Introduction

When I was growing up, canning was for old folks and cranks and separatists—oh, and for my parents, who spent every summer of my Virginia childhood scrambling to convert overflowing bushel baskets of fruits and vegetables from their garden into a pantry lined with shelf upon shelf of colorful canning jars, not to mention a stuffed-to-the-rim chest freezer or two. Not for me. I had better, far more important things to do. I can’t remember what they were.

When I left home and moved to New York, I happily immersed myself in a project of experiencing every new food I possibly could: seeking out Malaysian braised frog’s legs in Jackson Heights, buying armloads of vegetables and unfamiliar species of seafood in Chinatown and coming home to figure out what to do with it all, pestering kielbasa makers in Greenpoint for detailed explanations of the different varieties of smoked sausage hanging above their heads.

But as I started to miss the rosy homemade applesauce and the salsa that was just as hot as I liked it and the spicy-tangy pickled beans I’d snacked on blithely every day after school, I thought maybe I should try canning something myself. I flipped through some canning books at Barnes & Noble (public libraries also being the domain of old folks and cranks—though not separatists so much), and found that the common thread running through them all, from the classic Ball Blue Book to the newer, prettier books on jams and jellies, is the notion that Canning Is Hard: tedious work, complicated, deadly. I somehow got the impression that I would die if I tried this without three thermometers calibrated monthly, a hundred-foot roll of litmus paper, and a topographical map that pinpointed my location and its exact elevation.

Then several years later, living in a comically narrow railroad apartment in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, I found myself with a few baskets of apples I’d picked at an orchard somewhere north of the city with the man who would in a couple of weeks ask me to marry him. Something was in the air—fall, of course, and fast-declining Pink Ladies, and the beginnings of the eat-local movement swirling around—but also I was in love. I was about to become an honest-to-god wife. I called my mom and asked her how to make applesauce (now it seems so simple, second nature). I started canning in my tiny galley kitchen, in a stockpot with empty upside-down tuna cans in the bottom, using spring-loaded tongs with rubber bands wrapped around the ends to pull hot jars out of boiling water.

Nobody having died after eating (or at least being ceremoniously presented with) my applesauce, I went back to the bookstore and began a years-long search for a good, modern, clear, easy-to-follow canning book with delicious-looking recipes I wanted to make and eat. Finally I gave up and decided to simply learn as much as I could on my own—reading all the bad books, canning lots of stuff all year round, asking Mom and Dad and friends and neighbors and relatives and neighbors of strangers for advice—and write one myself.

The recipes here are for people a little bit like me. For those of us who upon hearing “pickle” remember Mom’s sweet watermelon-rind pickles ice-cold out of the fridge, but also think of the dollop of goodness that goes on top of a bowl of curried lentils, or the dainty dish of tsukemono pickles that might come with the sashimi at a good sushi bar. Those people for whom “ferment” means not just full-sour dills bobbing about in a crock of cloudy brine on the Lower East Side but also spicy red kimchi. And those of us who, while thoroughly enjoying a sweet, thick slather of classic peach preserves on toast every now and then (or, okay, often), might prefer a tart-sweet black plum jam spiked with fragrant cardamom, or a small spoonful of apricot preserves with vanilla beans alongside a wedge of veiny blue cheese and a thick slice of dark bread.

This book reflects what I, a person with tastes and interests that run to bread-and-butter pickles and strawberry jam and far beyond, like to cook and eat throughout the year, and how I in my small way extend the seasons of my favorite ingredients—and the memories that those foods invoke. I want you to find a way to do something similar, using this book as a starting point and inspiration. You’d be surprised how tomatoes, perhaps put up one hot Saturday with friends who’ve come over to spend an afternoon drinking frosty beers and filling the countertop with bright red pint jars, can comfort and nourish on a cold night in January in a simple pasta dish. How an early-morning spoonful of perfect blueberry marmalade, made by a good friend you might know only via email and your respective blogs, can help you make it through a busy day of office work. How a hot wokful of diced pickled yard-long beans and spicy minced pork, while cooked in a kitchen in the rural South, can bring back that Chinese-takeout favorite you’ve been craving since you left the city.

