When I was first married and moved to the Eastern Shore, somewhere during the Pleistocene Age, everyone out here in the hinterlands canned — even if they didn’t have a garden. They’d buy produce in bulk from farmers or roadside stands and ‘put it by.’ A lot of the women in our area didn’t work outside the home, but they worked inside and canning was part of the work they did to contribute to the whole family enterprise.
Canning fell out of favor when women began to leave home to work, but in the great turn of the mandala, which seems to have also brought back miniskirts and plaid, today’s women (and a few guys) are once again turning to canning. Part of the reason is the current economy and a yearning for some sense of self-reliance in a fluky job market. But the renewed interest is also linked to a desire for healthy food whose provenance we know.
As a result it’s once again possible to find canning supplies, to bore your neighbors with the number of quarts of spaghetti sauce you put up today, and to swop recipes for cornichons and spiced peaches and imaginative chutneys. Ironically, all of this is taking place at a time when the fear of litigation for giving canning advice has gone through the roof.
So I won’t tell you HOW to can anything, particularly since the research on how to do it safely has changed slightly since I first began. (There are links to credentialed sources below.).
Change based on knowledge is good. When I was first canning, some of my neighbors ‘canned’ green beans by boiling the jars, boiling the beans, then putting them in the hot jars with boiling bean juice, and turning down the lid. Terrifying. Why their nearest and dearest weren’t dropping like flies at the dinner table was a mystery. Beans need pressure canning unless you’re adding a fair amount of vinegar to acidify them.
Canning is chemistry, botany, and culinary skill, but primarily it’s the ability to follow reliable directions well. It’s usually hot work, especially if you do it in bulk over the course of a summer as I do. So it’s not always fun, though it’s usually more fun if you do it with a friend. But either way, it’s sooo satisfying when you open up the cabinet and pull down a jar of your own homegrown organic salsa, Bloody Mary mix, spaghetti sauce, pickle or jam.
So, in the interests of encouraging you to put up at least some of your garden’s (or the farmers’ market and produce stands’) offerings this year, especially if you’ve never tried it before, here are a few general rules of thumb to guide you, and then below, are some links to reliable canning sources for more detailed instruction.
First, acidity matters. Pickles are easy to start with since they are acid (thanks to the vinegar). The acid will kill any undesirable bacteria that might be in the vegetables. For centuries, people layered pickled anything and everything into crocks (sauer kraut, kimchi, pickled walnuts even) and kept them, covered with a cheesecloth or board lid so the flies and animals couldn’t get to them, in a cool dark place. (They also kept crocks of brandied fruit in the cellar and would go down to stir – and sip – periodically.).
Tomatoes are acidic, though not always as strongly acid as they need to be (5% is the rule of thumb). Hybrids bred for sweetness are sometimes quite low acid, and some recipes recommend adding anywhere from a teaspoon to a tablespoon of vinegar, lemon juice or citric acid before you put them into the canner’s water bath.
Sugar is also a preservative, and jams and jellies have for generations been made, poured into a clean jar, topped with paraffin and stuck in a vermin-proof cabinet with a bit of waxed paper over them. I’ve eaten many a jar done that way myself when I lived in Britain, though now the recommendation is to process them in a relatively short hot water bath to be extra sure.
Second, make sure everything that will touch food is sterilized – jars, lids – and kept really hot. If you fail to get a good seal on things, it could be because there was a seed or some tiny thing that stood between the lid and the jar rim for a total vacuum seal, but it could also be that the jar, the lid and what you put into it was not hot enough.
Third, never reuse a canning lid. If your jar didn’t seal the first time, throw that lid away and reprocess using a new, sterilized lid.
Fourth, make sure you actually like to eat what you’re putting up. It sounds silly, but some of us (and by some I mean I) get carried away with interesting-sounding recipes, and with preserving every last bit of whatever comes out of the garden. My family doesn’t really like tomato-apple jam regardless of how I try to dress it up. And there’s only so much mustard pickle any one family – and their friends, neighbors and passing strangers – can consume absent threats or coercion.
Last: Start small and be unafraid. When you first read the instructions, canning seems to be complicated and have a lot of steps. There are definitely a series of steps you need to take, and you need to pay attention to each one. But like riding a bicycle or any other thing you haven’t done before, listing all the steps can be daunting; once you get into the rhythm of it, it’s not hard.
We eat a fair amount of bread and butter pickles – on sandwiches and paninis, diced in tartar sauce, in chicken or egg salad, with sausages, and just out of the jar. I make pints and quarts of the stuff using a recipe from Maryland’s Way cookbook. Maryland’s Way also has good recipes for watermelon pickle (lovely with ham), pickled peaches (ditto), green tomato pickle, pepper relish, and peach chutney, which when spread with cream cheese on Triscuits is a Christmas brunch tradition with champagne for us. Maryland’s Way also has a recipe for something called Ma Comp’s Soup Seasoning, a spicy tomato-based concentrate with plenty of spices and pepper that we call tomato bullion. A couple of tablespoons of that in a mug of hot water makes a great pick-me-up in winter.
Ball’s Complete Book of Home Preserving includes canning instructions and 400 recipes for salsas, marmalades, jams, jellies, pickles, pie fillings and more.
The recipe below is what I make with ‘Big Mama’ San Marzano paste tomatoes, which are huge and easy to peel. I use it with vegetable or shrimp quesadillas, with fish, and with chips.
Nancy’s Tomato Salsa
10 pounds tomatoes, skinned
2 sweet peppers
2 large or 3 small onions
3 jalapenos, several serranos, 3 or 4 lemon peppers or other hot pepper
3 fresh garlic cloves, minced
1 large bunch cilantro, chopped
1/3 cup fresh lime juice
2 tsp cumin
2 tsp chili powder
2 tsp paprika
1 tblsp kosher salt
2 tsp fresh-ground pepper
To peel tomatoes, dip for several seconds (usually about 12) into simmering water, then into cold water. Skins should slip easily from the fruit. This process is easy if you wear rubber gloves to protect from the heat. To keep salsa from being too thin, halve peeled tomatoes, then with your thumbs, sluice out seeds and interior juice into a large bowl. You can easily strain this for tomato juice, Bloody Marys, or for making vegetable juice or soup. Rough-chop all vegetables and put into a large stainless pot. If you have a broad, non-reactive pan or several pans, which will allow for some evaporation while the salsa’s cooking so much the better, but you need to stand by a bit to be sure it doesn’t stick and burn. Add garlic, cumin, chili powder, paprika, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and simmer for about an hour or until vegetables are done. Add cilantro and cook another 10 minutes. Run a hand blender through salsa to keep from having huge chunks, but don’t make it into puree. If you don’t have a hand blender, you can use a potato masher. Add lime juice. Keep salsa simmering while you put it into hot canning jars. Process according to directions in the links below.
https://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/can_home.html
https://www.growit.umd.edu/Images5/FoodPreservationResources.pdf
https://www.freshpreserving.com/home.aspx
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