Safety

There are several posts here on canning safety and guidelines to use.
A quick search brings up several.
Here is a quick overview:
The two best resources that I use constantly when canning are the current Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving and
_The National Center for Home Food Preservation, _
www.nchfp.uga.gov for an online, in depth source on TESTED procedures and recipes from University of Georgia (USDA).

For your safety, and anyone consuming what you intend to preserve, you owe it to yourself and them to read thoroughly about both water bath canning and pressure canning and understand how to do both safely.

The biggest thing people do not realize is that you should not make up your own recipes when canning. It is not like cooking and baking. Use the tested recipes from NCHFP or BBB. Avoid internet recipe sites, blog articles, etc. Just because you can put food in a jar and stick it in a canner and have the jar seal, does NOT mean it is safe to eat. I can’t emphasize that enough.

When trying to decide if you should can, dehydrate, or preserve your food in some way, there are several things to consider. What is your end goal? For some it is the highest quality food, for others, it is really about producing shelf stable food only and quality doesn’t have to be the best, just “acceptable”.
You need to look at what you can grow well, what your family will actually eat, and compare that to what your options are for preserving it.
For instance, regarding vegetables, I grow green beans pretty well, so I pressure can lots of those. I have froze them several times, but I do not care for the texture and quality at all. I have dried them and was not crazy about that end product either. So we prefer the quality of pressure canned beans best, so that’s how I preserver them. My family really likes green beans, so it is worth the effort. They are a low acid veg so pressure canning is the option to choose, they would not be safe to water bath can.
I can also grow beets really well. My family hates beets. While I could preserve a lot beets, it wouldn’t be very useful because my family would not want to eat them.

There are vegetables and fruits that you can “pickle” using vinegar in the recipe and processed in the water bath canner. Just keep in mind that a serving of pickled vegetables or fruits isn’t used as a typical side dish. Pickled products are more in the realm of condiments. Meaning a little bit goes a long way. If you can’t get to the grocery store for months and are relying on your food stores to feed your family, you could eat a lot of your relish, dill pickles, pickled mixed veg, etc., but it would cease to be enjoyable after a day or two.

Most fruits are acidic enough that they can be water bath canned. (You can use your PC for this, you don’t need to buy a separate kettle just to water bath can.) So if you are growing a lot of fruit, there are many safe ways to preserve it using water bath canning methods. Quality of pressure canned fruit is often inferior to water bath canned fruit because of the increased heat at which it is processed. If the recipe you choose has both options, the water bath canned option will most likely produce a superior product than the same recipe if it were pressure canned.

Fruits also freeze really well as you probably know, so you may not want to invest a lot of time in canning them (unless you are looking for shelf stable preservation methods and are trying to avoid relying on your freezer).

Safe canning methods have changed in recent years, due to current research that is available now, so that is why you need to use current guidelines. Canning books from the 1970s and 1980s are not current.
A lot of folks still think tomatoes are acidic, but they are a borderline fruit. Recommendations to safely can tomato products requires additional acid when canning them to make them safe. Citric acid or bottled lemon juice are your choices and directions are given for properly acidifying jars of tomato products. Same goes for apple sauce. It can be borderline in acidity, so I always add the recommended amount of lemon juice to make sure it is safe. Windfall apples are notorious for being low acid compared to fresh picked apples, so you have to be careful of the fruit quality and degree of ripeness as well. Other fruits, like melons, are low acid, and should not be canned unless specifically mentioned in a tested approved NCHFP or BBB recipe.
Hope that helps.

8 Likes