An Introduction to Pressure Canning

[Robson Valley]

I'm surprised that you use kilner jars. Nobody does that here.
Instead, we all use the extremely thin and disposable brass-plated lids (rubber seals).
Many of those lids and the threaded rings get recycled not for preserves but for all kinds of herbs and spices.

 

[Woody girl]

These are kilner canning jars. Proper ones. All my friend could get as they only deal with one firm to stock the shop with.

Tengu. I would like to get a proper canner. My reading so far on this subject says you can use a normal one but it needs to have variable weights and you can only do a few jars at a time. Thanks for offer will bear it in mind if I can't get a proper canner. Plenty of time till next harvest and needing to use it. I think British Red recomended a prestige high top... but they are expensive new.!

 

[Janne]

Once I ran out of my British Kilner jars, a decade ago, I started using the American Ball jars.
IMO extremely similar. As far as I know, only the colour of the lid is different. I think

Kilner also make the jars with the loose rubber ring, and the wire locked glass lid.
I have a few of those. I prefer them, but do not use them for my preserves as I can not get new rubbers easily. Fantastic to store spices and herbs.
Dried funghi, dried rosehips, Spices I can not buy here or on Island.
Precious stuff!

 

[pagangill]

One of the subjects that we get asked about a LOT is pressure canning, particularly canning meat & meals like Chilli con Carne.

The life we lead is so full on that we don't have time to cook from scratch every day, so bulk preparing soups, sauces, Bolognese etc. makes all the difference. Preparing 30 portions of curry sauce at a time means on a cold day, I can prepare a home made curry in less than 20 minutes.

This weeks video is "An introduction to pressure canning", covering why we can, all the equipment and a full run through of the canning process.

Hi, I've just watched this video as I'm keen to learn more about how to preserve food and am interested in pressure canning. I watched this video and liked it so much I joined the site! I don't know if anyone else has replied to you but I'd love to see more videos on the different types of canning and preserving for different types of food, whether fruit, veg or meat and the best ways and methods to use. If you don't do any more because of lack of interest, then I totally understand, but if you do find the time to post more videos I'd very much love to see them. Thank you very much for this video though, it's persuaded me that I'd like to pressure can and I'm currently looking at a 23 quart Presto pressure canner on amazon as I can just about afford that one!

 

[British Red]

Hi, I've just watched this video as I'm keen to learn more about how to preserve food and am interested in pressure canning. I watched this video and liked it so much I joined the site! I don't know if anyone else has replied to you but I'd love to see more videos on the different types of canning and preserving for different types of food, whether fruit, veg or meat and the best ways and methods to use. If you don't do any more because of lack of interest, then I totally understand, but if you do find the time to post more videos I'd very much love to see them. Thank you very much for this video though, it's persuaded me that I'd like to pressure can and I'm currently looking at a 23 quart Presto pressure canner on amazon as I can just about afford that one!

Hi! We have over 30 videos covering different aspects of food preservation with more to come. We don't post all of them on this wonderful forum, just a select few as this is primarily a Bushcraft forum. Here's a playlist of more if the subject interests you

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDluIIoNPsleRQ-tuwg_FHRqmu9UPuhb7

 

[pagangill]

Hi! We have over 30 videos covering different aspects of food preservation with more to come. We don't post all of them on this wonderful forum, just a select few as this is primarily a Bushcraft forum. Here's a playlist of more if the subject interests you

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDluIIoNPsleRQ-tuwg_FHRqmu9UPuhb7

Brilliant, thank you so much. I've just subscribed to your channel, I'm really looking forward to watching them all.

 

[British Red]

Brilliant, thank you so much. I've just subscribed to your channel, I'm really looking forward to watching them all.

Happy to answer any questions on the videos or right here

 

[pagangill]

Oh that's so kind, thank you so much.

 

[Arwen]

We have been buying our canning jars (with caps and screw lids) from Home Bargains. So far its been three years and we've had no faults or failures despite them being really cheap. There are two sizes available, 500ml cost 69p and the 1 litre ones were £1.09, but most stores only stock what is on the shelves, so we buy them all when we see them which is usually around 10 at a time. Recently stocks have been sporadic but previously our local store managers have ordered them in for us in quantities of 50 and 100 at a time, nicely boxed as well. If anyone wants the barcodes I will get the wife to dig them and out and I will post here.

 

[Arwen]

We also found a UK based supplier of replacement silicon seal caps, not the screw down bands though. They are really close to us in Suffolk and sell via eBay of all places. Think they are about 3p each. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/174655363820?hash=item28aa455aec:g:rzwAAOSwgQlejM71

 

[British Red]

We have been buying our canning jars (with caps and screw lids) from Home Bargains. So far its been three years and we've had no faults or failures despite them being really cheap. There are two sizes available, 500ml cost 69p and the 1 litre ones were £1.09, but most stores only stock what is on the shelves, so we buy them all when we see them which is usually around 10 at a time. Recently stocks have been sporadic but previously our local store managers have ordered them in for us in quantities of 50 and 100 at a time, nicely boxed as well. If anyone wants the barcodes I will get the wife to dig them and out and I will post here.

That's excellent information!

 

[Toddy]

I bought some of those Home Bargain jars, and they are good, (Eerin is the name on them) but I found I needed to be careful with the rings. Some of the ones I bought aren't interchangeable with the Kilner ones and kind of birl round on the jar instead of tightening up to 'finger tight'.
I kept the two kinds separate for a bit. In the end it was just a bother and I put them away. If anyone who lives near me wants a box load of the Eerin ones, let me know and I'll dig them out of the shed for you. There's absolutely nothing wrong with them, just that I don't mix the two kinds now.

