Cherry Pie Filling Recipe check

11 years ago

This recipe allows for frozen cherries and the substitution of sugar with honey. It's from www.pickyourown.org.

1) Is it safe?
2) Can you use frozen sweet cherries instead of frozen sour cherries? Costco sells bags of organic frozen sweet cherries (unsweetened) that made a terrific jam and I think they'd be great in a pie.

Thanks. Recipe/instructions below.

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Fresh or thawed sour cherries 6 quarts
6 cups of honey and 1 cup of cherry or grape juice
Clear Jel 1 and 3/4 cups
Cold water or cherry juice 9 and 1/3 cups
Bottled Lemon Juice 1/2 cup
Cinnamon (optional) 1 teaspoon
Almond extract (optional) 2 teaspoons

Stir mixture and cook over medium high heat until mixture thickens and begins to bubble. WARNING: it gets thick really quickly, so don't overcook it, and if you need to add additional fruit juice or water to thin it out enough to be able to fill the jars.
Add lemon juice and boil 1 minute, stirring constantly.

1" headspace, BWB 30 minutes.

"This document was adapted from the "Complete Guide to Home Canning," Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 539, USDA, revised 1994, Reviewed June 2006."

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Comments (4)

digdirt2
11 years ago
Yes, it is just the NCHFP instructions with honey switched for the sugar. But I don't think you will want that much honey, it normally isn't a 1:1 substitution, and especially not if you use sweet cherries.
heavens123
Original Author
11 years ago
I was wondering about that.
I've never switched out sugar for honey and only have followed recipes that have allowed that option. Is the honey just for flavor and I can use as little as I like or is it part of the composition that makes it safe/unsafe. And are sweet cherries more acidic than sour cherries?
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malna
11 years ago
Sweet cherries are lightly less acidic than sour cherries, but not enough to impact safety issues (sour cherries are 3.2 - 3.8 usually; sweet cherries might be as high as 4.2 depending on the variety). Still well below 4.6 needed for BWB canning.
Honey is also more acidic than sugar (3.9 as opposed to sugar's 6.00).

The original recipe called for 7 cups of sugar, so they did reduce the proportion of honey (it's usually 3/4 to 7/8 cup of honey instead of 1 cup of sugar), but 6 cups sounds like way too much, as Dave said.

You might not need that much Clear Jel either - it's a powerful thickener and most of us that have used it reduced the amount considerably.

What you might consider is canning the cherries in a light syrup and thickening it for filling when you are ready to make the pie. Plain cherries would be much more versatile (my opinion).

A light syrup would be 2-1/4 cups of sugar in 9 cups of water (for 7 quarts). I'd start with 1 cup of honey, add the cherries, and taste before you finish canning them. You can always add more honey to taste.

Honey will make the syrup darker (but with cherries that shouldn't matter). I've done peaches in all-honey light syrup and they were delicious.

The sweetener (sugar, honey, corn syrup, etc.) is really only for flavor and also helps retain color. You can can fruit in plain water, so there are no safety issues reducing the sweetener.

Note: Substituting honey for sugar in jam and jelly recipes is more difficult, but for canning fruits in syrup, it works fine.
heavens123
Original Author
11 years ago
Thanks Malna. I really like having pie fillings ready to go so that I can mix up a cobble or something very quickly when needed. I'm glad to know I can reduce the honey and will do so and just do it to taste. I've never done cherry before (only apple from the same website) and am looking forward to it.