Apple Pie Filling

I honestly still consider myself to be a newbie at canning pie filling. I use to just can the fruit in syrup and then add the remaining ingredients for a pie later. Though I have seen sites on the internet that say to can it with cornstarch, the USDA doesn't recommend this (see post on ClearJel) and I don't do it. Even after ClearJel can along I still just kept canning fruit in syrup for awhile. I guess I can be quite a creature of habit some times.


When I first tried canning apple pie filling, I followed the USDA instructions exactly. However I had problems with getting too much liquid in some jars and too little in other jars.

This year I decided to fill the jars the way I fill them if I am canning them with syrup. That is, use a slotted spoon to put the fruit in the jars, and then ladle liquid on top. This is pretty easy to do because the ClearJel actually doesn't thicken until the jar is cooling. It is still thin when you are filling the jars.

This worked much better for me. I am happy with the results and look forward to enjoying a tasty, hot pie when the snow is piled high outside.
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A New Experience Canning with Clear Jel

I promised to move on to vegetables, but some how jam keeps coming up.

Anyway, blogging has led me to decide that I am too much of a creature of habit. After I wrote the post about Clear Jel, I started thinking about the options available to me. On the one hand, I like the fact jam recipes that rely on the natural pectin in the fruit usually use less sugar then recipes that call for added pectin. On the other hand I definitely like the shorter cooking time of recipes with added pectin. In fact, I like the shorter cooking time so much, that I almost exclusively use those recipes.

I wrote that I had read that you can use clear jel in jam but that I had never tried it. It occurred to me that clear jel could represent the best of both worlds. Since it doesn't depend on sugar to set, you could have the low sugar recipe with short cooking time.


I got my favorite cherry jam recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. I cut the amount of sugar in half, stirred 7 tablespoons of clear jel in with the sugar, and ignored the pectin. I combined all of the ingredients, brought it to a boil, and started canning.

I had to try some to see how it turned out. I admit that I would have liked it to be thicker, but I can still work on figuring out the right amount of clear jel to get it thick. It did have the taste of fresh fruit (not fruit that had been cooked to death) and it wasn't over sweetened. My first attempt at canning jam with clear jel, has lead me to decide to try it some more.
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ClearJel®

When I am baking a pie from fresh fruit, I usually use flour or cornstarch for my thickener. However, when it comes to canning pie filling, these thickeners don't work. Though I have seen sites on the Internet that say to use cornstarch, it doesn't stand up to being heated twice. The pie filling may be thick when the jar is put up on the shelf, but by the time the pie comes out of the oven, it is runny.

Furthermore the USDA says that using cornstarch as a thickener for canning is not safe. Apparently it prevents the food from heating evenly so the center may not get hot enough to kill mold and bacteria.


One solution is to can your fruit without the thickener and add the thickener before you put it in the pie shell. However this doesn't allow for the convenience of just opening the jar and pouring it into the pie shell.

When the USDA approved ClearJel® (modified corn starch) for use in home canning, I confess that I was slow to try it. I was full of questions like, "how do they modify it? Do the modifications make it bad for your health? Isn't one of the advantages of home canned food suppose to be that you don't have funny sounding ingredients in your food?"

Never mind that sugar cane is very highly modified before it ends up on your table on the form of granulated sugar, or that granulated sugar is definitely not a health food. After all, I have been acquainted with sugar all of my life. It is not something new and unfamiliar.

I tried reading up on how corn starch is modified to become ClearJel®, but that was over my head. I did finally end up deciding that I have not found any research yet which says it is bad for your health, and when you consider how much modification goes into something like sugar, maybe my real problem was just that I was afraid to try something new.

I have to say, that ClearJel® works quite well. In addition to thickening pie fillings, it can also be used as a thickener for canning things like creamed corn.

It can also be used in place of pectin in jam recipes, but I have never tried it. Maybe I should. For information about using ClearJel® in jam, refer to this article by Washington State University.
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