“What do you do with all that produce?” one reader asked recently about our garden. “Do you really eat it all, or does it go to waste?”
We eat it, but not at once. Though we enjoy a lot of the food fresh from the garden, we preserve most of it for later. I’m fortunate that Kris loves to can, and so we enjoy the fruits of our labor year-round.
Canning was once a vital skill for American families, though it’s now something of a lost art. Writing in The Gastronomical Me, M.F.K. Fisher describes an American kitchen circa 1912:
There was a series, every summer, of short but violently active cannings. Crates and baskets and lug-boxes of fruits bought in their prime and at their cheapest would lie waiting with opulent fragrance on the screened porch and a whole battery of enameled pots and ladles and wide-mouthed funnels would would appear from some dark cupboard. [...]
Grandmother and Mother and the cook worked with a kind of drugged concentration in our big dark kitchen, and were tired and cross and at the same time oddly triumphant in their race against summer heat and the process of rot. [...]
I have a feeling that my Father might have liked to help with the cannings, just as I longed to. But Grandmother, with that almost joyfully stern bowing to duty typical of religious women, made it clear that helping in the kitchen was a bitter heavy business forbidden certainly to men, and generally to children.
And so, too, canning seems to be forbidden to me, except when I do something stupid, such as the other night when I picked all nineteen pounds of apples from our tree at once. In these instances, I am required to help with the canning. (My mistake with the apples turned into 3 quarts of applesauce.)
Yesterday, Kris organized her pantry, which allowed us a chance to inventory this summer’s work. So far, she’s put up:
- 16.5 quarts (approx 16.5 liters) green beans — “It’s too bad you don’t like green beans,” Kris told me. Yes, it is.
- 7 qt. dill pickle spears
- 7.5 qt. salsa, which I do like, especially this batch
- 2 qt. pickled beans
- 4 qt. spiced apple chunks
- 4 qt. cinnamon-apple wedges
- 5.5 qt. canned cherries
- 7.5 qt. blackberry pie filling — good grief!
- 3.5 qt. berry applesauce, which is very good
- 3 qt. spiced applesauce
- 21 qt. barbeque sauce, most of which will be given away
- 3 qt. pickled plums in spiced syrup
- 1 qt. pickled tomatoes
- 1 qt. dried pears
- 1 pint dried plums
- 2 qt. pizza sauce, which she made yesterday and smells delicious
- 2 qt. strawberry syrup
- 1 qt. cherry-blueberry preserves
- 1.5 qt. strawberry jam
- 2.5 qt. spiced blackberry jam
- 1.5 qt. berry jelly
- 1 qt. peach-elderberry syrup
- 1 pt. red-currant jelly
Kris has also put away about 2.5 quarts of freezer jam, 12 quarts of frozen berries, 4.5 quarts of freezer pasta sauce, and 4 quarts of frozen vegetables (tomatoes, snowpeas, beans, zucchini). Before the summer’s through, she hopes to put up another batch of salsa and maybe make something with pears (if she can find a source for the fruit). When the grapes are ripe in a couple weeks, we’ll certainly make grape juice.
This may seem like Little House on the Prairie to some of you, but it’s not. Canning fits our way of life. There are startup costs involved (jars and equipment), but once you have the stuff, preserving the produce you harvest from your garden (or that you pick elsewhere) is an effective way to stretch your food dollar.
The main ingredients for each of these products have come from our garden, from friends and neighbors, from U-Pick farms, or from our local organic produce stand. (Canning food you buy from the grocery store or at the produce stand will taste good, but it’s not cost-effective.)
For more information on canning, check out:
- National Center for Home Food Preservation
- PickYourOwn.org: All about home canning
- U.S. Department of Agriculture: Complete guide to home canning
I asked Kris if she could recommend a book for beginning canners, and she suggested the BALL Complete Book of Home Preserving. She also likes Blue Ribbon Preserves: Secrets to Award-Winning Jams, Jellies, Marmalades, and More. Your public library probably has copies of both books.
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We recently got into canning. One tip: getting the canning jars at a resale shop like Goodwill can save 30 – 50% then buying them new.
