All I Want for Christmas is a Canner

Water bath canning the last two jelly jars.

I'm taking up a new hobby next year... pressure canning.  I already water bath can, but I want to expand into an entirely new area.  With water bath canning, I can preserve fruits, jellies, and pickles.  Believe me, I make some awesome jelly.  This year marks the first year I managed to to preserve enough triple berry jelly to meet the demands of 3 grown kids well into the fall.  I still have some down in the basement.  Every time the kids come home, they raid the closet and trade another couple of full jars for their empty ones.

I want to learn how to pressure can foods.  This means I'll be able to preserve foods that are lower in acid.  For the past few years, I've been depending upon the freezer for long term storage, but I'd like to reduce my dependence upon the freezer.  It does eat up some energy, and I'd like to cut down on my consumption of electricity.  Low acid canned foods are not have enough acid to cut down on bacterial growth - you know - the bacteria that causes fun things like botulism.

The pressure in the canner allows the temperature inside of the jars of food to go above 240*-250*.  This temperature, combined with time, should kill the botulism spores that can thrive in that anaerobic environment that exists inside of those jars.

A batch of jelly.

I've been searching for Home Extension classes next year to learn how to can.  I plan on following the Ball Blue Book of canning, but even so, I still really would like to have someone hold my hand and walk me through how to can.  If anybody who reads this happens to live in the Mid-Atlantic region and knows of a canning class offered through their home extension service or their local community college, could you please let me know in the comments?

There are so many pressure canners out there to choose from.  Does anybody have any recommendations on what kind of pressure canner works best for them?  I'd love to hear your opinions!

Making Ketchup

Over the weekend, I decided that I was going to take the last of the tomatoes and make them into ketchup.

How hard could that be? I asked....

Turns out, not only is it hard, it's a pain in the behind.

This is the recipe that I followed:

The directions didn't look that hard, and I had all of the ingredients on hand.  I do love me my ketchup, and the thought of having ketchup without high fructose corn syrup is an appealing thought.

So, I put the tomatoes into a pot, and began to stew them down.  And they stewed, and they stewed.  4 hours later, and I still had a very, very thin sauce that looked like water.  No thickness whatsoever.  3 hours later, everything finally thickened up - and I felt as if I had a batch of applesauce - but made from tomatoes, instead.

This - THIS - is the final result of my 6 hours of effort and electricity.  I'm going to use this as BBQ sauce on some chicken later this week.

I don't know where I went wrong.  I don't know what I did wrong.  For now, I think I'll stick to the stuff in a bottle that's full of high fructose corn syrup.  The quest continues...

Canning Salsa

With the arrival of 25 pounds of tomatoes, and then the very unexpected arrival of 10 pounds of green beans and potatoes, I've been overwhelmed with fresh produce this week!  Don't get me wrong, it's a very good thing!  Some of it, we've eaten.  The rest of it, we're putting up to enjoy this winter.

Canning is a wonderful process by which you can store your own home grown goodness to enjoy over the winter.  There are both pros and cons to canning.  No matter what, you do need to be very, very careful when canning anything.  Botulism thrives in the anaerobic environment that exists in home canned items.  The USDA has published guidelines, that are updated every year on how to safely can food.  Patrice Lewis, at Rural Revolution, has also produced some excellent guides to home canning.  If you're interested in finding out more, I highly recommend reading what she has written about safely canning items.  I rely heavily upon the Ball Blue Book of Canning for my recipes. 

I do not pressure can.  But I do water bath can.  Jams, jellies, pickles, and salsa are among my favorite things to can!

The recipe for the version of salsa that I made this past weekend came from the Ball Canning Website, and can be found here: http://www.freshpreserving.com/recipes/zesty-salsa.

Chilling in the cool water.

One of the best parts of the tomato preparation process is blanching them in order to slip their skins off.  You drop the tomatoes into a pot of boiling water for a minute or two, and then pull them out and put them into a bowl of cold water.  The shock causes the skins to slip right off of the tomatoes, and chopping them is a breeze.  Unless if you have some stubborn tomatoes, in which case you have to score the skin with a knife in order to get the skins to peel back.  I save the skins and use them to make tomato soup. (Because that's the kind of weirdo I am.  My Mom grew up during the depression, and she taught this girl how to use EVERYTHING to it's full potential. 

