Canning
Being a city girl, the only canning I knew of was using a can opener to open a store bought can of food.
The first year I started canning, I purchased the “Ball Blue Book of Canning” and to this day it remains my canning bible and good friend. It started falling apart years ago and I replaced it with a new edition, but I still use my original book because of the many margin notes and side remarks I’ve added over the years.
My first experience with canning was with corn. I was going to pressure can the corn just like the book said, but after all the horror stories I heard of a canner exploding and food shooting everywhere, I was afraid to stay in the kitchen with it, so I went outside for awhile until I got up the nerve to see it through. By the way, that was some of the best corn I had ever tasted.
Canning is a lot of work, but it is also so worth the sweat and effort; just looking at all the food you put up and the satisfaction of the security it brings.
Get a good reference book on canning.
When placing the metal lids in a pan of water to simmer, always alternate the way they are placed in the pan (one with the top metal up, the other with the sealing ring up). This way it is much easier to pick up the lids with tongs; or use a canning tool with a magnet on one end.
When using a pressure canner, before you put the lid on and secure down, make sure the hole for the steam escape is clear by looking up at it to the light. If your canner uses a rubber gasket, check that it is still in good condition.
When processing food in a pressure canner or boiling water bath, tighten the metal screw bands before placing them in the canner snugly, but do not over-tighten.
Always put a lid on the pot when processing in a boiling water bath as it makes the water boil SO much faster.
After the processing time has ended and the pressure is down, slowly open the canner being aware of the steam, take the jars out of the canner, placing on a table, and put towels over the jars so they can cool down slowly.
When the jars have sealed and cooled down, (usually the next day) remove the screw bands, wipe the jars for any reside or stickiness and write on the flat metal lid with a permanent marker the contents and date.
Occasionally a jar will not seal, so after it has cooled, you can reprocess it, or just put it in the refrigerator for immediate consumption.
Store the jars in a cool dry place and your proudly canned food should keep for many years. Every so often, test the jar seal by tapping the metal lid to see if it has popped up, meaning the seal has been broken. When that happens, discard the food and wash the jar for your next batch of yummy food.
Never reuse the metal canning lid for canning food. If you are just storing food in a canning jar, use can reuse the lid for that purpose.
Here's a Pictorial of the Process
Start with a pan full of something; here, we have several pounds of ground beef, cooked in a roaster.
Load up several jars, based on your pressure cooker’s capacity, ladle in hot water, and clean the rims. We often add a pinch of dried onion flakes and sometimes a beef bullion cube.
Meanwhile, you have some lids simmering. This sanitizes the lid and softens the seal. Here we’re using a plastic lifter – this thing has a very weak magnet and the tool makes lifting a hot metal lid from barely boiling water easy.
Load the canner. Notice the metal shelf on the bottom; this is necessary to keep the glass jars off of the bottom of the canner.
Then add the second metal shelf/separator.
And add the rest of the jars. We try to make each canner run full of jars, especially given the amount of heat and time it takes to run the canner. Times vary by food, but you can count on 60-90 minutes of cook time, followed by some cooling down time, and then leaving the jars covered by a towel. Because of this, we like to make every effort to ensure the canner is full of jars, so we have no wasted space.
Our canner uses no silicone gasket and we like this better. The aluminum lid is beveled and around the circumference, there are locking bolts with knobs as seen here. The trick is to set the lid on evenly, and tighten the knobs evenly. I bend over and look horizontally across the canner to get it close before tightening. If you tighten the lid crooked, the lid may not seal properly and you’ll get a lot of hissing and steam escaping as the canner heats up and the pressure increases.
Here we’re preparing Normady vegetables with some season salt.
Some jars with veggies ready to go. Notice the stainless steel wide mouth funnel. This little guy makes getting the jars loaded easy and fun. Trying to load jars with just a ladle is messy.
Here’s the canner with the pressure gauge visible. Notice the little vent on the right. The steam escapes here, and once the canner is up to temperature, you drop on a round weighted metal disk, which has a couple of markings for various pressures. This weight is properly calibrated to rattle and vent off excess pressures above a certain amount.
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