Canning Pineapple on the Wood Cookstove

First, some news: Nancy and I finally made donuts again, so there are now pictures on that post from April.

Speaking of April, sometime around Easter of last year, one of the grocery stores near us sold pineapples for less than a dollar each with no limits on the number you could buy.  We bought five and I canned at least three of them.  That was the first time I had ever canned pineapple, and when we opened a jar to taste it, we were immediately hooked.  Home-canned pineapple has outstanding flavor!  My personal opinion is that the flavor is so good because it is in glass rather than metal or plastic.

At any rate, pineapple went on sale again at the same store right around Christmas, and I finally got around to canning the ones we bought just last Thursday.

As always when I'm water bath canning on a wood cookstove, I start by putting my canner full of water directly over the firebox.  Because I knew that preparing the pineapple for canning wouldn't take very long, I also put my sugar syrup on to come to a boil.  Pineapple is very sweet on its own, so I made a very light syrup.  Canning manuals say that a light syrup is one cup of sugar to three cups of water.  I made mine a little lighter than that even.

When I'm water bath canning, I always like to have the teakettle near the fire too, in case I've missed my guess and have to add water to the canner.  Using boiling water from the teakettle doesn't cool the canner down when you add it, which is important to keeping your processing time accurate.

The canning lids are in warm water on the cooler part of the stove away from the fire.

The Margin Gem with canner, syrup,
teakettle, and lids heating up.  The
oven door is open because, well, it's
January, you know.

With all of that on the stove, I went to the counter in the pantry to get the pineapple into the jars.  I cut them into pieces that would be larger than commercially canned tidbits but smaller than what are sold as pineapple chunks.  Fill the jars to within a half-inch of the top.

Both times I've canned pineapple, it worked out that you can roughly figure that one pineapple will yield two jars full.

After covering the fruit with the boiling syrup and affixing the lids and bands, all went into the canner.  This time, right after putting in one of the first jars, I heard that telltale "pop" of a jar that just broke.  I tried to lift the suspect jar up to see if that was what happened, but I couldn't tell for sure.  Once I had the rest of the jars in the canner and I lifted the lid to see if the water had reached the rolling boil that tells me when to start counting processing time, look what was floating.

As frustrating as that is, it happens sometimes!  

My most recent Ball Blue Book says that pineapple in pint jars needs to process for 15 minutes in the boiling water bath.

As you can see, the finished product is a beautiful yellow, and it adds a nice bit of color to the fruit room shelves.  Back in April, I pushed the pencil on this, and when pineapple is less than a dollar each and you include the cost of the sugar and the canning lids, you can save quite a bit of money on canned pineapple by putting it up yourself.  Besides that, the flavor is fantastic!