The fact that home canning doesn’t involve cans is rather jarring.
I would never attempt it but it’s a fun hobby for some. A buddy of mine grows amazing tomatoes, by far better than in the store. Of course they are all harvested at the same time so he had a lot of tomatoes over a couple of weeks. He makes an amazing pasta sauce that he cans and then has for the rest of the year and gives out as gifts in December.
Is that the same as Cowboy Candy?
It absolutely is, and I typically spend mid to late summer canning. I make homemade marinara, can fresh green beans, winter squash, & a few types of jams from the fruits that grow wild on our place, mainly blackberries, plums, and wild strawberries. Some you can get by with the water bath method, others need to be pressure canned.
I don’t do it for the price, I do it as a way of preserving food from my garden to have during the times of the year when nothing is growing there. And a big part of the reason, as mentioned upthread, is that I can make it better (more to my liking) than what I can get in the stores.
My parents used to can bread & butter pickles, and brew up many gallons of tomato soup that they froze. We are both all year long.
Bread and butter pickles are another low-risk food that you can can with a simple water bath. (Always read the directions. But in general, things that are very sweet and things that are very sour are safer, and bread and butter pickles are both.)
No, I don’t use anywhere near that much sugar (4 cups of sugar for 3 pounds of peppers), and I just use white vinegar. The one I do is jalapenos, onions, garlic, and carrots all sauteed in a pan, then add vinegar.
Recipe link from that video.
Pickled Jalapenos (escabeche)
1 1/2 lb. jalapeño
1/3 cup olive oil
1 medium white or yellow onions, thickly sliced
2-3 medium carrots, peeled and thickly sliced
1 head garlic, cloves separated but not peeled
4 cups vinegar
2 tablespoons Kosher salt or sea salt
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
4 sprigs fresh marjoram, or 1/4 teaspoon dried
4 sprigs fresh thyme, or 1/4 teaspoon dried
1 tablespoon sugar
- Wash vegetables. If you want whole chiles, leave the stems intact and cut an X in the tip end of each so the vinegar can penetrate. Otherwise, slice as desired.
- Heat oil in large deep skillet or similar pan. Fry onions, carrots, garlic, and chiles over medium heat for about ten minutes, turning occasionally.
- Add vinegar and remaining ingredients, bring to boil then simmer 10 minutes. If using whole chiles, make sure they’re cooked through.
- If canning, hotpack sterilized pint jars, top with vinegar and process in hot water bath for 10 minutes
- If you’re going to keep them in the fridge instead of canning, you may need to simmer for 5-10 extra minutes.
3 pounds of peppers makes about 6 pints.
I’ve only done regular water bath canning myself (as does my mom) and it’s for high-acidity foods. It lasts forever. I have pickled foods I’ve eaten two, three years after they’ve been canned. With ripe tomato concoctions, you need to be a bit more careful with hitting the right pH and stuff. I’ve never bothered. Just pickled green tomatoes, cucumbers, sauerkraut, pickled salads, that sort of low-stress canning thing.
I do “refrigerator pickles” that I eat for a month or two without canning. I do sliced cucumbers, matchstick carrots&fennel, hard boiled eggs, sliced radishes, etc.
Same here, and haven’t done it in a decade now. We did big batches of pickled jalapenos that were 90% similar to @echoreply’s version (different spice mix, otherwise same) and one that basically just inverted the ratio of carrots to jalapenos. They were really, REALLY good - but the amount of work involved was just too much. And we did enough that even with frequent use, the two of us (wife and I) couldn’t eat all we canned in the 3ish years we were comfortable with. And we never felt comfortable enough to work with a non-high acid option.
These days when we get more produce from my MiL’s garden than we can eat, it’s process then freeze. Generally the extra jalapenos get chopped, bagged and frozen, or made into a medium salsa and frozen. The tomatoes get sliced, sprinkled with salt and brushed with vinegar and dehydrated, or slow cooked overnight (8qt slow cooker ftw), stick blended, and frozen.
All of which are work, granted, but they are absolutely better products than most store options and since we’ve gone for the easier preservation methods, worth the work.
That’s my problem, too. A full batch takes either all morning or all afternoon, from start to finish, which is a lot of work. Plus clean the kitchen before and after.
