Hot Water Bath Canning

Decades later, developing a can-do attitude

The plethora of new books on canning hardly look threatening. They're full of soft-focus photographs of plump blueberries in crystal-clear jars, neat rows of pickled cucumbers and jewel-colored peach jam.

A photo of one author shows a smiling young woman in a neat plaid blouse (with no tomato spatters) who appears to be giddy over the pot she is stirring. No doubt she is preparing to fill dramatically lit jars with something exotic.

When any pastime progresses from being merely a random activity to an official trend, it must be endowed with extra meaning. So canning is "nourishing culinary and cultural traditions," crows one book. "Preserving evokes deep-rooted, almost primeval feelings of self-sufficiency and survival, of gatherer and hunter," over-analyzes another.

My mother spent every summer of my childhood canning. She wasn't coddling any traditions or prowling the savannah for nuts and berries.

She didn't can because she was committed to eating locally, and she certainly didn't do it because she was concerned about the quality of commercially produced food.

My mother embraced processed food with the passion that today's locavores show for heirloom tomatoes grown five blocks away.

My conclusion: My mother canned because she wanted to torment me.

OK, so maybe my father's half-acre garden had something to do with it, along with her inbred resistance to wasting anything. But turning my school-free summers into sweaty assembly lines must have been a bonus.

Tomato-canning time was the worst. The tomatoes would pour forth from the garden in the hottest apex of the summer and go on forever. So did canning them.

It would start at the crack of 8 a.m., which might as well have been dawn to me. I'd hear the banging of the canner and jars being dragged out of the attic. The pull-down attic stairs were 3 feet from my bedroom door, which was open because we did not have air conditioning and I was courting cross-ventilation.

By the time I got the hint and shuffled in, the kitchen would be filled with steam. Besides the large boiling water-bath canner, there was a vat of boiling water for sterilizing the jars and lids, and another for peeling the tomatoes. (A quick dip loosened the peels.) We had enough hot water to repel a sizable army of invaders, had anyone been remotely interested in overrunning that cauldron of a kitchen.

Tutorial: Hot Water Bath Canning | Frugal Upstate

Have you been wanting to try canning your own food using the hot water bath method, but been too  intimidated to try?  I know I was for a long, long time!  Believe it or not, it takes me a while to wrap my mind around a new idea before trying it.  I like to read, research and mull something over for quite a while before I try it.

I know how hard it can be to take that first step and try something new, so  I decided to help encourage you all to try canning by doing a tutorial for this month’s Walmart Mom DIY challenge.

After all, what is more “Do It Yourself” than preserving your own food?  And with the renewed interest in growing and storing your own food as a way to help hedge against inflation-well, it seemed like a great fit.  Plus I buy all my supplies at Walmart every year anyway!

I’ve been using hot water bath canning for several years now and I promise you, it isn’t anywhere near as hard as it sounds!  Yes-there are multiple steps, and there are a few places you have to be careful to ensure food safety. . . but I promise you, YOU CAN DO THIS!

I’m going to walk you through this in very specific detail with lots and lots of photos.

Let’s start with your supplies:

There are a few other things I use, but I’ll show you as I go along.

A note on the pot:  this can be a specially sold “canning” pot or a deep stock pot you already have.  The important thing is that your canning rack fit inside and that it is tall enough to not only fit your jars, but to have 1-2 inches of water OVER the jars.  If you are going to buy a pot new, I’d suggest buying one that is deep enough to fit pint jars at a minimum.

About the jars.  There are many different size jars out there-here you see from left to right, back to front a regular mouth quart jar, a wide mouth quart jar, a pint jar, a tall jelly jar, a regular 1/2 pint jelly jar and a small jell jar.