More about Home Kitchen Garden Canning
When it comes to preserving produce from my home kitchen garden, I choose canning for fruits (including tomatoes). I especially enjoy making jelly: it’s incredibly easy to do, it usually tastes better than commercial jelly, it costs less than commercial jelly, and for some reason people who receive a gift of homemade jelly act impressed that a human might actually have made it himself.
Does your home kitchen garden produce more fruits and vegetables than you eat in a season? My last post provided an overview of food-preservation strategies you can use to benefit from the excess. Embedded at the end of that post was a YouTube video introducing key concepts about home canning: storing foods in vacuum-sealed jars.
That video was one in a series about home canning. And, though those videos have some of the most stilted narration ever written, they are well-produced and terrifically informative.
So, please continue your exploration of food-preservation by reviewing the next videos in the series. These explain more about the differences in equipment necessary for boiling water bath and pressure-canning methods of canning. The videos define more terms that are helpful to know when you talk about canning, and they demonstrate the steps necessary to process foods—whether with the boiling water bath or the pressure-canning methods:
I’ve always wanted to try canning but I usually break out the food dehydrator at the end of the season. Fear of the unknown, I guess. Nice blog, I’ll bookmark it for future reference.
Anthony: I know what you mean. I’ve always wanted to acquire and use a food dehydrator, but it’s a whole new learning curve… I’ve been canning for so many years, it’s hard to change gears (also, I don’t think you can do jams and jellies in a dehydrator).
Canning is, however, stupid-easy, especially if you stick to boiling water bath canning for high-acid foods. Seriously: peel and core pears, stuff them into jars, fill the jars with sugar-water, put on lids, and boil the jars for a while.
I hope that next season I’ll be blogging new-found insights into food dehydration.