Canning?...who does it anymore?

[yogitunes]

Had a technician to the house the other day and he seen all the canning jars of food on the shelves in the basement, and thought they we left by the last owner, I'm the original owner, but suprised him that I did the actual canning, he didn't think anyone did this any more...

But my actual question to you guys and gals is do you CAN?
or freeze and do preserves?

This is just something thats been passed down in my family for generations, and it's fun to do with a gang of family and friends, and make great gifts, a little messy at times but the end result is satisfying...

I do: sweet and dill pickles, peaches, green beans, applesauce, spaghetti/pizza/sloppyjoe sauce, and preserves by normal canning methods..

freezing: many vegetables from the garden or produce stands as available, strawberries, cantelope/honeydew/melon, peas, and corn off the cob....

and we experimented with many other recipes with freezing and canning methods...in between, just to see what happens...

Just wondered if you do CAN and what you CAN?

one last tip of the day: freeze the wrappers from stick butter
and save to use for when a recipe calls for you to "grease" a pan, pull one out, wipe pan, and throw away, no mess!

 

[qsd-dan]

Yep, I still can. It's almost that time of the season to get crakin!

I usually can apricots and cherries. If I'm feeling REALLY energetic, I make and can jam.

 

[ptcruiser51]

Butter wrappers!

OMG, my OL did that and still does! Even when I was a child I remember seeing them in the freezer of our 1947 Westinghouse.

 

[laundryboy]

Yogitunes

Can I borrow your recipe for sweet pickles, I have always wanted to can them, I have all my parents canning supplies and then some..

Chris

 

[toggleswitch2]

Friend of mine grew up on a farm in Tennessee. His momma sends me all sorts of "canned" goodies in that she knows I feed him and watch over him now that he is living in the big, bad city.

All I have to do is return the jars.
DELICIOUS!

 

[xraytech]

I love canning
I can the following:
sour cherry jelly
black raspberry jam
sometimes plum jam, if I can get purple plums cheap
green beans and wax beans
applesauce
tomatoes
With the exception of beans which I do in the pressure cooker an dthe apple sauce I process in a water bath, th ejams and jellies and tomatoes I use the the inversion method, in which I cook the jams or tomatoes down and pour into hot prepared jars and seal with prepared lids and rings and then flip upside down on a towel and cover them over with another towel and it forma a seal. This meathod according to the newer canning books is not considered safe but we have never had a problem doing this.

For freezing I freeze some green beans, then everything else I usuallty prepare and freeze with my fresh produce or what I get from local farms.
I freeze:
approx 3 - 4 dozen stuffed green peppers
cabbage rolls
12 apple pies
4-5 peach pies
6 black raspberry pies
2-3 sour cherry pies
and I freeze whole tomatoes in quart bags to be pulled out to use for vertain recipes
also take a few bushels of tomatoes and put through the squeezo strainer and cook down and make spaghetti sauce and freeze in quart jars.
I also freeze some small containers of black raspberries to be used for fried pies.

I am also one of those people who likes to churn their own butter, which I do from time to time

 

[frigilux]

I can every summer. After being forced to help my Mom can when I was a kid, I swore I would never do it as an adult. I started canning about 10 years ago. It's comforting to pick a jar off the pantry shelf, knowing you made it yourself.

I have friends with several sizable gardens, so we usually can at my house, as I have a well-equipped kitchen and two canners.

These are the regulars:

Strawberry Jam
Blueberry Jam
Mixed Fruit Chutney
Tomato Sauce
Salsa
Dill Pickles
Bread 'n' Butter Pickles
Pickled Vegetables (great for antipasto platters)

 

[gyrafoam]

I like to can food. I got carried away with this years garden so I'll be doing a lot of it this summer.
Tomatoes,fennel,squash,green beans,eggplant,sweet red peppers,banana peppers, cantalope, then the hot peppers---habeneros,cayenne, and jalepenos.

I miss my fig trees back in Atlanta. I loved to can them.

 

[toggleswitch2]

Don't we all?

~I am also one of those people who likes to churn their own butter, which I do from time to time.

*eyes roll* LOL

Only did that once-- in the first week of kindergarten. Remember it like it was yesterday.

 

[yogitunes]

Christopher...