Folks nowadays can for many reasons. Sure, it could be that they’re preparing for the apocalypse or, just as bad, a government takeover. (Ask me about the time I was standing in line at a grocery store with a cartful of canning jars and the guy behind me gave me a knowing look and started talking about how—soon—we’re all going to have to start canning.) Maybe they’ve found a way to can in a truly frugal way, or they have access to a lot of produce and can’t stand for any of it to go to waste. Maybe they’re sensitive types who put summer produce up in jars because otherwise they’d miss it during winter. Maybe they just like to make a few batches of special jam to give to friends as holiday gifts that won’t go bad before the New Year. Some do it to reconnect with the past, or to satisfy some deep doit-yourself urge. And some surely do it just because it’s . . . something to do.

For me, putting up the very best produce I can find in season—especially if it’s homegrown or from a nearby farm—is quite simply a way to spend some marginally productive time in the kitchen, preferably with my family and friends. Opening the jars and enjoying them later, I’m reminded of those fun times of tasting and talking, usually about food but also about music and politics and everything else that matters. In addition, taking on a kitchen project of a certain complexity, like canning or pickling or fermenting (or smoking meat or stuffing sausage or aging cheese), helps me remember what food was like when I was a kid and my mom and dad did these things, and what it might have been like when they were kids.

I don’t have to can things to keep my family in food—the power never goes out at my house for more than a couple days at a time, the winters are pretty darn temperate, and we can always just run out to a grocery store and get anything we need. I understand that canning isn’t really economical in most cases. If I didn’t put up a dozen jars of strawberry jam each spring, I don’t think I’d end up buying a dozen jars throughout the year to fill the void; I’d just eat something else. The point is, preserving food—and thinking of delicious ways to use those preserves—is fun.

What You Can Preserve

Lower-sugar jams and preserves: The jams and fruit preserves in this book are all quite low in sugar, simply because I think looser, less-sweet spreads taste better than sticky, cloying ones. Most contain fresh lemon juice, which is added primarily for flavor but also to up the acid content a bit. The jams and preserves have a remarkably intense fruit flavor because excess water is cooked out rather than gelled with store-bought pectin.

Easygoing, naturally gelled jellies: My own homemade jellies would never win any awards, that’s for sure, unless the judges were tasting blindfolded. Most of the time I can’t be bothered with using a jelly bag to strain the cooked fruit juice slowly (I use a very fine sieve), or letting the strained juice sit overnight in the refrigerator to let it clear up. So my jellies tend to be a little cloudy. I think they’re pretty enough, and they taste great, so who cares if they’re not absolutely sparkling clear? Because I don’t use store-bought pectin, all the gelling action comes from the fruit itself or from tart Granny Smith apples, which do need a fair amount of sugar to gel properly. Banning pectin limits jelly options somewhat, yes, but I consider jelly to be an occasional luxury anyway, unlike everyday jams and preserves.

Real pickles: Here you’ll find everything from refrigerator pickles in vinegar brines that will last a few weeks or months in the fridge and don’t need any processing, to canned quickly brined pickles that will last a year in the pantry, to long-fermented pickles made sour by fermentation, to Indian and Middle Eastern–style “pickles” such as citrus preserved in salt. Most pickles are low in sugar, but not low in salt (which I fervently adore) or delicious tanginess, whether it’s that sharp bite of the acetic acid in vinegar or the mellow tang of fermentation-produced lactic acid.

Eminently useful frozen ingredients: As opposed to stuff you’ve just stashed in the freezer for no reason. (It’s okay. I do that too—all the time.)

Some practical dehydrated goods: Reducing bushels of the best tomatoes or new-crop apples to a couple jars’ worth of space on the pantry shelves is worthwhile if you have good ways to use that dried produce—even if it’s just as snacks and healthful lunchbox filler.

A Few Words about Ingredients

Vinegar: Be sure to use the type of vinegar called for in the recipe, or at least one with the same percentage of acidity, so that the finished pickle ends up with a pH below 4.6 and is safe to can in a boiling-water bath. Most of the pickle recipes specify cider vinegar or distilled white vinegar, both of which are generally 5 percent acidity—look on the bottle label to confirm the acidity before you use it—and so can be substituted for one another if necessary. (Cider vinegar, which I think tastes better than distilled white vinegar in most cases, may darken light-colored vegetables a bit.) If the recipe says to use a wine vinegar, again, check the label. Don’t use homemade vinegar for canned pickles, since it’s hard to know exactly how much acid it contains. Also, when a recipe says to boil the vinegar mixture, boil only for the amount of time specified and no longer; acetic acid evaporates more quickly than water does, and excess boiling can throw off the acidity of the brine.

