Leaves are changing color, the air is crisp, and you're noticing Mason jars on the shelf at your local grocer or hardware store. Perhaps you idly wonder who, at this point in history, has time for home preserving. Then you move on, filling your cart with commercially packaged jars, cans, and cardboard boxes.
But what if you decided to give canning a chance? Sounds hilariously old-fashioned, doesn't it? What's next, a pickling crock? (Well, okay, I do use one of those, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.) Rumor has it some people take up home canning because they want to create delicious concoctions or because they want to carry on family traditions. Me, I started three years ago in self defense. My partner Joe and I haven't yet managed to convince our two cats to eat fruits and vegetables, and when we signed up for a community-supported agriculture program we had no idea there would be weeks we'd get twelve pints of blueberries or several heads of cabbage at once. We only have so much fridge space; it was either going to be home canning or drowning in produce.
When you aren't just canning whatever surplus exists, preserving the bounty of summer is an exercise in careful selection. Are the local raspberries delicious this week? Are they on sale because they were picked in the rain, which means they won't last past today, even if they're beautiful right now? They'll still make great jam, whereas they might be too soft to freeze. Given proper sanitation and a few tools, small-batch boiling-water canning can be accomplished in any kitchen. A large pot, some towels, and a waterproof, heatproof mitt or two will do, but for a small investment one can get a jar-lifter and a few other specialized tools that make the process much easier. Most home canners start with foods such as jams and pickles, since those only require boiling water instead of needing a pressure canner. Our initial runs of blueberry jam turned out well enough, even if slightly imperfect. Who's going to complain if your jam is more sliceable than spreadable? It's still delicious!
The current edition of the Ball Guide to Home Preserving is an excellent starter text. Its chief feature (or perhaps drawback) is that it's filled with tempting recipes which lead to frantic phone calls and grocery store visits. One winter, no local stores seemed to stock a mysterious fruit called Seville oranges. Since the book assured me they made the best marmalade, I had to have some. Contacting a local food co-op, I ordered six pounds: enough for two batches. Imagine my distress when they called a few weeks later to inform me that my 36lb case of oranges had arrived! Over many, many hours of chopping oranges and grating rind, a friend became a canning buddy, and we both gave away a lot of marmalade that year.
This year, summer travel meant that picking up a weekly farm box wasn't going to work. A little jam in the spring when the strawberries started to get good, a little stock when we had some veggies wilting in the fridge: that was the extent of our canning until fall snuck up on us. When harvest arrives, everything changes. Winter is coming, whispers the chill in the air. Suddenly farmers' market stalls are overflowing with gorgeous produce. I acquired half a bushel (25lb) of tomatoes and canned some whole, while others became jar after jar of salsa. Winter tomatoes, waxy and hard when they come off the truck, have no place in our kitchen. We'll be tasting the juiciness of September all year, in pizza sauce, tacos, and soup. While boiling-water canning is possible for tomatoes, we pressure-can ours to retain more nutrients and flavor.
Desperation drives some fall canning. A couple of weeks ago, I received a green tomato rescue entreaty; a friend's garden still had 20lb of unripe tomatoes on the eve of a hard freeze. She was heartbroken at the possibility of so much work going to waste. We pickled half the tomatoes with dill, garlic, and cider vinegar. The rest we made into a sweet southern pickle, which required soaking slices of green tomato overnight in food-grade lime (not that gardening stuff!) and combining them with a surfeit of brown sugar. Plenty of work, but not too difficult, and the yield of her garden was given a second lease on life. (Neither of these were fermented pickle recipes, which use yeast instead of vinegar; those are equally delicious, and can be accomplished even without a stoneware crock.) Another rescue occurred when my sister showed up with sacks full of apples which had fallen from our aunt and uncle's tree and were destined for the compost heap. Instead, we turned them into spicy applesauce and thick apple butter. I considered apple jelly, but didn't feel that patient. A food mill's a good deal faster than waiting for juices to drip through a jelly bag. There's always next year, though!
Flavor wasn't my original motive to begin canning at home, but there's a definite difference in taste and quality when food is preserved at the peak of freshness without the use of chemicals or additives. And canning at home leads to great savings if, like me, you're inclined skip the high-fructose corn syrup fruit spread for the tiny, expensive jar of jam. Hands-down, the biggest flavor surprise has been with pumpkin. Pie pumpkins have much more flesh than do jack-o-lanterns, but all the work to cut and roast them means almost nobody makes pumpkin pie (or pumpkin anything) from scratch. Taking an afternoon with friends to butcher, cube, and pressure-can pumpkins is a fun way to celebrate the season, and the taste can't be beat. Bonus: toasted pumpkin seeds! (As you recall, I mentioned earlier that some foods with lower acidity, such as most vegetables, need to be heated beyond what's possible in boiling water. Use a pressure canner when indicated and you can leave botulism in the textbooks where it belongs.) I recommend showing up at a family event with unbelievably delicious pumpkin pie, bread, or muffins. Home-canned pumpkin even conceivably lends itself to pumpkin goat cheese ravioli, which might not seem practical if you're faced with a squash, a knife, and a cutting board.
Holiday giving can contribute to the waste endemic in modern culture, but why feed the consumer machine when you have other choices? This year, Joe's gifting friends and family with home-brewed porters, while I'm handing out the fruits of my fall canning: half-pints of homemade ketchup and Oktoberfest-style beer mustard. If you give homemade ketchup a try, I'll warn you that the Ball recipe isn't entirely forthcoming about the several hours it takes tomato sauce to reduce to a proper ketchup consistency. It's so delicious, though, that the time is worth it, and there's something calming about slowly stirring and reducing a sauce that isn't trying to burn you. (Watch out for jam; long sleeves and an oven mitt are a must!)
We tell people that giving our jars and bottles back is entirely optional; an even better choice is trying your own hand at the age-old techniques of home preserving. You may find that the only thing better than receiving home-canned treats is returning the jars filled with your own preserves.
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Comments
* Part of the Apple Butter Fest was making apple butter in giant pots in the park. The bees would get attracted by the sugar, naturally enough, and end up drowning themselves. And then tourists would buy the jars of apple butter. I swear one of these days I'm going back for a week or so.
I like to know what's in the food I give my family. I like the look of the jars, all lined up in the cupboard. I like the feeling of accomplishment. Over the years I have learned what's worth the trouble and what isn't. There have been failures and unexpected successes. Like, who would have thought Pickled Pumpkin was so nice? And why did my dill pickles go all soggy and horrid and have to be dumped on the compost even thought I used the same recipe I've used for 40 years?
I used to can a lot more than I do now. But I was never the equal of my neighbour, who had eight children. She "put up" hundreds of quarts every year, including canning a whole moose. For those with a pressure canner and the inclination, few things are more delicious than home-canned meat or chicken.
Botulism is an anaerobic killer, it grows in the oxygen-less contents of canning jars, in non-acid foods that were not taken up to the correct temperature and held there for the correct length of time. This varies from foodstuff to foodstuff and must be done exactly as required.
Acid foods, such as peaches or plums, pickles and relishes and most jams or jellies, will not support botulism.