If you want to can but don’t want to store the equipment, it is possible that your local Extension office or even library will let you rent out the necessities. I used to work for Extension (and the NCHFP actually…) and we had a ton of them in our storage unit for citizen use when we weren’t doing demonstrations.
With some families its just a thing.
So say they buy in bulk like a dozen bushels of tomatoes. Then they spend a week making ketchup, spaghetti sauce, and barbecue sauce. Both for their own use and to give as gifts.
They might do the same with bushels of cucumbers or apples, oranges, plums or whatever. Yes, you can grow them yourself but in the case of say tomatoes. those ripen at different times of the year and the quality/quantity may vary.
Actually they make AWESOME one of a kind gifts with fancy labels and decorative boxes and all.
Our family used to do this with honey from our hives.
Yes, pickled jalapenos alone is enough reason to take up canning. Be careful though, as said, you will ruin yourself for the commercial stuff. I just use store bought peppers, and they’re still far better than the jarred stuff.
I also will use a pressure canner for stock. Stock is easy enough to freeze, and if I only have a little that’s what I’ll do, but if I have six quarts or so, then I’ll run the pressure canner. I’ll use smoked chicken to make smoked stock, which is fantastic in chili and beans.
A big issue with using an instant pot to pressure can, is that pressure canning recipes have been tuned to expect a certain amount of time to come up to pressure, and down from pressure. That is important sterilizing time. An instant pot will have a different heating and cooling profile that might not result in a safe product.
BTW Ball spun off the canning group a few years back but the new company still uses the Ball name.
What the heck was that post? Both Kavanaugh and the English language are so far off-topic for this thread, that all I can think is that you meant to post that in some other thread.
I like Beer?
I dabbled in canning when I was trying to eat sustainably, before I went to law school and gave up on trying to be a good person. I was mostly vegan and had a farm share, which meant picking up a huge box of veggies from the farmers market every week (and lugging it home on the subway). I started canning and pickling and freezing because I couldn’t eat it fast enough and it wasn’t year-round. It was fun for a while, but I realized I wasn’t crazy about most of the stuff I made. It turns out I only really like refrigerator pickles, for example, not the pressure-cooked kind. I couldn’t detect any difference in flavor between my best canned stuff and the canned stuff I could buy at the store. When my boyfriend and I moved across the country and had to winnow down our stuff to what could be shipped or stuffed in the car, my canning supplies didn’t make the cut.
Back in the 1980s the Ball Company ill-advisedly started a computer division, now long defunct. For several months I had a temporary job as a Quality Control Inspector for them, testing incoming lots of resistors and transistors and capacitors. When people asked me what I did, I told them I was a Ball Inspector.
Did you move on to Wang?
We used to say we were better than Wang Operators, because any fool can operate a Wang, while it took brains to be a Ball Inspector.
Did I miss it? This thread is up to 30 posts, and nobody has answered:
We do it because we can.
I usually chafe at lawyer bashing, but this I liked.
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. <
Very true. Just putting things in the deep-freeze is not the same, they always come out somewhat mushy. You need to freeze things almost instantly to prevent the cell walls from breaking down.
As for the original question about canning, Mrs Ded is a keen cook, jam maker and preserver of garden produce. This year she canned some beans, which appear to have gone off. Some quick reading on the Internet confirmed my suspicion that you cannot can non-acidic things such as beans without having a suitable device to raise the temperature, and maybe this will be on her shopping list for next year. Any Dopers who have used one? Recommendations? I saw some likely products, but US-made, no idea if I can buy them in Europe.
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. <
Various forms of chutney use green tomatoes. Just Google for chutney recipes.
For me, canning follows along with fermenting, preserving meats by various methods, and the like. We don’t do them every year, but I have learned to do them so that I have the skills needed to be able to do them, should society crumble, and I need them. I do like being able to dial in my own recipes - the green tomato chutneys are a favorite at home, as we end up with a lot of green tomatoes at the end of the growing season.
I made almost a gallon of roasted green tomato salsa when the season ended sooner than the tomato plants. Didn’t feel like being fussy and canning so I bunged it into vacuum seal bags and tossed them in the freezer. It’s really good.
We enjoy doing the work together, basically. The best results are jams (berry and jalapeno) and pickles, as there’s really no comparison between home-canned and store-bought. We can peaches and tomatoes to last through the winter just because we can-can.
For those in search of recipes to use up green tomatoes, this one might be an option:
Aunt Mamie’s Pickled Green Tomatoes
7 pounds sliced green tomatoes. Soak for 24 hours in water in which 3 cups of slack (pickling) lime have been dissolved. Drain and soak in clear water for 4 hours, changing water every hour. Drain thoroughly. Place tomatoes in a large vessel.
Put into a large boiling pot:
5 pounds sugar.
3 pints white vinegar.
1 teaspoon each cloves, ginger, allspice, celery seed, mace, and cinnamon.
Bring to a good boil and pour over tomatoes. Let stand overnight. In the morning, boil gently for about one hour and process as normal for pickles in a hot water bath canner.
This recipe may also be used for cucumbers.
Added note: Make sure to not omit the rinsing and draining process. Slack lime can adversely affect the pH balance of your product. Test with pH strips after boiling tomatoes to be sure.
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I mostly can regular tomatoes just because they taste so much better than frozen. Plus I am able to choose varieties of tomatoes I want to use for different dishes. I also like playing around with fruit jam combinations.
I have a prolific pear tree and usually I dehydrate them. But some years, I like to make a sugar-white-wine-vinegar syrup, poach them for 6 hours and can those up. Gorgeous over ice cream, and you won’t find this pear concoction in a store (except maybe in Belgium, since they’re called Belgian pears).
I’ve made and canned many things, from full meals in a jar to ketchup, onion jam and salsa. I’ve learned what I think is worth the process and what isn’t. I think you have to enjoy both the process and the product for it to be a fun activity.
Yeah, I read about this in business school when learning the history of anti-trust law and the Ball Company. If I’m not mistaken, the feds busted your balls - turned you into a bunch of Baby Balls? “You’re getting too big.”
Take your normal pickle recipe. Add a few habanero peppers or jalapeños to the brine. Realize how great spicy food is, and how hard it is to buy what you just made.