Lemon juice: I exclusively use fresh lemon juice in fruit preserves, where its presence is needed mostly for flavor—fresh simply tastes better to me than bottled. In fig preserves, canned tomato products, and in vegetable pickles like the Baby Artichokes with Lemon and Olive Oil on this page and the Roasted Red Peppers with Lemon Juice on this page, lemon juice is added not primarily for its flavor but for its acidity. Because the acidity of fresh lemon juice varies somewhat (in my testing from a pH of around 2.8 to 3.0), to be absolutely safe you should use bottled lemon juice (whose pH is usually lower and more consistent than fresh, coming in at around 2.75 in my tests). In jellies, syrups, and acidulated foods, measure strained lemon or lime juice; for jams and other preserves, unstrained is fine.

Pure kosher salt: The pickle recipes here call for pure kosher salt (I used Diamond brand in developing these recipes), which contains no additives like anticaking agents or iodine, which can result in a cloudy brine. There should be only one ingredient listed on the salt container: salt. You can certainly use canning and pickling salt instead—it’s also pure—but because it’s finer-grained than kosher, use scant measures. If you don’t care about cloudiness, any old salt is fine.

Sugar: You’ll get the best results with white granulated pure cane sugar. You can try substituting unprocessed sugar or artificial sweeteners, but expect quite different preserves from the ones I describe. Some recipes use honey as a sweetener; this is done because the flavor of the honey is welcome in those particular foods. Agave nectar makes a decent low-glycemic alternative to honey, so use that if you wish. Folks trying to limit their refined-sugar intake should check out books specifically written for them; a great one is Canning and Preserving without Sugar, by Norma MacRae (see Further Reading, this page).

Produce: Use only top-quality fruit and vegetables. Canning and preserving will do absolutely nothing to improve sub-par produce. Don’t use any produce that exhibits signs of spoilage or disease. Imperfections are fine—just trim them off. Avoid using deadfall—tree fruit that has fallen to the ground—as it may be higher in pH than fruit picked from the tree; this is especially true for apples.

Citric acid: Available in most grocery stores and in the bulk spice sections of natural foods stores, using this powder is a good way to increase acidity without adding liquid or competing flavors. A must if you’re making tomato products.

Pickle Crisp: Look for this fine-granular calcium chloride in the canning-supplies section of the grocery store (it’s made by Ball). A little bit of it added to the jar when making raw- (aka fresh-) packed pickles will help the vegetables maintain their structure and crispness. Worried about something called “calcium chloride”? Don’t be: It’s a natural salt, and the same stuff that’s used in most of the tofu sold in this country.

A Few Words about Pectin

Pectin is a natural substance found in the cell walls of fruits and vegetables in varying amounts. Pectin comes into play when making jams, preserves, and jellies because without sufficient pectin (and enough sugar and acid to react with it), the liquid won’t thicken and gel. This is fine if you don’t mind thin, syrupy preserves and liquid jellies, but if you want a nice, spreadable preserve, you’ll need to consider the pectin content of the fruit or fruits you’re using. Fruits with very high pectin content include green apples (used extensively in this book, in several ways), citrus, quince, cranberries, some blackberries, and some plums. Fruits that are underripe and a little hard have more pectin than ripe fruit; in most jams, preserves, and jellies, a combination of about a quarter underripe fruit (for the pectin) and three quarters ripe fruit (for flavor and natural sweetness) is ideal. Pectin is most concentrated in the cores and seeds, rinds and peels, and membranes of fruit, so wherever possible I find ways to use whole fruit. Sometimes that means including thin slices of lemon, or putting apple or citrus trimmings in a jelly bag or cheesecloth to cook with the fruit mixture to extract their precious pectin without actually including them in the preserve.

There are many kinds of commercially produced pectin, most of them derived from apples or citrus fruit (which are naturally high in pectin), that can be added to preserves made with fruits that are too low in pectin to gel on their own, and they all are reliable, albeit in a standardized way. If I were to recommend one over the others, it would be Pomona’s Universal pectin, which is activated by calcium (included in the box) rather than sugar, so with it you can make thick, spreadable jams with just a little sweetener or none at all. The Quick, High-Yield Strawberry Jam on this page relies on Pomona’s, which will give you some idea of how it is used.

That said, I don’t tend to use commercial pectin in my preserves, for a few reasons: First, I prefer the consistency of preserves that have set with homemade apple pectin or from the fruits themselves. These preserves are not rubbery or stiff or grainy. Second, simply because it is possible to make excellent, not-too-sweet fruit spreads without it. In fact, the method I describe here for making jams and preserves—in which the fruit and sugar are cooked briefly and then drained so that the syrup they produce can be cooked down and thickened (sometimes with chunks of green apple added) before the fruit is returned to the pan—results in preserves that have much more fruit flavor than in typical fruit products because there is no commercial pectin gelling excess water. They do not taste caramelized or sticky or heavy the way traditional long-boil preserves do, because the fruit solids themselves have not been cooked for long periods and because they contain less sugar.

How Preserving Works

How canning preserves food: The microorganisms that lead to food spoilage need certain conditions to survive: They need water, they need temperatures between about 40°F and 139°F, they need oxygen, and they need a low-acid environment. Most canned preserves and pickles have a water content sufficient to support the growth of microorganisms. So we can’t meet the first condition. Sterilizing the jars and heating the food to boiling for a certain length of time before it’s put into jars kills existing microorganisms, but of course canned foods are meant to be stored at room temperature, which is smack in the middle of the zone most conducive to the growth of new bacteria. So the second condition can’t be met if we want to line up our pretty jars in the pantry. That leaves the last two conditions, which, happily, can be dealt with.

Processing the filled jars—sealing them by means of a boiling-water bath—creates an anaerobic (airless) environment, a vacuum, in which microorganisms that might have found their way into the jars as they were being filled cannot survive. How is the vacuum formed? When the jars are put in the boiling-water bath and the food inside heats up, the food expands, forcing the air out the as-yet-unsealed lids. When the jars are removed from the canning pot and begin to cool, the food contracts, forming a vacuum as the lid contracts and seals tightly onto the rim of the jar. (Those popping sounds you sometimes hear as the jars are cooling are made by the dome-style lids contracting.) This not only prevents microorganisms from entering the jar, but also creates an inhospitable climate for any that are somehow still there: There’s no air in the jars.

Now, if it weren’t for the fact that the spores of certain microorganisms are both resistant to heat at the level that can be achieved in a boiling-water bath (212°F at sea level) and also thrive in anaerobic situations, we’d be all set. But there’s one more condition that even these spores need to survive: a low-acid environment, and here we take care of that, too. All of the canning recipes in this book are for high-acid foods—that is, foods that have a pH level below 4.6, which is sufficient to prevent the growth of microorganisms as well as the activation of their spores. Most fruits are naturally acidic, with the exception of some tropical fruits, like figs and ripe mangoes, and some tomatoes (see this page), so preserves made almost exclusively with fruit—jams, preserves, jellies, juices, and so on—will be high-acid foods. Vegetables are low in acid, but if acid is added in the correct amounts (as in pickles), they become acidic enough to preserve safely in a boiling-water bath.

Vegetables can be acidulated—pickled—in two ways: (1) acid can be added in the form of vinegar or a combination of vinegar (which contains acetic acid in varying percentages) and lemon juice (which contains citric acid), or (2) the vegetables can be fermented to the point where beneficial bacteria (primarily Lactobacillus) have converted the natural sugars present in the vegetables to lactic acid, thus lowering the pH to an acceptable level, below 4.6. (That said, you might actually be better off not canning fermented foods; see this page.) This is why it’s important that for pickled foods you do not change the proportions of vinegar to the other ingredients. Foods that ferment in salt or salt water are still preserved by means of the acid that’s created, but you need to use the amount of salt called for in the recipes to keep away harmful bacteria (which happen to dislike salty environments as well as acidic ones), making room for good bacteria to acidify and therefore preserve the food.

So there you go. Heating to kill off existing microorganisms, processing to create a vacuum and prevent introduction and growth of microorganisms, and using high-acid foods or acidulating those that are not in order to create an acidic environment that’s inhospitable to microorganisms.

How sugar preserves food: You might notice I didn’t say anything about sugar above. Sugar can act as a preservative if used in quantities high enough that the sugar replaces the microorganism-sustaining water in the food. Standard fruit preserves, jams, and jellies often contain enough sugar to at least slow the spoilage of opened jars, but not enough to stop it completely. Sugar is not, however, absolutely necessary in preserving fruit products in jars (despite what many sources imply). It is possible, for example, to can plain fruit in nothing but water or its own juice: The acid in the fruit, heat-processing, and an anaerobic environment are together sufficient to prevent spoilage. Fruit and fruit spreads canned without sugar tend to taste a little lifeless, it’s true, and will spoil more quickly after the jars are opened, so I recommend using at least some sugar in every fruit recipe here. Sugar is needed only to enhance the flavor of fruit preserves, to increase the quality of preserves (it helps fruit keep its shape in liquid and helps retain color), and to react with the natural pectins in fruit to create a gel.

