Apricot compote for the winter, prepared in the summer during the season when fruit can be bought at a very attractive price or even picked in your own garden, will serve as an excellent alternative to many store-bought juices and drinks.
Cooking tips
One of the features of making compote from apricots is the use of ripe, but at the same time dense and not overripe fruits for this purpose. If you want to use unripe fruits for compote, the drink made from them may have a bitter taste. And overripe apricots will certainly soften during heat treatment, and the compote will become not very beautiful, cloudy.
Apricot compote for the winter can be prepared from whole fruits, or from halves and even slices. But keep in mind that compote from whole apricots should be consumed first so that it is not stored for more than a year. With longer storage, a toxic substance, hydrocyanic acid, accumulates in the seeds.
To obtain especially tender fruits, apricots are peeled before storing. To make this easier, the fruits are first scalded with boiling water, after which the skin of the apricots comes off quite easily.
The best apricot compote recipes
The variety of recipes for making apricot compotes for the winter is great - choose according to your taste: from the simplest to the complex with various additives.
Classic of halves
Our grandmothers used this recipe to prepare apricot compote.
Prepare:
- 5-6 liters of purified water;
- 2.5 kg of apricots, pitted;
- 3 cups granulated sugar;
- 7 g citric acid.
You will also need glass jars of any size that are thoroughly cleaned of dirt and sterilized.
According to this recipe, the finished compote can be drunk immediately without diluting it with water.
Now you need to boil the syrup with sugar and citric acid, which acts both as an additional preservative and as a taste optimizer. Heat the water to a boil, add sugar and citric acid and boil for about 5-6 minutes. Carefully pour hot syrup into jars of fruit and place them for sterilization. Three-liter jars are sterilized in hot water for 20 minutes, two-liter jars for 15 minutes, and liter jars for 10 minutes.
After the procedure is completed, the jars are rolled up and left to cool in the room.
From whole apricots without sterilization
To make apricot compote according to this recipe, the fruits only need to be thoroughly washed and dried. If you calculate the ingredients for a three-liter jar, then you need to take from 1.5 to 2 kg of fruit, from 1 to 1.5 liters of water and about 300 grams of sugar.
Fill the jar with apricots and pour boiling water almost up to the neck.After 1-2 minutes, drain the water into a saucepan, add sugar and heat to 100°C and boil for 5-7 minutes.
Pour hot syrup and sugar over the apricots again and leave for 10-15 minutes. After which the syrup is carefully drained and brought to a boil again. After the third pouring of hot syrup over the fruit, they are immediately sealed and cooled.
Concentrated
Compote made according to this recipe, when consumed, will definitely need to be diluted with water two, or even three or four times. To do this, you must use only boiled or special drinking water.
The syrup is prepared thicker - take about 500-600 g of sugar for 1 liter of water. And fill the jars with apricots to about the height of your shoulders. In all other respects, you can proceed both in the recipe with and without sterilization - pouring boiling syrup over the fruits several times.
With nucleoli
Traditionally, jam is made with apricot kernels, but a thick concentrated apricot compote will also receive additional flavor from the kernels.
Apricots must first be divided into halves, pitted and the kernels extracted.
The kernels should be sweet and tasty, almost like almonds. Fill the jars with fruit halves, sprinkling them with kernels up to half - ¾ of the container's volume. After which the syrup is boiled as usual (500 g of sugar is added to 1 liter of water). Pour hot syrup over the apricots and sterilize them as indicated in the first recipe.
With honey
Apricot compote with honey is a special recipe for those with a sweet tooth, since even not too sweet fruits in this compote acquire a truly honey taste and aroma.
The apricots are divided into halves, the pits are removed, and the fruit is placed in sterilized jars, filling them approximately halfway. In the meantime, the syrup for pouring is being prepared: 750 grams of honey are taken per 2 liters of water. Everything is mixed, brought to a boil, and the resulting honey syrup is poured into the fruits in jars. After which the jars are sterilized according to the instructions from the first recipe.
With rum without sterilization
Lovers of everything unusual will definitely appreciate the recipe for apricot compote with the addition of rum. If this drink cannot be found anywhere, then it can be replaced with cognac. For 3 kg of apricots you will need about 1.5 liters of water, 1 kg of granulated sugar, and about 1.5 tablespoons of rum.
First, you will have to remove the skin from the apricots.
The skin peels off on its own after these procedures. All that remains is to carefully cut the fruits into two parts and remove them from the seeds.
The subsequent preparation method is extremely simple. The fruits are carefully placed in liter glass jars and filled with hot sugar syrup. At the very end, a little teaspoon of rum is added to each jar. The jars are immediately screwed on, turned upside down and left to cool completely.
Compote of apricots and cherries
According to some housewives, the simplest recipe for making apricot compote for the winter is the following.
First you need to find the following ingredients:
- 4 kg apricots;
- 2 kg cherries;
- 1 small bunch of mint;
- 6-8 liters of water;
- 5 cups white sugar;
- 8 g citric acid.
Rinse the apricot and cherry fruits well, remove twigs and other contaminants and place them on a towel to dry. It is not necessary to remove the seeds.
Thoroughly sterilize suitable sized jars and metal lids.
Place apricots and cherries in sterile jars, filling them from 1/3 to 2/3, depending on what concentration of compote you want to get. Mix water with sugar and citric acid and, bringing to a boil, boil a little; at the very end of cooking, add mint chopped into small sprigs. Pour the boiling syrup over the jars of fruit until the syrup practically pours out of them. Immediately screw the jars with hot sterile lids, turn them over and, wrapping them in warm clothes, set them to cool.
In the same way, you can prepare apricot compote for the winter with the addition of various berries: black and red currants, gooseberries, strawberries, cranberries, lingonberries and others.
Apricot and plum compote
But if you want to make compote from apricots with plums, then it is better to cut both fruits into two halves and separate the seeds from them before placing them in a jar. Then you can proceed in exactly the same way as described above. In halves, the fruit will look more aesthetically pleasing and will release more juice and aroma, giving the compote a beautiful color.
With frozen berries
Apricots ripen at different times depending on the variety, and their ripening time does not always coincide with the period of ripeness of other berries and fruits that you would like to use to prepare compote for the winter. In this case, apricot compote can be prepared using even frozen berries.In this case, they act somewhat differently.
Apricots are prepared in the traditional way: washed and dried on a paper towel. It is advisable not to specifically defrost frozen berries, but only rinse them several times in a colander in water at room temperature, after which they will remain cold, but the ice will already be gone from them.
Apricots are laid out in jars and sprinkled with sugar on top, based on one liter jar - 200 grams of sugar. At the same time, the berries are placed in a separate pan and filled with water. For each liter jar you should expect to use about 0.5 liters of water. The number of berries can be arbitrary and depends on your taste and capabilities. The berries are brought to a boil in water, and then carefully laid out evenly among the jars of apricots, pouring water on top. The jars are covered with lids and set aside for 15-20 minutes to soak. Then, through a special lid with holes, the liquid is poured back into the pan and brought to a boil again. Apricots and berries are poured with hot liquid again and this time they are finally sealed with heated and sterilized lids.
A beautiful and tasty assortment of apricots and berries is ready for the winter.
From dried apricots
Many happy garden owners dry apricots for the winter in the form of dried apricots or apricots, while others like to buy and enjoy them in the cold season. If you did not have time to prepare apricot compote in the summer during the fruit ripening season, then you always have the opportunity to pamper yourself and your family by preparing a delicious apricot compote from dried apricots at any time in late autumn, winter or spring.
200 grams of dried apricots is enough to prepare 2-2.5 liters of delicious compote.The dried apricots must be sorted, rinsed well in cold water, and then scalded with boiling water in a colander.
Take a three-liter enameled or stainless metal pan, pour scalded dry apricots into it, fill it with 2 liters of cold water and place on medium heat.
When the water boils, add 200-300 grams of sugar to the water, depending on the initial sweetness of the dried apricots. Apricots must be allowed to boil for at least 5 minutes. If the fruit is very dry, the cooking time can be increased to 10-15 minutes.
Then the prepared compote should be covered with a lid and allowed to brew.
Conclusion
Preparing apricot compote will not take you much time, but it will allow you to enjoy a natural drink in winter with the alluring aromas of summer, which can decorate both a regular lunch and any holiday feast.