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I am surprised to see all the talk on canning vegetables and fruits, we have canned for decades, however we can everything meats, stews, soups, chowders (not with milk/cream until it is opened) I live in an apartment, and still manage to can approx. 1,000 qts of vegetables, fruits, meats, soups, stews, every year. For me it is just an ongoing year round process, like going shopping.
However, doing it at home, you control Sodium, and preservative etc.
I also can, lots of chicken and broth, beef and broth, pork and broth.
Chicken Leg quarters are cheap by the 10 lbs bag in the store, and you can, can all sorts of recipes. The very expensive little cans of canned chicken breast in the store can be home canned very cheaply, just raw pack in wide mouth pints and put 1/2 tsp salt on top, pressure can 10-15 lbs for 90 min.
I would be lost not canning!!!
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On the topic of tomato sauce, here in rural western Virginia (high density Old Order Mennonite area) I learned from an Old Order lady years ago.
Cook your tomatoes into juice, let the stock pot set on the stove top until the next morning, all the solids (after juicing) will settle to bottom, leaving the clear yellowish clear liquid on top (we refer to as tomato whey)skim all this off,
cook for about 30 minutes to reduce a bit, then go to the store and buy the largest cans of to tomato paste. We purchase gallons at Costco for 3.99 add the can to your sauce, cook a bit, and can!!
The fact that you cook tomato sauce so long, uses all sorts of electricity/gas, cooks all the nutrients out. and we often end up canning 30-40 qts from this.
Since the average Mennonite home cans food not in the hundreds of quarts per year, but the thousands per year, they have learned techniques to help speed the process along, I know some homes with 4 gas stoves and 8 pressure canners going all summer long.
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Pressure Canning vs. Waterbath
I have not water bathed anything for decades!!
When I can tomatoes, fruits etc. that they call for water bath, we use 5 lbs for 5 min.
Some really soft fruits, we will bring to pressure after venting and turn off the canner.
Some other fruits we will process 5lbs for 15 min.
We have found that 99.5% of all pressured canned foods seal, this fall, I canned 350 qts of soups, stews, meats, and vegetable soup and I had only 6 jars that did not seal.
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Please be careful when canning green beans. They have a very low acid content and such are ripe for botulism colonization, even with proper preparation. My great grandmother accidentally killed her first two babies with canned green beans back in the early 20th century.
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This is to comment on Courtney’s comment, in the early 20th century most all home canners primarily use a water bath for canning green bean. Today it is recommended to process green beans in a pressure canner which we do, at our altitude which is about 1200 ft. we use 10lbs pressure for about 75 minutes. We have done this for decades with no problem. I recommend pressure canning for all things.
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I was recently introduced to canning and I find it really interesting. I have a few meat meals that I would like to try to can. I noticed that there are not many recipes for cooked meat. Then there are those that are called ‘canning recipes’. So I was wondering is it possible to can any sort of cooked food? or there are only a few recipes that can be canned?
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My mom (with me or my sisters’ help) usually cans strawberry jam and raspberry jam (we pick our own from pick your own farms). She’ll usually make maybe 24 pints of strawberry jam and 12 of raspberry. Sometimes more. We LOOOOOVEEE jam at our house. We also make some gooseberry jam. All that would be more at the end of june/july.
Then at the end of August, we take a week for ‘tomato’ products: salsa, chili, tomato sauce, and just good ol’ canned tomatos. We probably had like 50 pint-sized jars of a mix of the above! And the pantry was completely empty of all of that as of last weekend. For all of those, we grow tomatos, bell peppers and onion so we only need to buy a few things like jalapeno or beans for the chili, spices.
As for getting started with jars, rings, a big canning pot for water baths, I suggest checking on craigslist or garage sale. People are always getting rid of them. I bought 2 cases of pint size jars, my big pot, and a few other things for $20. She had tried canning and got sick of it I guess. The stuff was brand new. And I always see jars on craigslist for like $0.50 each and you can haggle a bit on those, like $5 per dozen.
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