Just one of the green peppers.

While I was waiting for the water to boil, I began chopping the green peppers. Choppy, choppy.  this is the first rough cut.  After I took the picture, I used Knifey to go back over the peppers once more- once crosswise, from bottom to top, and once up and down from side to side.

I added the peppers to the pot, and then the tomatoes started coming out of their bath, and I roughly chopped them up and added them into the pot.  The tomatoes fall apart relatively easily in the cooking part of the salsa.

I must admit that I cheat here a bit.  I have a mini-food processor. It doesn't do a lot, but it does come in very handy for some things.  This is one of those things.  Into the mini food processor, I added the jalapenos, cut in half, with seeds removed, the vinegar, the peeled garlic, and the cilantro.  Spinny, spinny, whirly, twirly, and everything was nicely chopped with a minimum of frustration on my part!
(I don't add hot sauce, and this is the point when your kitchen will become very fragrant!)

Onions were chopped and added, and we began cooking down the salsa.  According to the recipe, they salsa is supposed to come to a boil and then simmer for about 10 minutes.  I don't like to bring salsa to a boil too fast.  Bad experiences there, resulting in a pot of salsa - salsa and pot - having to be thrown out.  So, I cook over med-high heat so that the salsa doesn't burn.

While the salsa was cooking, I got the deep water bath heating for the jars, removed the jars from the dishwasher, and sterilized the lids.

Once the salsa had bubbled away for 10 minutes, I added it to the jars, wiped the rims, added the lids & bands, and began processing the whole shebang in the water bath canner.

The entire process - beginning to the last, gorgeous jar of salsa took me no more than 3 hours.  Of course, I've had a lot of practice slicing and dicing - One of my college jobs was slicing and dicing vegetables for a restaurant.  From reading the comments, it looks as if some people spent 4 hours along with chopping.  Take some short cuts here, people!  If you have a full size food processor, I believe you can use it to chop up your peppers and onions FOR you!  Even better, get a friend or two to help you so that you can whip through the canning faster, and then all of you can split the spoils at the end of the day!
 

Jelly and Jam

I love making jelly and jam this time of year!  The fruit comes in so fast, I can barely keep up with it.

I tend to dedicate one day a week to jelly making.  And I really only make it at this time of the year.  My family only likes one kind of jam: triple berry.  A delicious concotion of Strawberry, Blueberry, and Raspberry, it is irresistible.  I stumbled upon the recipe not long after we moved into this house.  I had planted a stawberry bed, and we had an unbelievable number of blue- and rasp- berry bushes growing in the back yard. I found a recipe for triple berry jam in the Sure-Jel box when I was looking to make some strawberry jelly.  I figured I had nothing to lose, and an instant family favorite was born!

Jam really doesn't take much time to make.  It's an investment of a morning, or an entire day if you're really into it and making huge batches all at once.  You do need sugar, and you do need hours of uninterrupted time.  You aren't going to be able to leave to go to the store in the middle of the process, because once you lose your momentum, you just won't be able to get back into the jelly making.

We use our jelly all year long.  It goes onto our toast.  I buy only vanilla yogurt at the store, and we add a couple of Tablespoons of jam to the yogurt, stir, and I swear to you, it truly is the best yogurt you've ever had!  You know exactly what went into that jam, and you were the quality control agent, cooking and canning it on the same day - or the day after you picked it.  I don't care what you say, store bought jelly just can't hold a candle to home canned jelly.

You do have to make a one time investment in canning jars.  And you have to invest in lids.  But, considering I've been using some of these jars of ten years now, it was an investment well worth making!

If you've never made jam before, give it a whirl!  I'm posting my link from last year's jam post here.  As always- you MUST use a pectin agent of some kind.  Sure Jell, or Ball, or whatever you can find in your local store- the pectin makes the jam set.  Also - you MUST follow all directions and measurements exactly.  No short cuts, and no substitutions.  Canning food for long term storage is a science, and keeping the food safe and healthy to eat months later requires exact attention to detail.

So, go grab some fruit and enjoy your own home-made jelly!

(Just in case the link above doesn't work, here it is again)
http://librarynut-momsview.blogspot.com/2011/06/making-jelly.html