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Isabella Woodhouse Isabella Woodhouse is offline
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Default Canning recipe specifies jar size - dangerous to change?

In article >,
George Shirley > wrote:

> Hokay, I'll chime in here. I've been pressure canning for more than 40
> years, most of it with the same eighteen-quart canner. Mine is the one
> with the gauge that reads the pressure but it also has a jiggler.


I'm so glad you posted--- thank you. While I've done a lot of
canning and preserving, I have only little experience (a few years ago)
with pressure canning and, basically, what I recall is that BWB seemed
so much easier and less time-consuming than pressure canning. OTOH, I
was horribly sick at the time (celiac) but now, after recovering for a
couple years, I am very much better and getting back into my groove
again. So I need to relearn the process I guess.

We're all electric, no gas service at all. I have a glass-top range and
I do recall that adjusting the pressure was difficult. I may well have
heated on too high a range setting and then overcorrected to bring down
the pressure. I recall doing peaches (halves) and that the jars lost
half their liquid so I had to just open them all. Never had anything
like that happen with BWB. The canner is a Presto with a dial gauge.

We have an outdoor grill with a 15,000 BTU side burner so I was thinking
maybe I could try using that for pressure canning. But, since it gets
pretty hot here and it's very sunny out there, it would likely take a
lot longer for the canner to cool down out there unless I got it into
the house. But I fear that would be way too much moving around. Right?

> Once I turn the heat off the pressure starts to drop and, within twenty
> minutes or less, the gauge reads zero. At that stage you can remove the
> top. At that point I do something our old home ec agent in Texas taught
> us, toss a tea towel over the top and let it sit five more minutes.


If I may ask, what is the purpose of the towel?

> ...Once that's done I lift the rack out, set the rack and jars on a
> folded towel and let them cook to room temperature. It is generally
> recommended that you let them sit for 24 hours before moving them
> around to ensure the entire mass is cool.


My canner only has a plate with holes on the bottom--- no lift-out rack.
In the past, all our BWB canners had a rack that held all the jars and
you would lift the entire thing out. I was worried about the jars
falling into each other and rattling around. I wondered if maybe that
was why my peaches did not turn out. It was disconcerting.

> ...I've never had a jar fail to seal in the pressure canner, never
> had the jar contents go bad (we eat it all up pretty quick anyway),
> and, for certain items I prefer canned to frozen. Ie, green beans, or
> shelled beans of any kind. Soups, soup stocks, broths, etc. all get
> canned to save freezer room for important stuff like vacuum sealed
> steaks, roasts, fish, etc.


I've been very fortunate with BWB canning. But it would be nice to feel
even more secure and be able to can a greater variety of things. My
chicken broth takes up entirely too much freezer space, for instance.

> Sure, pressure canning is a PITA but you get a safer, more convenient
> food that will last up to a year or more in a cool place out of direct
> sunlight - my pantry.
>
> It's certainly no more difficult or lengthy than messing around with jam
> pots, boiling jars for 5, 10, 20 minutes, etc. I quite BWBing tomatoes
> twenty years ago when I became uncertain as to the acidity of the fruit.
> If I get enough to can I pressure can them.
>
> Oh yeah, none of the food I can has ever become mushy from the canning. YMMV


Well that is certainly good to know. BTW, since I started freezing my
green beans on cookie sheets and then vacuum sealing them, they are just
ever so much better than the old way of packing them into boxes. The
only shell beans we get from the garden are black-eyed peas. And we
gobble all those up fresh so there's never any left to preserve.

Isabella
--
"I will show you fear in a handful of dust"
-T.S. Eliot