I "put up" 33 pints of peaches over Labor Day weekend, but this does not
mean that I know what I'm doing.  Is there an experienced canner among us?
How does one shift from "one year's experience repeated x times" to "x years
of experience"?  Maybe it's not possible.

25 responses total.

  My mother does. I have personally helped her peel several hundred pounds
of peaches, tomatoes, and other assorted fruits and veggies. I am sure
that she can offer some advice

Sure it is.  I have been canning off and on for 20 years, and helped my
mother can for probably 15 years or so before that (one of my earliest
memories is of standing on a stack of catalogs/phone books on a chair
to stir grape juice that was to become grape jelly, I must have been
about 4 or 5).  If one ignores all the new bull s***t coming from the
government about how to do canning, it gets easier over time (example:
we always did tomatoes using the open kettle method, government now says
it isn't save that you need to pressure can them).  After my 35 or so
years of canning, my mother's years before I started helping, my 
grandmother's and her mother's, etc. using open kettle and never having
a can go bad, I doubt that I will change my canning methods just because
the government says so.

My wife is trying canning this year for the first time.  Yesterday she
was canning tomatoes and managed to take the bottom off 2 of 5 jars.
She was quite upset.  It happened while she was boiling them in a large
pot using the "cold-pack method".  After looking at what she had done,
I suspect that it was due to the jars resting on the bottom of the pot.
I bent some wire, to go into the bottom of the pot, so the jars would
be surounded with water and not able to rest directly on the bottom.
We are trying not to have to buy more special pots, etc. so are adapting
what we already have.  She'll try again today and we will see what happens.

Yes, you should not have the jars resting on the bottom of the pot.  Both
my canning pots (open pot and pressure cooker) have grids that go on the
bottom to lift the jars up about 1/2 in or so and another to put between
layers of jars when canning with pints rather than quarts.

Canning Sucks.  Huh Huh Huh.

The reason the government is recommending pressure canning for
tomatoes nowadays is that modern tomatoes are much lower in acid
than they used to be years ago.  Since the acid was part of what
prevented botulism in canned tomatoes, lower acid tomatoes results
in much greater risk to the consumer of tomatoes canned the
old-fashioned way.

My wife was too chicken, so I fired up the cooker with improvised
grid and everything went fine.  I guess that was the problem.

I was just reading somewhere (can't remember where just now) that today's
tomatoes are not really lower in acid, they just have a sweeter taste over
top the acidity.  I haven't had any problems.  I will admit that the last
time I did any serious canning was before Damon was born, probably 1983
or so.  I put up about 30 quarts of tomatoes.  It took us 3-4 years to
eat them all and the last jar was just as good as the first.  I have never
used the pressue canner for tomatoes, takes too long.  I use it for things
like pumpkin and other veggies.  Last pumpkin I did was in 81.  We still
have a few jars left.  Opened on the other day and pitched it.  It looked
and smelled ok, but the lid had a bunch of black stuff on it and we didn't
want to take a chance that it wasn't good.

I hope someone is still checking this out.  I wnt to learn how to can because 
I had an overactive imagination when it came to planting my very first garden
this year.  I planted 25! tomatoe plants and 13 bell pepper plants and everyone
 of them lived>HELP! I need recipes and ideas for good books and what do I need
and ...help...I  am going under! <g>

I sure can use some tomato and pepper recipes this year, too.
My porch looks likely to produce a banner crop and I've no *idea*
what to do with the surplus!

I use the Ball Blue Book (published by the Ball Corp. that makes
the canning jars).  (My copy is the 30th edition, c1982, bought at
Ace Hardware for $2.49 about 10 years ago)
        You need either a canner (i.e. a really big pot, with lid,
with a rack for the bottom so that water can circulate, & deep enough
so that jars can be covered by 1 or 2 inches of boiling water --
something sold as a "stock pot" may be better if you're planning to
use quart jars) or a pressure canner (I don't know much about these,
I've never used one).  Also canning jars, with lids (secondhand jars
are fine, & lids don't have to be *new* but they should be *unused*),
& a jar lifter.  Those are the only specific-to-canning things I
have needed.  Get a good up-to-date book, and think about how
ambitious you want to be with those tomatoes.  Ketchup? Puree? &c.

