Mango Preserves

Posted by:

Julie

On:

June 21, 2024

Food, Recipes, Recipes

Instant Pot, mango, preservation, recipe

06/21/24

Though I get tired of the rain and mud, there’s one thing I do like about this time of year: it’s MANGO SEASON! My parents have 4 trees on their property and they are already dropping like crazy. Every time I visit, Mom sends me home with a bag. Last week I made a delicious mango chutney, but I didn’t make very much and it only lasted a few days. This time I wanted to use the Instant Pot to steam can mango preserves. Then we can have mangos long after the season ends.

I ended up making this at Mom and Dad’s house, for 3 reasons:

1. They have AC.

2. The Instant Pot needs a lot of power and this week has been cloudy.

3. There have been flies in my outdoor kitchen. They aren’t bad if you’re only out there for a few minutes, but they really like mangos and after 10 minutes of cutting mangos they become intolerable. Bees start showing up too. FUERA! (OUT!)

I modified a basic recipe: 4 cups of chopped mangos, simmered in a pot with 1 cup monk fruit (instead of sugar), the juice of 4 tiny limes (also from my mom’s tree), and sprinkled in some cinnamon and ground cloves. The mangos we’re already pretty ripe and mushy so after stirring for about 20 minutes they were ready for canning.

Canning mango preserves in tiny half-pint jars.

I learned how to steam can in an Instant Pot from a blog called Frieda Loves Bread, and I still pull her posts up so I remember how to do it correctly:

This article explains the concepts of Instant Pot canning.

And this article gives a step-by-step on making jam using an Instant Pot. The recipe I used had a processing time of 15 minutes.

One very important step is: when you fill the jars, they must be hot like the mangos we just cooked. Normally I drop them in the Instant Pot with some water and set it to Sterilize. Works great! This time I did not because the jars were brand new Ball Mason jars, recently delivered by Amazon Mexico. So Mom popped them in the microwave for 30 seconds so they’d be close enough to temperature.

After following the directions, we ended up with 10 tiny jars of mango preserves. They are delicious. Lurko likes them, but he liked the mango chutney more. It’s still early in the season, so at some point I’ll sterilize some pint jars and make more chutney. And when I make that, I’ll post another article. 🙂