Thank you for the GREAT 101 at the beginning of the site. I had read many articles, chapters in current books – and yours was the best.

I would like to try with something easy. Split peas soup or Vegetable Beef Soup.

Do I use my old standard recipe for these two favorites?? Then when hot follow your instructions for the processing??

Please advise. I have done water canning before so I am not completely terrified :0)

Just looking forward to trying soon and enjoying the pleasures of having my food “put up” for convenience.

Thanks……..

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1st is botulisum found in canned food that the lids are still firmly sealed? Meaning can I rely on the fact that my canned goods are ok as long as I have a solid seal on them?

2nd when I do my tomatoes and I process using the weighted gauge and cook it for the alotted time, my bottles come out with alot of the fluid gone from the jar and my tomatoes really look over cooked and over pressureized. Is that telling me the times or pressure that I am using from the recipe are to much?

Thanks Duke

i know what you mean. i hate to run the canner for 3 or 4 pints… there are a couple of options i use. sometimes i just freeze what i have until i have enough of something else to take up the extra canner space…. as long as all the jars in the canner require the same amount of time under pressure, there’s no rule stating they all have to be the same thing. for example, if i have a few quarts of spaghetti sauce with ground beef, and a few quarts of meatballs, they all need to be processed using the guidelines for beef, so can all go into the canner together. the other option i sometimes use is to fill the empty space with jars of water. once processed and sealed, you have jars of sterilized water for storage.

lissa

I just popped over to Amazon to order a few books I’m very interested in lactofermentation and other low-energy forms of food preservation, but I also love my canned tomatoes!

You’ve inspired me to think outside of the consumer box and try many foods that I’ve been convinced I didn’t like for so many years. Turns out I just don’t like the commercial versions.

Thanks!

That’s a bummer, though – it seems a shame to run the canner for just a few pints of beets or applesauce, and I am finding it really difficult to find time for whole big batches this year. I was really hoping to be able to run a few pints in the pressure cooker while I make dinner every night (my stovetop is small, so if my canner is on the stove my frypan can’t be – just a small pot for heating water for lids & warming jars.)

The thing is, this is like driving with no seat-belts, or smoking while pregnant. People used to do it all the time, and you can be pretty sure that if your Grandma is still alive, she did drove without seatbelts and survived. Lotsa babies were born to mothers who smoked when pregnant – and it is impossible to tell with pure anecdotal evidence that the babies from those Moms really were smaller, more likely to be premature, more likely to be unhealthy, more likely to have asthma, more likely to die of SIDS. In order to figure that out, a big study had to be conducted under rules of scientific research – the same is true about canning – until people did the research, for example, they didn’t realize that occasionally molds can reduce the acidity of even high acid foods, and allow them to grow botulism if they aren’t properly canned.

I ate those foods too – but that doesn’t mean that everyone did it and lived – there were cases of botulism that didn’t have to happen. There were cases of food poisoning that didn’t have to happen. Just as people got maimed and died that didn’t have to before, just as babies died of SIDS that didn’t have to. The odds are that if you did this, you wouldn’t die, and your family wouldn’t die. But the blunt truth is that the chances that you or someone you love might die from botulism are low but not nil – and it is a bad, horrible death. There is no reason to risk it – period. Better to skip canning altogether and use other techniques.

Sharon