Home Canning Options

[forgeblast]

Lehmans.com has some "kraut crocks". I was looking at them yesterday.
Here is my Grams freezer pickle recipe
4 cupls sliced cukes
1 cup sliced onion
4 teaspoons salt
2tb water
let stand 2 hours
drain and squeeze out the water

boil then cool the following
3/4 cup of sugar
1/2 cup of vinegar
fresh dill
pour over your cukes/onions and freeze

Apple butter we make in the slow cooker, we peal the apples and mash them up like we would be making apple sauce, but we put them in the slow cooker with the lid slightly ajar, I think we cook it for two 10 hour slow cooker cycles.

Some of our early blueberries are getting close to being ripe, blackberries not yet, it was an early year for strawberries I think a lot of places are almost done.

 

[dmccarty]

Thanks Larry, that is pretty dang simple! :laughing:

We have been looking at dehydrators and I think we might buy one this month. With the amount of dried fruit I eat I think it will pay us back ASAP. The brand we are looking at buying has been in business for decades but it is not cheap. On the other hand it can do a bunch of food at one time.

Later,
Dan

 

[dmccarty]

...

Apple butter we make in the slow cooker, we peal the apples and mash them up like we would be making apple sauce, but we put them in the slow cooker with the lid slightly ajar, I think we cook it for two 10 hour slow cooker cycles.

Some of our early blueberries are getting close to being ripe, blackberries not yet, it was an early year for strawberries I think a lot of places are almost done.

You freeze the pickles? NEVER heard of that one. What do they taste like and dont say pickles. :laughing:

I like that Apple butter technique. We have been thinking of buying a crock pot but I don't think we would use it enough. Making apple butter in s crock pot is interesting.

Strawberries were very early here too. Dehydrated Strawberries sound good but the berry patches have to be getting close to done at this point.

Later,
Dan

 

[forgeblast]

Its funny once you have a crock pot you use it a lot more then you would think. Its nice coming home to a meal thats cooked. The dogs are ramped up from smelling food cooking all day

The best way to describe them is that they taste "fresh", you let them thaw before you eat them but they are crisp and just tasty. Real easy to make, We would use an old time meat slicer (where you turn the handle to spin the blade) to get the pickles thin.

We have a plastic round dehydrator, I have made bananna chips and mostly use it to dry hops it works ok. Those cabelas dehydrators that are digital and stainless look great.

 

[joshuabardwell]

Most of the canning things I recieved from my gram. Her pressure canner is pretty small I would like a larger one. I just ordered a set of tattler lids and seals. Once I use up my one and done lids ill be moving on to them.
I have the water bath canner on a turkey fryer burner, heats up very nicely and is outside. If i dont put it there I will can early in the morning.

I have the Tattler lids and they're awesome. Do keep some one-use lids around, though, for stuff you plan to give away as a gift or in trade. You don't want to be giving away those expensive reusable lids and gaskets and not getting them back!

 

[joshuabardwell]

We have been looking at dehydrators and I think we might buy one this month.

Professional dehydrators have some advantages, it's true, but depending on your oven, you may be able to do near as good a job with what you already have in your house. The question is how low a temperature your oven goes to. My old oven would go down to 150. I moved, and my current oven goes down to 135. It's got convection to boot, so there's moving air, which speeds things along. When I want to dehydrate, I put the stuff on sheet pans (if it's loose material like dried herbs) or on a cooling rack set in a sheet pan (if it's bigger stuff like sliced tomatoes or apples) and put it in the oven on the lowest temperature. It dehydrates just fine, and I didn't have to spend a bunch of money on a dehydrator. It is worth thinking, however, whether I'm spending more in electricity to heat up that big oven, even just to 135. I dunno.

Another approach I'm familiar with uses fans and HVAC filters (clean ones, please). You get a big box fan and several filter and use bungee cords to strap the filters to the face of the fan. You put the food to be dried in between the filters and then set the fan on some blocks or something, facing upwards, so it's blowing air through the filters and past the food. Even though there is no heat, the moving air dries stuff out really quickly. This works best for stuff like jerky, which loses its moisture relatively easily. If you were going to do herbs this way, you would want to do them in bunches, still on the branch/stalk, since they would just fall all over the place if the herb was loose.

 

[joshuabardwell]

I have both a pressure canner and a water bath canner. However since it is so hot I would prefer not to use the water bath canner which takes so long to come to a boil. Can I put high acid foods in the pressure canner, say at 5 pounds pressure instead of the 10 normally iused, and only process for a short time? Sure make the batches go faster and saves a lot of propane. Thanks

I would say that, whatever you do, make sure you are following published recipes. Often, you can find both pressure-can and water-bath recipes for high-acid foods like tomatoes. As other commenters have pointed out, pressure canning will produce better results, because the food spends less time at temperature, but water bath canning will get you done faster, especially if you are doing multiple batches, because you don't have to wait for the canner to come up to pressure and then back down again. For low-acid foods, you must pressure can. No if's, and's, or but's. Again, as long as you are following a published recipe (like from Ball, or from an extension service--not from some yahoo on the Internet who says he's done it for years) you should be fine.

I know people have their "ways" when it comes to canning, and I know that recommendations have changed over the years, and things that our parents and grandparents did are no longer considered safe. I can't tell you what you ought to do, but whatever you do, please remember that botulism is no joke, and it may not give any sign that it is in the can! No amount of canned food is worth the risk of you or a family member getting botulism.

I heartily second the suggestions to use an outdoor stove for canning in the summer (and, really, when else do you can). We have a propane camp stove that we use for camping, and we got an adapter to let it hook up to a standard 20-lb propane tank, so we didn't have to keep buying the little ones and throwing them out. I'll set that out on a table on the patio and can without heating up the house at all.

 

[forgeblast]

Joshua thanks for the tip on the lids. Did you find you had to do anything special for the reusables?

 

[joshuabardwell]

Joshua thanks for the tip on the lids. Did you find you had to do anything special for the reusables?

Just follow the instructions that came with them. The one thing that is counter-intuitive, at least to me, is that you don't want the rings on as tight as you can possibly get them. You want to get them hand-tight and then actually back them off 1/4 turn or so. This is to let steam escape during the canning process. I guess the rubber gasket has a better seal than you get on the single-use lids, and if you put the rings on full-tight, it can keep the steam from escaping. This will prevent the lid from sealing. I was worried that water would get into the can if the ring wasn't fully tight, but it hasn't happened.

 

[aczlan]

PS: how do you do pickles without vinegar? I stopped making them because they were always limp and soggy.

A grape leaf in the pickle jar with Mrs Wages Kosher Dill pickle mix will help keep the pickles crunchy.

Aaron Z