At some point back in May, a few of us in my knitting group got to talking about canning and preserving. There’s three of us who’ve done a little bit here and there (my massive jam-making fest last summer being a prime example) but we all agreed that even though it’s a lot of fun, there’s a lot we still have to learn about the process. So it was a nice surprise when one of the knitters noted that there is such a thing as Master Preservers in our area, who offer demonstrations on a monthly basis.

Similar to Master Gardeners, the Master Preservers are a group affiliated with the Sacramento County/University of California extension cooperative. The rest of us having the chat had never heard of these folks before, but it turns out, they’re at a the farmer’s market every weekend (naturally the very next time I went to the farmer’s market, I saw their table immediately; I am sure I have walked right by in the past and never realized what they were), and they do offer two types of demonstrations – basic demos, which are free, and more in-depth demos, which cost $3 for the materials.

The class offered for June was on stone fruits, and so a friend and I decided to check it out. It was absolutely wonderful. They demoed several different recipes using various stone fruits (plums, peaches, apricots), talked about the differences between types of fruits, gave a short but extremely informative overview of drying (including how to sulfur-dry) and in general provided a wealth of information about canning in general. Considering how incredibly useful all the information was, I came back to my knitting group all excited about the demos, and encouraged my fellow knitter/canners to come to the July demo with me as well.

This month’s demo was supposed to be on berries and tomatoes, but for some unknown reason they started it off with an overview of juicing, using fruit that isn’t even in season. They then spent the majority of the next two hours going over several berry jam recipes, and did not even touch the subject of tomatoes until there was barely 20 minutes left. Considering that when they said ‘and now we’re going to talk about tomatoes’ everyone started applauding, and pretty much everyone in the class actually stayed late and kept peppering the final presenter with questions, it was obvious that everyone else was feeling just as frustrated about the lack of tomato-based information as my friend and I were. Berries really don’t take that much work (you smash them up, you add sugar, heat, and pectin; poof, you have jam), but tomatoes are a borderline fruit, so require the addition of acid (lemon juice, citric acid, etc.) to make sure they’re safe.

I think it’s a good thing we went to the June class first, because if we’d attended the July class first, we’d likely have never returned for another one. But for now, we are hoping that this month’s class was just an unfortunate anomaly and that June’s is the norm. Next month’s class is supposed to be on pickling, and they mentioned that there will be a demo on using pressure cookers in September, which I think I should definitely attend. And despite the general frustration with the lack of tomato-based info this time around, the thick packet of recipes and information they handed out will come in useful, if for no other reason than that I used it to scribble down a short list of canning-related items I will need to invest in some day, and I don’t want to lose that.