While many articles say that you don’t need sugar in canning, almost all of the recipes have sugar. I wanted to use up all of the sweet peppers from Full Cellar Farm in a pepper relish and spent about two hours reading recipes that had sugar in them – one called for 9 cups of sugar – yikes! Finally I settled on chopping all of the peppers with an onion, cooking everything in vinegar, and canning it in pint jars.
Relish ingredients can vary based simply on what you have and like. For example, a friend of mine added pear, raspberries, jalapeno peppers, and purple onion to her pepper relish. Besides looking really colorful and pretty on your shelves, there are a wide variety of uses for relishes: sandwiches (with meat, like turkey, or without, like hummus and tomato), scrambled eggs, chicken and tuna salad, garden salads, fish, just about everything. And when you leave out the sugar, these are all healthy servings of vegetables – and fruits if you add them.
You know how much I hate cleaning the food processor, but peppers are a bit more challenging to chop than tomatoes, and I had a lot of them. I packed them into the chute of the food processor and shoved them through along with the onion. This time I followed the instructions on the canning lid box and kept the jars and lids simmering. I use a pressure cooker pot for canning without using the pressure cooker lid, because it’s my only pot that’s big enough to cover the jars with water. I plan on hitting garage sales or Craigslist as time permits for a real canning pot.
A couple of tips: Have your pot 1/3 full with boiling water and the full jars will probably displace the rest of the pot, but keep a full kettle with boiling water so that you can top off what’s in the pot to cover your jars. Do not pour the water from the kettle on top of the jar lids because it splashes back — pour it between the jars. For years I had a heck of a time getting the completed jars out of the pot until I finally invested in canning tongs, which were under $10 and make all the difference.
Sweet Pepper Relish with No Sugar
5 C chopped or shredded sweet peppers
1 finely chopped sweet onion
1 C apple cider vinegar
¼ C white vinegar
2 t pickling salt
2 t fresh dill seed, mustard seed, garlic, or whatever herb/spice you like
Heat the chopped peppers, onion, and any of the juices on the stove until it boils. Simmer for 15-20 minutes while you prepare/sterilize the jars. Fill the hot jars leaving 1/2″ gap to the lid. Add the two-part lids and boil for 10 minutes with 1″ of water covering the jars.
