Easy Canning

Venturing into the world of food preservation can be daunting. So let’s begin the conversation with something very old school and talk today about easy canning.

As I write this blog post, we are squarely in the middle of 2022, and a lot of us are working on growing gardens and learning about food preservation. If 2020 was the year everyone learned to bake bread, then this is the year we learn about easy canning methods.

Why do we can or preserve food?

Primarily, we can food to keep it from spoiling, and then have it to enjoy it later. Produce has a limited shelf life, so dehydrating, freezing, or an easy canning method is needed to safely preserve that food for later. Safely is the key point in this conversation.

Improperly preserving your food is not only a waste of ingredients and time, it’s dangerous. Improper canning can set up the perfect environment for something called botulism. It sounds scary, because it is. Our “friends” at the CDC define it as follows:

Botulism (“BOT-choo-liz-um”) is a rare but serious illness caused by a toxin that attacks the body's nerves and causes difficulty breathing, muscle paralysis, and even death. 

Ok. Read that again. Paralysis and death. These are not things you want to inflict on families or friends. Where does it come from? Improper canning methods.

So please don’t fool around when canning your food. I don’t want to scare anyone, but it’s literally life and death that you do this correctly.

Best Resources for Safe Canning Practices:

• As much as I’m not a fan of the CDC, they have good information and resources on food safety and home canning.
• The USDA publishes what many consider to be the Home Canning Bible, so take some time to review the information there. It’s very thorough and pretty interesting. Recipes are embedded in the information.

In a nutshell, botulism happens in a low acid, low oxygen environment. Different types of produce and other foods have different amounts of acid in their makeup. This is why some foods need to be pressure canned and some foods can be water bath canned. They are very different methods for different foods and varying amounts of shelf life. I use water bath canning recipes and that’s what we are going to talk about here. Water bath canning is reserved for high acid foods and pressure canning is required for low acid foods.

What is the best way to achieve easy canning nirvana?

• I recommend a small appliance called an electric water bath canner. (affiliate link) If you set up with large pots of boiling water on the stovetop, you run the risk of cracking a glass top stove, depending on how large the pot of water and jars is used.
• Use updated recipes from trusted sources and authors.

What surprised me about the Freshtech water bath canner?

• First of all, I was kind of shocked my how large an appliance it is. This thing is YUGE! 🤩
• It’s also heavy and well built.
• The multi cooker is easy to set up and use.
• Freshtech makes canning the recipes easy and canning multiple recipes in one day is more efficient than stove top canning.

It’s a quality appliance and now that I have it, I understand the price point. Though when I first found this canner it was only $99. That was in 2019 when I first became interested in canning my own jams. Then when 2020 rolled around, the canner went out of stock and it stayed out of stock until I found it again in early 2022. By that time, it was up to $150, which was a painful amount of money to spend on this, but now that I have it I do believe it’s worth the money.

Canning methods and recipes have come a LONG way.

I grew up on a small farm in the 70s and 80s. My dad grew a mega garden and we ate from it all year. We canned everything extra in wide mouth quart jars and used them all winter. I helped pick, prep, and process everything from tomatoes to hot peppers. And I absolutely hated it. Let me explain.

I loved the garden, but I despised the canning. And I didn’t love the food we ate from it.

Mom and dad pressure canned everything and loaded the jars with salt for a preservative. Everything was blasted into mush and the only flavor left was the salty brine the veggies were cooked in. And the actual processing was a chore. We had to prep literally bushels and bushels of produce. I snapped beans or shelled butter beans for hours on hot August afternoons in the barn day after day.

Ok, Patty, I thought you said this article was about EASY CANNING methods

While I understand this sounds over whelming, and you might be a little confused about where exactly the easy part comes in. Consider this; when you were 15 and started studying for your driver’s ed exams, didn’t it feel totally over whelming? Remember the abject terror you felt the first time you pulled into traffic on the road with all those unsuspecting drivers? But now you can do it without even thinking. Driving is like second nature, and you can easily scoot to the store for canning supplies and produce almost without even thinking about it.

The point is that trying to follow the rules of something new always feels like a LOT the first couple of times you do it. Canning is no different. In future posts we’ll talk exactly about the steps to follow to successfully and SAFELY water bath can.

How to successfully water bath can

• Work from tested and approved recipes. The books shared earlier and fantastic resources as is the Ball website.
• Have new or carefully inspected mason jars to use. That old pickle jar is not going to be safe for the temperature in a water bath canner, but you might be able to recycle a pasta sauce jar depending on the brand. Classico uses Mason jars in their packaging so if the jar is in good shape, you should be able to use it as a quart sized mason jar.
• Make sure to use quality lids, and do not reuse lids when water bath canning. Bands may be reused. I spend the extra money and buy only Ball brand lids. Too many people in canning groups report failures from using those cheap, made in China lids sold on Amazon. Do you really want to be in a situation where you are relying on your canned good to feed your family in an emergency only to realize all the lids have failed and all your hard work is spoiled?
• Follow the directions in the recipes exactly. Canning is even more exacting than baking! Each recipe will not only explain how to prepare the food, the recipe will included the canning times and instructions. Do not adjust this in any way. Also, do not double the recipe to save time.
• While you can tie up your stove and run a large burner for hours boiling water, you can also invest in the Canner appliance I recommended earlier. It’s perfect for multiple batches throughout the day and it keeps consistent temperatures. And it’s optimized to use less electricity than your stove top.
• Water bath canning is definitely easier than pressure canning. There are tons of different pressure canners and getting to and maintaining pressure can be tricky. I see people reporting these issues every week in my canning groups. But with water bath canning, you simply bring the water to simmer, submerge the prepared jars and boil for the specified time. With the Freshtech appliance, you literally turn the dial to prescribed setting and canner does the work for you.

I hope that clears up some misconceptions or confusion regarding the home canning process. This is the first article in a series on home canning and I do hope you will stick around for the coming articles. In future stories we’ll discuss the variety of jars available and what to use when, we’ll look at the tools needed for home canning and I’ll share a few of my favorite canning recipes. All from approved texts, of course!

Until then, happy gardening!