Common wisdom is that if you want to save money, you shouldn't buy ingredients to make your own preserves, pickles, or relishes. While in many cases that's certainly true, I've found several instances where it did save me money to make some of my own preserves using store-bought ingredients.
One of my favorites is tomato salsa. I make my salsa with almost exclusively purchased ingredients, including the tomatoes. I use canned, whole tomatoes that I buy in institutional-sized cans (known as #10 cans). I can get about 7 or 8 pints of salsa using 1 #10 can of tomatoes (cost me $3.10 to $3.50 a #10 can). I also buy the onions in bulk (50-lb sacks, at about 20 cents/lb), and jalapeno peppers (under $1 a pound). The other ingredients include garlic or garlic powder, salt, chili powder, vinegar, oregano (I grow), cilantro (I grow), and red pepper flakes (sometimes use those free packets that you can ask for with a pizza purchase). 7 to 8 pints of salsa cost me about $4 to make, or about 50 cents per pint jar, which is about 1/3 the cost of the cheapest commercial salsa at my local Walmart.
I love, love, love blueberry preserves. Bit I don't like the price so much. Walmart sells Smucker's Blueberry Preserves (18-oz jar) for $2.68. Bonne Maman 13-oz Wild Blueberry Preserves are even pricier at $4.34. I can buy a 10-oz bag of frozen blueberries at Dollar Tree for $1 ($1.60/lb) or a 40-oz bag of frozen, wild blueberries at Walmart for $4.88 ($1.95/lb). A 10-oz bag of frozen blueberries contains about 1 1/2 cups. So, using the Dollar Tree blueberries, I need 2.66 bags of blueberries, about 5 1/4 cups of sugar, 3 oz of pectin, and 2 tablespoons lemon juice (lemon zest in strips is also nice). This makes about 48 ounces of preserves for a cost of about $3.50 to $3.75, or the equivalent of $1.31 to $1.40 for an 18 ounce portion, half the price of Smucker's Blueberry Preserves. A comparable amount of wild blueberries (if I wanted to go the Bonne Maman Wild Blueberry Preserves route) would cost an additional 58 cents per batch, or $1.10 to $1.17 per 13-oz jar. That's almost 1/4 of the cost of Bonne Maman preserves.
You may recall that I make watermelon rind pickles, using the white portion of the watermelon rind. This part of the melon would otherwise be discarded, so I consider it to be free to me. However, I do have to buy sugar, spices, and vinegar to make those sweet and tangy pickles. If you can find watermelon rind pickles in your store, you'll see that they run about $4.75 to $5.00 for a 10-oz jar, or $7.60/16 oz. Even if I compared the price of homemade watermelon pickles to a more ordinary pickle, such as a bread and butter cucumber pickles, the least expensive jar of B & B pickles at my Walmart costs $1.84/24 oz. My homemade watermelon rind pickles cost me about 25 cents/16 oz (or 37 cents/24 oz).
Pickled carrots are another good example of making a pickle frugally with store-bought ingredients. I can buy carrots in 25-lb bags for under 40 cents per pound. The vinegar, spices, and sugar are also pretty inexpensive, so these pickles are a bargain to make and yet so nice to add to winter meals. Most of us likely wouldn't buy pickled carrots. So, a better cost comparison to the homemade pickled carrots is once again, the bread and butter cucumber pickles. Homemade carrot pickles cost me about 65 cents for a 16-oz jar, or 97 cents for a 24-oz comparison (to Walmart's B & B pickles) portion.
The trick to making preserves, pickles, and salsas inexpensively is to look for the main ingredient to be inexpensive to begin with, such as canned tomatoes, fresh carrots, to-be-discarded watermelon rind, or frozen blueberries. Sometimes this means buying in institutional-sized packages, other times on sale or from a discount store, or even buying "seconds" or imperfect produce. There are a couple of bonuses to making preserves and salsas with store-bought ingredients. One, even if it's a bad garden year, I can still make some much-enjoyed extras for our winter table. And two, I can make most of these preserves in the off-season, too, when I'm not overwhelmed with other end-of-summer tasks.
Do you have any favorite frugal canning recipes that rely mostly on ingredients from the store? Please share!