I will dig out my Ball canning book tomorrow and post it on here....this is one of the easiest and fastest canning things to do, so simple and fast, you can get carried away with it, I do this recipe every other year, because I make about 10 cases of quart jars when I get started.

and churn butter...I haven't done that since I was a kid, also I still have the ice cream machine with the hand crank, this brings back great memories, I may have to pull that out and whip up some ice cream.....yummy!

 

[xraytech]

Oh I forgot about the bread n butter pickles and pickled jalapenos

 

[sudsmaster]

I make my own kimchee. Kimchee is basically spicy chunky sauerkraut.

Also, in the past 10 years, have made jam, and canned peaches from the garden. I routinely freeze extra produce from the garden (green beans and hot peppers, mostly, but in the past froze a fair amount of tomatoes as well). Still have frozen peach halves from five or more years ago. They're vacuum packed so still good.

Canning, I found, is very labor intensive, at least in a home kitchen - especially the jams and jellies.

 

[tolivac]

Remember helping my mom can tomatoes during the summer visits to her house-despite the hot kitchen,hard work,and long time it took-the canning was kinda fun.Remember her getting the Kerr or Ball canning bottles and lids-and that GIANT pan used to heat the jars in to get the caps to seal.also sterilized the bottles in that giant pan-it took up two burners on the stove.My job was to blanch and skin the tomotoes-she packed them into the jars.My Mom or others I know haven't canned in years.My Mom and stepfather used to grow really large tomatoe gardens.also another one of my jobs was to bust and roto till the soil before planting-its was hot and hard work behind that tiller-and the feild was LARGE!

 

[davek]

Kimchee

Sudsmaster, how do you make your Kimchee? I love fermented cabbage products (kimchee and sauerkraut), but I'm quite intimidated by attempting to make it and I'm afraid I might poison myself (I sure wouldn't give it to anyone else until I knew i had it down).

 

[toggleswitch2]

rats, squirrels, bird, roaches stray cats, ants .....etc.

Kimchee.

My neighbors, who appear to be Korean, leave that stuff around to "cure"/ "dry" right on a piece of plywood in their garage or out on the "quad" between the aparmtment buildngs. Interestingly no animal will touch it and they don't appear to recognize it as food.

 

[dblrinz]

Canning

My family did it A LOT when I was young, but stopped once everyone gave up gardening...We typically did it in groups - Mom, Aunts, Great Aunts, Grandparents - Men usually prepping food and women cooking and canning. Then came the big family dinner...

In the day, my family canned almost as much stuff as Xraytech. You could always grab a couple of jars and some stuff from the freezer and make a meal at anytime. AND none of the stuff came pre-prepared from a grocery....

Xraytech - I am envious of your energy! AND the butter...We never churned butter, but being of Northern Italian heritage we used much more butter rather than oil as would central and Southern Italians...

 

[chuffle]

I do...

I can tomatoes and red sauce.

I grew up with the sights and smells of canning tomatoes, beets, green and yellow string beans, beet relish, pickles, elderberry jelly.

Corn, strawberries were frozen.

I have limited storage, so that is why I only do the tomatoes.

Joe

 

[geoffdelp]

We're still canning here in Minnesota!!

Pickles, tomatoes, beets, beans, strawberry, rhubarb and ground cherry preserves; all stored under the basement stairs.

We freeze all fruit, corn (on and off the cob), squash, pumpkin.

We use a large enamelware canner, pressure canner and those Food Saver bags for the freezer.

Nothing like good stuff from your own garden in the dead of a Minnesota winter!!

 

[westie2]

Yes we still can here in Arkansas

We can tomatoes (whole, sauce, juice and rotel type by adding chopped hot peppers, green beans, squash for squash caserolle, apple pie filling, peach pie filling and dill, sweet and bread and butter pickles the bread and butter we make regular and then some zesty ones by adding a hot pepper to the jar. We freeze the rest. Usually make sauerkrat every other year. Have a large stainless steel pot, two pressure canners both 7 quart size. For pickle brining and sauerkrat we use my great grandmothers 8 gallon crock that is over 100 years old and has been passed down generation to generation. One person can do the canning but with both my wife and I working together goes much smoother and easier.

Nothing more relaxing to us after a hard day at work to go to the garden and harvest it. With beans we harvest and sit on the patio and snap them to get ready to can. Our grandkids all like to help snap them. We also have a french cutter we use.