This question came to mind in the discussion on getting an Instant Pot.
In the old days canning was a way to preserve food (mostly fruits and vegetables) over the winter months but as far as I know it was never done for quality or taste except for jams and jellies. (I have a friend who makes his own apple maple jam which is divine.) With today’s modern flash-freezing there seems to be little reason to can vegetables.
So Dopers, reduce my ignorance: why do you can food? Do you only can fruit? Or is there a good flavor you just can’t get any other way?
If you include pickles and relishes, it is an easy way to get good quality products. For example, few commercial products are spicy. If you include alcohol, you are getting unique things not generally for sale. It is much cheaper to make your own preserved food and not a bad skill for these unusual times.
Well, gee - why do people bother to bake their own bread? Make their own kimchee? Brew their own beer?
There’s a certain satisfaction to mastering these old fashioned skills.
There are also some people still living in areas where they grow most of their own food and/or don’t have particularly reliable power for a freezer, where canning food is a more certain way of preserving it than freezing.
But mostly I think there’s a bunch of people out there who enjoy cooking as a hobby.
I can store far more food canned than I can frozen.
Plus, just freezing food usually isn’t quite good enough. If you don’t have a blast chiller that can freeze things instantly, IQF style, then you are not going to get the same results as you see in your frozen food section.
If your question is, why do we can stuff rather than just buy it, well, that’s a whole different discussion.
My grandmother’s recipe for canned tomato soup is far, far tastier than any commercial tomato soup I’ve ever tried, and probably a lot healthier, too (less sodium than even the “low sodium” varieties, for a start).
My family also has a wonderful recipe for green tomato relish, which is something I’ve never even seen for sale.
And home-canned salsa generally works pretty well, too, though my family’s recipe is much too mild for my tastes.
Other than that, we don’t can veggies much (we freeze them instead), but Mom makes a wide variety of jams and jellies, because she harvests far more fruit than can be eaten in a summer, anyway.
I always can my own tomatoes. They are far better than the store cans or using fresh from the store, especially if not in season. In this case, home canned tastes miles better.
I also jar up homemade, organic jams to enjoy and give as gifts. The costs are about the same as organic stuff in the store, but I enjoy my own flavor combinations and they are gifts almost everyone loves.
I’ve never seen stores offer dilly beans on a consistent as they are just so easy to make. Around here, everyone has a coworker, neighbor, or family member who makes them. Great snacking if you like dill.
Ultimately, stores just don’t offer the variety or quality of what you can make and preserve yourself. It comes down to this Greg Brown song: Canned goods.
Canning and pickling can be used to add flavor, and lets you control the quality of the ingredients which can be sadly lacking in some commercial applications. Having said that, I can less than I used to, because it is a great deal of work, but more importantly, a pain to store the giant canning pot.
The only thing I usually can these days is a batch of pickled jalapenos. My mother-in-law grows them for me by the near bushel during the summer months and I use them in a ton of dishes, dehydrate some (on the porch, you DON’T want to do that inside), and some I wash, slice in rounds, and pickle followed by a heat treatment.
You will never look at a jar of store-bought pickled jalapenos again. And yeah, 90% of the time, I want fresh, but sometimes you want that vinegar/heat combo.
Obviously you never had my grandmother’s apricot preserves.
Canning is done, still, to preserve one’s garden and orchard produce. Freezing requires much of the same labor, uses fossil fuel energy, and is at the mercy of a power outage. And it tastes different. When my grandmother was alive, we dried, pickled, salted, canned, and froze all summer and fall. We made sauerkraut, harvested walnuts, filberts, and almonds, made bread, made soup stock from bones . . . She did it because it was how she lived, I can’t imagine her being otherwise.
If you grew up eating food that you and your family grew and prepared and saved, it is hard to accept the lesser quality and comparatively few choices available commercially. For example, despite the dozen local ‘artisan’ bakeries, none of their bread is a patch on my own. I could go on.
Canning is something I’d like to do if it weren’t the botulism risk of amateurs. AIUI, it depends on using something sour to kill the spores, like adding vinegar to any oil-based canning?
All of the reasons above, and because otherwise you’d be throwing away/composting heaps of produce. Even a small garden produces more than most people can comfortably eat fresh, most years.
When I was a kid I can remember neighbors and relatives dropping off bushel baskets of produce at my grandmother’s house. She would be canning for days.
My mom and I keep up the tradition but on a much smaller scale. We enjoy cooking together and the product is excellent. Putting up 6 quarts of beets or dill pickles really isn’t that much work compared to any other normal kitchen task. 2 bushels of banana peppers? No, thanks.
My friend grew up with a huge garden and not a,lot of money. Canning got them through the lean years. They’ve kept it up because they like the flavors.
And if it isn’t something with a low pH, like most breeds of tomatoes (low-acid tomatoes shouldn’t be hot-water bath canned), you need to can it at pressure to destroy any botulinum spores.
Instant Pots are not recommended for canning because they don’t have a pressure gauge.
So, did your grandmother split the jars with the people who dropped off the produce, or did they pay her to do it, or some other kind of barter? I’m curious.
I love home-canned green beans, but they are a LOT of work. Still worth it, though.
No, I don’t get the same results as I can buy in the grocery frozen-food section. I get much better results; because I’m not starting with tasteless produce bred for production and shipping ability, but with varieties chosen for flavor. A couple of years ago I didn’t get enough beans into the freezer, and bought some at the store. Gaah.
– having said that: as others have said in the thread, all that about flavor also applies to canned goods. If you or your neighbors or your farmers’ market have grown really good produce, putting that up when it’s in season lets you eat it year round, instead of the insipid stuff from the grocery store.
Some things freeze better than they can, some can better than they freeze (and opinions may vary, I hate canned beans unless they’re pickled dilly beans, which are great.) And, as has also been pointed out, most people have more room in their cupboards than in the freezer, and canned goods will stand up to a long power outage better.
Homemade ketchup is just plain a different creature than storebought. Sometimes I want one, sometimes I want the other; but the homemade version is unobtainable any other way than by making it at home.
Thanks for all the interesting responses. My apologies if I offended, it wasn’t my intent. Cooking food at home almost always results in better taste than buying at the store. It’s just that I never buy canned vegetables because the fresh/frozen versions are so much better; it was hard to believe that even home-canned veggies could be better than fresh/frozen.
Is this a recipe that you might be willing to share. It would be lovely to have another way to deal with the green tomatoes I grab the day before they freeze.
