ended up with a large batch of baby beets to pickle! Now, like most of the things I pickle other than the traditional dills, I know that pickled beets are an acquired taste. So acquired, in fact, that I'm not sure that I even like them. But, being that I have a wife who's been salivating over the possibility of pickled beets since we started canning lo those four years ago, it was time to try.

Ultimately, they were really easy - you have to pay attention to a lot of things, including spending twice as much effort trying not to make a mess as normal since beets stain so badly, but it was an easy solo canning adventure. The beets took forever to boil, but once they were tender their skins came off easily after I drained them and refilled the pot with cold water. The brine was easy enough to mix up - the similarities to my dill pickle brine were too obvious to miss. I will say that the one thing I had to do this time for ALL four jars, that I rarely have to do otherwise is clear air bubbles. Most liquid canning solutions call for your "non-metallic" tool to swish around the jar, and I usually do, but I've never seen so many air bubbles as today. Luckily that's easy to clear up though, and then it was just a matter of boiling the jars!

Now we'll just have to wait and see what they taste like... And what my wife considers appropriate repayment!