Canning At Home – Tips For True Beginners

When you’re new to canning food at home, the entire process is often intimidating. Not only does it take an honest little bit of time and space within the kitchen, but there’s also that worry that you’ll roll in the hay wrong and obtain sick later.

I wont to feel an equivalent way. But once I’d skilled the method a few times, I noticed it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Remember this:

When you’re just beginning to can at home, you don’t need to attempt to fill your whole pantry. It’s okay to figure in small batches until you get easier canning and find a couple of favorite recipes.

HOW CANNING WORKS

Don’t be intimidated by the canning process. within the simplest recipes, it’s really just a matter of boiling your jars during a water bath canner to heat the interior contents and destroy any harmful bacteria.

Once out of the boiling water, the lids on your jars create a vacuum seal as they cool and may be stored during a cool dark place for months or years.

CANNING AT HOME: BASIC SUPPLIES

Canning fresh produce may be a very cost-effective thanks to preserving your harvest and refill on your favorite seasonal items to be used year-round. to urge started, you only need a couple of, inexpensive canning supplies. 

So which canning supplies are the foremost essential and which of them are optional?

MUST HAVE CANNING SUPPLIES

Water bath canner 

Canning Books and Recipes 

Canning carpenter’s kit 

Mason Jars

OPTIONAL CANNING SUPPLIES

Jam and Jelly Maker

Pressure Canner and Cooker

SUPPLIES REQUIRED FOR CANNING reception 

Canning may be a good way to enjoy healthy, nutritious foods throughout the year. It allows you to preserve everything your garden has got to offer throughout the year and cash in of products you discover at the farmers market.

WHY you would like A WATER BATH CANNER

Two reasons: size and therefore the jar rack.

The large size means you’ll can the maximum amount as possible at a time. and therefore the jar rack is often lifted and rest along the sides of the pot for straightforward placement of your jars.

It remains in situ during canning to stop the glass jars from touching rock bottom of the pot. Why is that this important?

Because having the glass direct contact with rock bottom of the pot may cause your jars to bust open! Let me tell you that’s not something you would like to wash up. For that reason alone it’s well worth investing during a proper water bath canner.

When the water bath process is completed, you’ll lift the rack with the cans out of the water for easier removal. The jar rack gives you more control over the warmth and jars, leading to better overall canning results.

CANNING RECIPE BOOKS

Everyone knows that Ball is one of the most important names within the canning world. once they publish a book on canning, it’s something worth listening to, and therefore the newest edition of this canning reference doesn’t disappoint.

Yes, there are tons of free resources about canning available online, but there’s just something about having an enormous book sitting on your kitchen counter that you simply can reference throughout the canning process. It’s also nice to possess and look around for inspiration when you’re facing an enormous batch of products that must be put up.

CANNING TOOLS KIT

If you’re new canning, the thought of handling hot jars submerged in boiling water is often pretty terrifying. Grabbing hot, wet, slippery canning jars together with your kitchen tongs and wrestling them out of the pot and onto a folded towel on the counter does sound a touch dangerous.

Make sure you’ve got a canning kit that has jar tongs in your canning supplies. These special little tongs wrap around the jar, making it easy and safe to handle even the most well-liked canning jars.

You also get a group of kitchen tongs for lifting canning lids out of the pot when boiling them to sterilize and handling hot food that must get into the jars and a magnetic lid lifter for pulling the can lids out safely.

Another essential for your canning supplies, the included funnel makes it easy to pour liquids into jars without the danger of spilling it everywhere the jar and therefore the counter. The funnel is good and wide, making it easy to pour chunky things without making an enormous mess.

When you’re canning, you would like to tighten lids after you get the recent jars from the water bath. The included jar wrench is far safer and easier to use than grabbing some kitchen towels to tighten the lids. 

CANNING JARS

Who doesn’t love mason jars? they’re, of course, great for his or her intended purpose, but there are many other uses for these essential canning supplies.

Use ball mason jars as drinking glasses, flower vases, storing leftover food, carrying lunch to figure, and more. Older jars that are past their canning prime often become all kinds of arts and crafts around the house.

Ball is the hottest brand when it involves canning and mason jars. additionally to canning, they’re an excellent storage solution for the freezer also.

With more and more health concerns shooting up about plastic storage containers and therefore the risk of contamination into the foods we eat, some homesteaders feel safer using glass instead. Ball jars have yet to interrupt on me within the freezer or within the canner, which is vital in my book.

It’s important to notice that when you freeze a jar you ought to not use it for canning.

When you start to form things like freezer jam, or use jars as freezer containers, keeping good track of what can enter the freezer and what’s used just for canning is vital.

HOME CANNING BEGINNER TIP:

Before you begin to can anything, believe the serving sizes you finish up using for any particular food. 

For example, if you employ only half a jar of pasta sauce at a time, then struggle to use it all up before it goes bad, pick a smaller jar once you make, and may your own. 

The same goes for jelly. If you’re not an enormous jelly or jam eater, make small batches and may them in little half-pint jars. this enables you to still make a spread of various fruit preserves and more importantly, it makes sure that jelly stays tasty to the last bite.

Ball mason jars are available an enormous sort of size also as regular and wide mouth jars. you’ll get them organized straight from Amazon and have them delivered to your front entrance.

OPTIONAL HOME CANNING SUPPLIES

AUTOMATIC JAM AND JELLY MAKER

If you’re keen on your baker and rice cooker, you’re getting to love the Ball automatic jam and jelly maker. It’s one among those nifty little appliances which will prevent tons of your time and energy.

This fancy-do-dah electric appliance heats, stir and cooks a batch of homemade jelly or jam on autopilot. You add the ingredients, turn it on, and are available back to yummy jam, able to pour into canning jars.

From there, you’ll process the jars during a predicament canner, freeze the finished fruit preserves, or simply start eating it.

This will are available very handy for anyone that loves making homemade jelly but features a hard time standing at the stove stirring pots for long periods of your time. 

OTHER WAYS TO USE THE JELLY MAKER

While this is often marketed as a jam and jelly maker, it’s actually tons more versatile than that. Essentially, it’s an electrical cooker with built-in stirring paddles.

When you check out it that way, it exposes all kinds of cooking possibilities. Use it to form pasta sauce, small batches of soup, or any sort of sauce that involves tons of cooking and stirring. Now it’s a way more versatile and usable small home appliance.

The Ball Automatic Jam and Jelly Maker may be a small appliance that won’t take up any longer room than your slow cooker on the kitchen counter. It’s also pretty light-weight, making it easy to maneuver it from the cupboard to the counter and back. 

No matter how busy you’re, you’ll activate this jelly maker and have it look out of the cooking and stirring for you leaving no excuse to not have fresh homemade jam on the table.

DO YOU NEED A PRESSURE CANNER?

Some foods, like low acid vegetables and meats, aren’t safely canned during a water bath canner. In those instances, you would like a pressure canner.

A pressure canner effectively raises the temperature of the canned contents to 240 degrees Fahrenheit which is high enough to kill the organism that causes botulism. Water bath canning, on the opposite hand, only raises the temperature to 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

This is fine for acidic foods and jellies because the Clostridium bacteria cannot survive during a low pH environment. But if you would like to can your veggies without pickling them, you would like to use a pressure canner.

Instead of being submerged in boiling water, a pressure canner uses steam to push all the air out of your canned foods and fill the space with boiling water and steam at much higher temps than are often achieved with a water bath canner. Since there’s no air within the jar, the warmth is distributed evenly to all or any parts of the jar.

Canning At Home – Tips For True Beginners

Leave a Reply

Scroll to top

Discover more from DIY Gardens

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading