Oh, asparagus, why do you task me so? Another weekend at the market, another chance to pick up cheap asparagus. I was gratified this week to find the price had dropped to $1 per small bunch, and the quality was amazing, so I bought 20 bunches, about 7 pounds.
In previous years, I've always just blanched and frozen it. After last week's low-yield pickling experiment, this week I thought I would try pressure canning. I bought this ridiculously large 22 quart pressure canner a few months ago only to discover that 99% of the things I was interested in canning didn't require it. Time to finally put it to use.
First step is cutting the asparagus spears to the right length, about 5 3/4 inches to fit into a quart jar. Lots of asparagus ends to go into the soup pot, which was fine with me. Then quick blanching of the spears and ice-bath cooling. Then packing into jar and into the pressure canner for 40 minutes. What could be simpler?
Actually it WAS simple! My 7 pounds of asparagus yielded 4 quarts canned, which was more than the recipe said I could expect. Of course, the asparagus gods couldn't let me off the hook that easily -- when I opened the canner and lifted out the first jar: DISASTER! The jar came out just fine, the problem was that the contents remained in the pot -- the bottom of the jar had sheared right off. Grrr. With trepidation I removed the other three -- all fine, thank god.
The other weird thing is how much liquid escaped from the cans. I left a 1 inch headspace but as you can see I lost almost another entire inch of liquid. I think that the canner took too long to get to full pressure, so the cans were boiling for overly long. We'll see if I die when I finally open the jar and eat the asparagus. I don't even want to think about the cost per quart: about $7 plus an hour of my time.
YIELD VERDICT: hmmm, kind of a push
CANNING VERDICT: FAIL? that airspace scares me
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