Cactus Fruit Simple Syrup

[BunnyTime]

Hi all!

I harvested way too many prickly pear fruits and have been making so much jelly that I'll never use it all up. It was recommended to me that I can make simple syrup and water bath it to be shelf stable. I have some friends that are interested in taking some off my hands, but they want pints or quarts and I only find recipes for half pints. The recipe I have is:

3 cups prickly pear juice
3 cups sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Boil it all together for a while, then pour into half pints and water bath for 10 minutes.

Could I quadruple the recipe and put it in pints and/or quarts and process it the 10 minutes?

Thanks!

 

[GotGarlic]

Hi, Bunny. In general, it's not recommended to increase the size of the jars if a trusted source doesn't include timing for that in the recipe. However, the closest recipe I can find for what you want to do is canning fruit in syrup. The heavy syrup on this page is essentially simple syrup, so I think you would be safe using this procedure, which does allow for quarts.

http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_02/syrups.html

 

[BunnyTime]

Thanks GotGarlic! I don't see anything about processing the syrup on that link and I'm not sure if that means it just doesn't need to be processed or if I just don't understand what it is telling me. Should I put it in the boiling water bath?

 

[GotGarlic]

What I meant is that, since the link shows that you can can fruit with syrup, you can also can the syrup without the fruit. Use the times on the link for the size jars you want to can.

 

[BunnyTime]

Thanks for another reply, GotGarlic, you put so much time and goodwill into these threads! Unfortunately, I still don't understand what I'm supposed to do. You said to use the times on the link, but the link you gave me doesn't have any processing times. Do you mean the link I originally got the recipe from? In which case I would process the quart jars for the same amount of time as the jelly jars.