Having said that, I was very disappointed in the quality of some of the latest Kilner jars I bought. No longer made in the UK but made in China, and they were not even, the glass was thick and thin.....how hard can it be ? we spend a lot of money buying these jars, yet the folks who make and sell pasta sauces and the like need a consistent quality, and they get it, and mostly folks just throw those jars away, yet they were more consistently even walled than the ones I bought.

My son's girlfriend is Italian, she says they don't throw them away, but they are washed and stored and used again to store red sauces when there's a glut of tomatoes and peppers in Summer and Autumn, and they've been doing that since before the war. It's a known technique and doesn't need any further expense.

Much I suspect like us making jam here, yet I watched a youtube video of an almost screaming American lady insisting that people die in the UK from doing this
I jest you not, she insisted that by not 'canning' our jams that we were dieing in the hundreds of botulism.
Complete idiot, and utterly false. The only cases of botulism in the UK were from meat, and it wasn't from meat grown or processed here, and instead of the hundreds, there were five.

 

[Toddy]

We also found a UK based supplier of replacement silicon seal caps, not the screw down bands though. They are really close to us in Suffolk and sell via eBay of all places. Think they are about 3p each. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/174655363820?hash=item28aa455aec:g:rzwAAOSwgQlejM71

I think that actually works out at 30p each though.

 

[Arwen]

I think that actually works out at 30p each though.

Doh. Never was very good at math.

 

[Toddy]

Doh. Never was very good at math.

It sounded such a bargain, that I had to go and look

 

[grizzlyj]

After watching BRs vid I now have an imported canner, some jars, a USDA cookbook and some Tattler lids that are reusable but pricey from Amazon (cheaper if they last?).
A friend makes and cans bone broth so I'll be looking to him for guidance.
We have two smallish freezers, I thought about getting a new shiny one that would be more efficient but can't persuade myself the outlay will pay for itself sensibly. But now my aim is to can enough cooked meals to not need one of the freezers.
I didn't realise how closely I'm supposed to follow the approved recipes though. There's a wide variety of things to make, but to be "safe" it seems I must stick to what the likes of the USDA research has proven to be so.
Spag bol first I think

 

[British Red]

After watching BRs vid I now have an imported canner, some jars, a USDA cookbook and some Tattler lids that are reusable but pricey from Amazon (cheaper if they last?).
A friend makes and cans bone broth so I'll be looking to him for guidance.
We have two smallish freezers, I thought about getting a new shiny one that would be more efficient but can't persuade myself the outlay will pay for itself sensibly. But now my aim is to can enough cooked meals to not need one of the freezers.
I didn't realise how closely I'm supposed to follow the approved recipes though. There's a wide variety of things to make, but to be "safe" it seems I must stick to what the likes of the USDA research has proven to be so.
Spag bol first I think

Trust me it's perfectly possible to vary recipes so long as you treat things similarly. Precisely which vegetables go into vegetable soup doesn't matter hugely so long as they aren't meat and they aren't in wildly different chunk sizes. Happy to advise.

 

[grizzlyj]

Trust me it's perfectly possible to vary recipes so long as you treat things similarly. Precisely which vegetables go into vegetable soup doesn't matter hugely so long as they aren't meat and they aren't in wildly different chunk sizes. Happy to advise.

Hi and thank you for the reply. I seem to remember something about not changing the proportions of tomatoes which, by changing the overall acidity, you won't end up with a long term safe food. May have been in something like spag bol rather than just a veg dish.

 

[British Red]

Hi and thank you for the reply. I seem to remember something about not changing the proportions of tomatoes which, by changing the overall acidity, you won't end up with a long term safe food. May have been in something like spag bol rather than just a veg dish.

Acidity is vital when, for example, water bath canning tomatoes. This is because it's the level of acidity that is antimicrobial. In pressure canning its less critical because the primary preservation is accomplished by heat. When you have an idle moment, have a flick through your recipe book and look at a few recipes. You'll find that there are only a few basic canning times along the lines of "55 minutes for pint jars of vegetables, 75 minutes for meat, a few variations like stock"

 

[grizzlyj]

My take on pressure canning is this can result in long term stored food with botulism, which I believe is not noticeable like mould etc would be. The USDA produce guidelines which result from something like 100 years of lab research. This is why a canner is required, not just a pressure cooker. The only difference seems to be repeatability, a pressure cooker certainly might be safe for canning, but without using a known weight to seal, and taking into account your elevation above sea level as they do, you won't know if you're replicating the same pressure, time and procedure the USDA have shown to be safe.
Since you asked me to, in the USDA The Complete Guide To Home Canning, ISBN 9798631975507 chapter on tomatoes and tomato products it says acidification is required (adding citric acid) both with boiling water or pressure canning.
For salsas it says do not alter the veg quantities in each recipe, use tomato quantities after peeling and coring, do not drain them, do not change the proportions of veg to acid and tomatoes because it might make the salsa unsafe. For their spag bol sauce do not increase the veg proportions.
They have quite different times between smoked fish, fish, beef and chicken, in quart jars sweet potatoes want 90 minutes, white potatoes 40, beans 75, beets 35, mushrooms 45 and their mixed veg recipe 90 as examples.