Thank you very much...I have a huge stock pot (20qt)...and an antique jar
lifter someone gave me...i will look for the BBB...I am also looking for a
green tomato relish recipe...I will post this elsewhere as well. Tomatoes
everywhere...and I may be moving to Louisiana in mid August.. I could be very
depressed...anyone near Lansing who might want my cityplot  garden?  Life can
be a drag...

I'd be happy to loan my copy of the book, _Putting Food By_ to anyone
who wants it.

Maybe you could put the author here?  I hate to borrow due to
the fact that I rarely return...:-)

_Putting Food By_ by Ruth Hertzberg, Beatrice Vaughn, and Janet Greeene.
Stephen Greene Press, Brattleboro VT and Lexington, MA. ISBN 0-8289-0538-X.

Thank you Danr.  I will see about obtaining a copy even though 
it looks like a will have an orphan garden.

Yes...I have an orphan garden, but I have found seven people
to take it over. sigh.

Is anyone a Euell Gibbons "fan"?  He has some fantastice canning recipes, and
others to.  There's a woods down the block, so I've had a chance to try some of
them out.  If anyone is interested, please respond at twolf.  Heavens only kno
when I'll visit the board again.

Oh, he's the guy who used to talk about pine trees on TV -- "many parts
are edible."  (He never said which parts, though.  They made him stop
for fear that kids would start eating random parts of trees, edible or
not.)

Well, actually in his books he did say which parts are edible and which
aren't.  Although the books were published in the late 60's, so it's a
good idea to check with more recent books to see if some one else has found
out a specific plant is potentially dangerious. Like sassafrass leaf is the
only part ofthe plant considered still safe to use.  Although the bark and
root bark was once commonly used as a commercial flavoring.
  Gibbons was also the guy on the Grapenuts commercials in the early 70's.

We have a pressure canner that people may borrow (but we should be present
the first time it is used).  Pressure canning is supposed to be much faster
than open kettle.  And we have never had anything spoil, but we reboil
anything in which the lid does not go down.
        This year we filled a freezer with:  turnip, mustard, amaranth and
collard greens, snow peas, green beans, eggplant (all cooked briefly first
following instructions in Putting Things By), raw peppers, cooked squash, and
raw blueberries (first frozen on a tray so they would freeze separately) and
raw unpeeled peaches.  The peaches are turning brown but taste good (they did
not expand as expected).  But I have little experience cooking with frozen
foods.  They seem to have lost some flavor and are too mushy to stir fry. 
We are tired of mushy stir-fry and soups, and would appreciate new ways to
use the above.  (We also froze apples, but that was an accident.  Half of them
turned brown and taste awful but the others are edible.)  Any suggestions must
be vegan, no salt or sugar added.  (A fanatically healthy eater insists).

With a blender, you could make interesting slushy juices like the ones at Joe
Joe's from frozen fruit.  I dunno how appealing that is in January, though.

The fruits and veges turn mushy because when the water in each cell freezes,
it expands.  This breaks the cell walls, and in many fruits and vegetables
the amount of water is so great that not much cellular structure is left to
hold the juices.  Many vegetable melanges like raitatouille (big guess ont
he spelling there) caponata, etc can be made from these frozen veges because
the integrity of the shape is not as important to mouth-feel as it might be
in stir-fry.  

Personally, I make up the prepared dishes before I freeze things.  

You might look up "vegetable stews" as a heading in which mushed up vege
dishes would be found.

The vegetables were coming at us this summer and fall much too fast to make
up prepared dishes.  In fact they tended to sit in the refrigerator for a week
or so before we found the time to parboil and freeze them.  I will try more
casserole type stuff, including ratatouille.  (We froze tomatoes too.)  Have
never tried frozen blueberry slurp, or whatever it is called, but a friend
made gallons of it last fall.  They are good just plain frozen, too.

Our frozen vegetables seem to have lost most of their flavor, along with water
soluble vitamins and minerals, to the water used to blanch them.  We don't
normally boil water.  I ran across half a page instructions on how to
microwave vegetables for freezing, but not very explicit.  ANyone ever try
that?  A library cookbook had one recipe involving ziplock bags, freeze in
the bag after microwaving with it partly open.

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