There are a few recipes in the book in which sugar does act as a primary means of preservation: Candied Citrus Rind on this page, Crystallized Ginger on this page (the spice ginger is a rhizome and, like a vegetable, has a pH higher than 4.6, so it can’t be preserved without removing the water by drying or saturating it with sugar), the Pumpkin Chips on this page (pumpkin, too, is a vegetable), and the Carrot-Cardamom Sweet with Pistachios on this page (which is a refrigerator jam anyway).

How refrigerating preserves food: At temperatures of 40°F and below, as in a properly set refrigerator, growth of microorganisms that cause spoilage slows, though it doesn’t stop altogether. Refrigerator pickles—that is, vegetables that are acidulated but not processed and sealed in a jar in a canning pot—can last longer in the refrigerator than fresh refrigerated vegetables, simply because they are submerged in an acidic liquid in which spoilers won’t thrive.

How freezing preserves food: Growth of almost all microorganisms slows dramatically at temperatures below freezing, or 32°F, and stops at temperatures below that—0°F or lower is optimal for freezing food. That said, microorganisms are not actually killed by freezing, and any microorganisms that are present in frozen food can reactivate upon thawing. In addition, enzymes that are naturally present in foods can continue to break them down, if very slowly, at freezing temperatures. Blanching or cooking foods before freezing them will inactivate most of the enzymes and kill other spoilers.

How drying preserves food: This one’s easy: Microorganisms need water. Remove the water, and they meet a horrible end.

What You Need

All you really need for canning is a wide pan, a large pot, and a jar lifter. This is oversimplifying a bit, but it is true that you don’t need a lot of specialized equipment to make good preserves and pickles, and much of what you do need you probably already have.

Wide, 6- to 8-quart preserving pan: This is the pan you put your jams, jellies, and other preserves in to cook them. It should be wide so that the liquid has the maximum surface area for quick evaporation as it boils. If you must use a deeper, narrower pot, it will take longer for the preserves to thicken, and the fruit may overcook a bit and break down more than is ideal. It will still taste delicious, though, and I’ve made plenty of very good preserves in a deep pot, so if you don’t have the perfect pan, don’t let that stop you.

Your preserving pan should hold 6 to 8 quarts—any smaller and you run the risk of sticky, super-hot preserves boiling over. Never fill the pan more than about one third, as some preserves will boil up more than you might expect. (Don’t even ask how I learned this.)

Finally, the pot should be nonreactive, because every preserve you’re going to put in it will be acidic. Nonreactive means, preferably, heavy-bottomed stainless steel (shiny) or enameled cast iron (opaque white or cream). Don’t use aluminum, which can darken your preserves and impart an off taste. Some books recommend copper preserving pans, which conduct heat very well, but those will react with the acids in any fruit left in the pan for very long, so I’d avoid them.

The preserving pan I used to test all of these recipes is a 6-inch-tall, 9½-inch-diameter Vollrath 7-quart stainless-steel pot, with a very thick, heavy base and stainless-steel handles that only rarely get too hot to touch. It has a mirror finish that’s easy to clean, and the heavy bottom heats evenly, so preserves don’t stick or burn (unless I forget to stir them). It set me back sixty-six dollars at a restaurant-supply store, and it has been well worth the expense. Cheaper pots will do fine, of course, but if they’re lightweight, beware of hot spots and stir vigilantly to keep your preserves from burning.

Big pot for boiling-water-bath canning: In just about any hardware store or big-box emporium you can find one of those huge blue- or black-and-white-speckled enameled steel pots with a rack that fits inside to hold jars, but for most of the recipes in this book you don’t need one, and in fact I use mine only when I’m canning batches of more than four or five pint jars.