They’re so good though, that I don’t want anything else, which means I just end up going without. Usually what happens is I’ll unexpectedly find jalapenos on sale, and commit future self to spending a Saturday afternoon in the kitchen.
I haven’t made them since I got my new mandolin, which can make thicker slices than the old one. The old one sliced too thin, and knife slicing 3-6 pounds of peppers is not fun.
I just made this. It’s very thick. I should have added more salt. And it’s delicious. Thanks!
A few years back, Amazon had them way on sale on Prime Day. I started a thread here asking if I needed to get one. The answer was an overwhelming YES.
Versus crock-pot: you CAN use the IP as a slow-cooker (though I have not done so) - so if it’s one or the other, splurge on the pressure cooker.
The most common thing we use ours for is hard-cooked eggs. Took a few tries to get the timing right for ours: most people say 6 minutes high pressure, 6 natural pressure release, then open it and plunk the eggs in ice water for at least 6 minutes; we do 2/2/whenever we remember.
We’ll do a big chunk of pork loin,then open the pot, shred it, add some BBQ sauce,and that’s dinner for 3 days.
Leftover soup,if frozen in a round container, can go into the thing still frozen solid. Add a little water, set it tot 5 minutes, and let it rip. It takes a while to get to pressure, then it’s done in 5 minutes. No thawing-in-the-fridge time required.
It’s good for rice and other grains (though I mostly use a microwave rice cooker). Dried beans are the one thing it’s really irreplaceable for (though I’ve yet to quite figure out the timing to get the beans firm like canned ones). You can presoak those beans but it’s really, really unnecessary.
I’ll use a couple scoops of dried bean soup mix from North Bay Trading, a chicken breast or two (right from the freezer), some broth, some canned tomatoes, other veg if I feel like it, and some random seasonings, and let it go. 3 minutes assembly time. An hour later, 5 minutes to fish out that chunk of chicken breast, shred it, and put it back into the soup.
All in al, it’s not necessarily FASTER than stove/oven cooking, but for nearly everything, it’s both hands-off AND idiot-resistant.
I actually bought a Mini for the house, a year or so after I bought the big one (8 quart) - with the intention of using it for rice, cereals, and small amounts of stuff. I got relatively little use out of it - it would mainly have become a rice cooker - but my daughter asked for it when she got her first apartment. Of course, she NEVER uses it - I’m tempted to swipe it back 
Yes - My oldest eats it with a fork.
We’ve had our InstantPot for a few years now. We like beans, so the vast majority of our use is pressure cooking dried beans to use in other recipes. Cooked up some orca beans just last night–about 25 minutes at full pressure, which translates into about 45 minutes on the clock, because it takes some time to heat up. Perfectly done without soaking and cooking for multiple hours on the stove, which is great.
Second most common use is braised brisket. I can do a 4lb one in about 2 hours, 1.25 hours of which is at full pressure, with about half an hour of cool down before I release the pressure valve. At that point, it’s sliceable after cooling for a time. If I let it go 15 minutes more at full pressure, it can really only be pulled–there’s nothing left of the connective tissue holding the muscle fibers together (this is not a complaint).
It’s also great for making fast vegetable stock or mushroom stock from dried mushrooms. When I’m being organized, I’ll save up scraps of mirepoix vegetables I’m chopping for other things in the freezer over a few weeks, then wrap them in a cheesecloth bundle and pressure cook to make my veggie stock–remove the bundle and discard.
I never use the slow cook mode, and though the rice cooking is fine, I usually just do that in a regular pot on the stove.
Used it tonight to make The Kids’ Favorite Chili in about an hour and a half.
I’m going to start my Indian Butter Chicken in a couple hours
If you’re planning on making any Indian, Tex-mex, or any cumin heavy recipes, you may want to get another lid seal. I have one that I use for cumin recipes and one for everything else. I keep the cumin one in a ziplock bag. It is very easy to spread the scent of cumin to other meals if you don’t use a separate seal.
I like cumin, but not in lasagna.
Just so you know, I’m going to try this for next week’s suppers. The only way I’ve done beef short ribs is as pipikaula short ribs, which, while taking a while to prep, are so worth it.
I hope you like it!
Looks like I’ve got Sunday dinner sorted.