Preserving The Season's Fruits With A Canning Evangelist

[mixfinder]

Custom Cannery

We didn't have running water and just a wood fired cook stove but lots of friends and neighbors gave us fruit and produce. There was huge warehouse style building in our town with rows of metal counters and sinks, a huge trough of scalding water, an ice machine, corn stripper and stacks of empty cans. After prepping the produce you loaded it into cans you stamped with your assigned number and the contents. You added salt or sugar and loaded the cans in racks on a rolling line that fed into the machines that put on the lid and fed the cans into the tort chamber. A week later you picked up your cans ready for the shelf. There were a couple steam jacketed kettles, a juice extractor and peeling machine if you wanted to can meat, soup, chili, juice etc. Grandma was cheap and wouldn't pay the cost of the cannery, but processed her jars in the ovens in roasters with 2 inches of water. After we got a freezer and running water mom never canned another jar.

 

[retromania]

Kelly,

Anderson had a smaller version of the warehouse that you described. I think it was run by the county extension service, but I am not sure of that. Like I said my mother's thing was freezing. We had a big Hotpoint freezer on the back porch and it was slammed with meats, fish that we had caught, veggies, etc, etc. Obviously we were worried about theft back then. The freezer didn't lock. We never locked our house because our grandparents never did and when we moved in some years later no one could find the house keys. BOY do I digress. I've got to work on that!!!! LOLLL

 

[vintagekitchen]

Oven canning

Yup, no longer recomended, but yep, I still do it. I grew up eating oven canned or open kettle canned fruits and tomatoes, and boiling water bath canned or oven canned vegetables, and never once got sick. I know they say it's not safe now, but I also know most people now don't keep the scrupulously clean and nearly sterile kitchens our grandmothers kept either. My grandmothers cleaned sinks, counters, appliances, floors, and walls with Clorox in the kitchen and in the bath. Canning jars were washed, rinsed in water with a splash of Clorox, then scalded before use. Germs lived in fear of those old ladies. Seriously though, in my opinion, oven canning is easier, faster as no canner holds as much as an oven, easier on the stove as there's not all that weight on the stove top, and cooler as the kitchen doesn't become a steamy sauna. I don't can a lot anymore, but what few things I bother with I put in the oven.

 

[whirlcool]

My sister called me today to tell me that her cherry trees gave off a bumper crop of cherries this year. So she decided to buy a home canning kit and can some of them. She said she has about 12 bushels of cherries on hand.

I asked her if it was a pressure kit and she said no, it's a simmer pot. It came with all the jars and instructions. I told her that she may have to boil those jars for awhile to make sure they were safe. She said that she is following a recipe where she has to sterilize the bottles, but after you fill them the recipe said you only have to simmer them for 5 minutes. I told her I don't think that's right from what I read here, but she said if it says to simmer for 5 minutes that's what she's going to do. Then she said "I'll send you a few jars when I am done!".

I don't think a 5 minute simmer would even get the canned product hot all the way.

 

[kenmore71]

Cherries would be considered a high-acid fruit and are relatively safe to can.  The USDA recommends a 20 minute boiling water bath for quarts that are hot packed and a 25 minute boiling water bath for a raw pack.  5 minutes sounds like just enough to get the jars to seal MAYBE.  I doubt anyone would get sick or die, but why take the chance?