For most of my canning career, I used an 8½-inch-tall, 9-inch-diameter Lincoln Wear-Ever (read: inexpensive) aluminum 9-quart stock pot with a mismatched lid, and a rack made out of extra jar lid rings that I lashed together with little pieces of kitchen string (if you have a round stainless-steel cooling rack or trivet that fits in the bottom of the pot, that would be even better than jar lids). You don’t need a rack that you can lift up and down and hook onto the sides of the pot, like the ones that come with dedicated canning pots; it’s fine just to put the jars directly in the water on a rack on the bottom of the pot.

I could fit three standard quart jars, four pint jars, six half-pint jars, or seven 4-ounce jars in it, and various combinations of sizes. This smallish pot requires less water—and thus less heating time and energy—than those monster enamelware pots. In our last cross-country move, I lost that trusty Wear-Ever pot, but I was delighted to learn that smaller-size enameled steel canning pots with racks are now readily available. Look for the 12-quart size, which will serve you well for all of these recipes.

In any case, the pot you use must be deep enough so that water will cover your filled jars by at least an inch, boil, and not overflow. When I lived in a minuscule apartment in Manhattan, I would water-bath my filled cans in a stock pot so short that when the water was deep enough to cover the lids of the jars it came to the very top of the pot, which meant I had to watch it every second so that it wouldn’t splash over and extinguish the gas flame. I don’t recommend this. It’s unsafe in myriad ways.

Candy thermometer: Any kind will do for jam and jelly making, but after you’ve made a few batches you probably won’t even need it. Before you use it for the first time, put the tip in water at a full rolling boil and take the reading. If it’s not 212°F, the temperature at which water boils at sea level, note how many degrees off it is, and take that into account as you follow a recipe. Jelly cooked to 8°F above the boiling temperature of water will gel, so, for example, if your thermometer reads 208°F at boiling, your jelly will be ready at 216°F rather than 220°F at sea level.

For pasteurizing cucumber pickles, in which the water in the canning pot is maintained at 180°F for 30 minutes, you’ll definitely need a thermometer—the water gives no outward signs that it’s at that temperature.

Scale: In the canning and preserving recipes here, where it’s important that you use precise quantities (not only for safety but also so your preserves taste and look the way I’ve so evocatively described them), I’ve listed amounts for the main fruit or vegetable by weight rather than by volume. One person (say, my mom) can dice 3 pounds of strawberries and end up with 10 cups, while another person (me) can do it and get 9 cups. And one person can pick 5 oranges off their tree to get 3 pounds, then go next door and have to steal 7 of the neighbor’s oranges to get 3 pounds. It just makes more sense to weigh these things, and for that you’ll need a scale. Of course, if you’re buying your produce at a place where there are scales, you can just keep track of how much you buy and calculate from there to determine how much of it you’ll need for a particular recipe. The weights I provide are usually for uncut fruit.

Timer: Don’t rely on a clock and your memory. I’d even advise against using oven timers or cell phone alarms. You need a reliable, dedicated digital timer to accurately measure processing times. I’ve tried many, many models, and the best one I’ve found is a cheap one made by Taylor that I got at a grocery store. No frills is what you want, a simple intuitive design.

Jar lifter: For a long time, I just used a pair of stainless-steel tongs with rubber bands wrapped around the ends to move the hot jars around. This works fine, but certainly not as well as a tool specifically designed to lift jars. For my part, the purchase of a jar lifter made me a happier and more content individual, and I’d highly recommend you make the three-dollar investment yourself. You can find jar lifters in hardware stores and big-box stores that stock canning supplies. Note that if you’re using Weck jars (see Sources, this page), you might consider getting one of the Weck jar lifters that fit them just right.

Wide-mouth funnel: These too are sold wherever you can buy canning supplies, and it’s another tool I did without for a long time. It’s not absolutely necessary, but like a jar lifter, it will make your canning adventures brighter and more cheerful.

Very-fine-mesh sieve, bouillon strainer, or jelly bag: You’ll need one of these only if you’re making jelly or juice. I use a lower-end bouillon strainer, which looks like a conical colander or chinois made of an extremely fine wire mesh that keeps all but the tiniest bits from draining through. I got it at a restaurant-supply store for around twenty-five dollars—not cheap, but it’s made a huge difference in the ease with which I can now drain cooked fruit to get juice for jelly. Just set it over a deep bowl (I prop mine up between two chairs, and position the bowl on the floor underneath it), pour in the cooked fruit, and let it sit. You can stir the fruit gently to speed up the draining, but don’t press so hard as to push any solids through. The strainer works just as well as a jelly bag and is easier to use and clean.