Pressure Canners

[washerboy]

love to can

I love canning veggies. Some things I think are better frozen like corn and orka. I usually get my beans ready the night before, then set the jars and canner up in the morning. I think I process beans for 50 minutes. I do this in the morning before I leave for work. Since you cannot remove the jars until there cool I just turn off the burner and when I get home in the afternoon their ready to wash and put in the pantry. Nothing smells better than green beans!!!!

I also enjoy using my pressure cooker year round. In the winter time I cook dried pinto beans under presure. Just wash the beans well, put them in the cooker and add about 3 x the amount of water, cook for about 40 minutes and their done. I've tried to cook dried peas but they don't hold up as well under pressure. I also cook stuffed green peppers and minute steaks.

Someone above made the comment they cook a roast that's fork tender...maybe I don't do some thing right but every time I try to cook a roast it's tuff and grainey. I've also tried the "pressure cooker" fried chicken and it's always slimey...

 

[retromania]

Mark

You probably didn't process the roast long enough.o it. Thanks for the tip about pressure cooking pintos. I will have to try that.

 

[iheartmaytag]

Roast always comes out tender and falling apart. Be sure to brown it a bit before processing, It will come out a little gray and anemic looking otherwise.

I also like to so Salisbury steak in the pressure cooker. I coat and brown the meat, while I am doing that I add the onion, celery, green pepper, and beef stock to the pressure cooker and start it warming up. When the meat is brown I place it in the P/C and process at 15lbs for about 20 minutes.

 

[retromania]

Harley

Yum! What time's supper?

 

[tomturbomatic]

Seriously, pressure cookers?

Here we've been discussing pressure cookers and the bombs in Boston were made in pressure cookers. I hope we are not questioned. I would not know what to tell them seeing as how my pressure cooker recipe books don't list that item.

In early tests at CU, they did manage to get one to build up sufficient pressure when the safety plug did not let go that it blew the lid off the pan. I think I remember that it looked like it would not be able to lock on the body again. It looked a little twisted or warped. I guess that is what happened with these cookers. I wonder what brand the bombers used. I doubt they would spend money on quality; probably some cheap turd world stamped aluminum model. Do you suppose the gasket would be damaged by the heat of the blast? Do you suppose that the on line Al Queda magazine that gives instructions for making these devices accepts advertising from pressure cooker manufacturers? They could have little hang tags on the handles of the pans with the "as seen in..." slogan. I hope we don't have to start registering our pressure cookers. I'd be in instant trouble.

I am not making light of a terrible tragedy and the way they have tightened security around here is no joke, but when everyday common things can be used to make weapons, you wonder how we can be safe again.

 

[retromania]

Question?

I have an old old pressure cooker that is heavy heavy. It is a little wobbly on a flat surface. Should I be afraid to use it? It has a new seal ring and pressure plug. I have used it and it does fine. Just wondering if since it is a little warped on the bottom if I should not use it at all.

 

[westingman123]

I'd say it was fine

I have more than a few pressure cookers. As my aunts have passed on, they seem to gravitate to me. A couple of my older ones are a little warped on the bottom, but they work just fine.

As for pressure-cooked roasts, I find them to be extra tender and ever so much faster than the other methods. Be sure to follow the times in your owner's manual, and I think you'll be well pleased.

I think I've related before that Grandma and I blew up a pressure canner full of jars of pickled beets. We were out in the garden and it overheated, leaving a red mess all over that kitchen. Some paint and new curtains later, the only evidence left was the dent in the ceiling. It's still there, all these years later. The bottom of the canner became a water dish for the outside dogs.

 

[neptunebob]

Tom, canning was and is hard work, and there is a Pittsburgh connection. It is because canning was such a pain that H.J. Heinz made his fortune.

 

[retromania]

Bob

There were places around her years ago where you could take crops and have them canned in metal cans. I'll have to ask my mother more about that.

 

[tomturbomatic]

Andy, I remember reading & hearing about such a place in DeKalb Co. Ga. It was a giant operation at the county HQ complex near us under the supervision of home economists and I think it was part of the county Home Extension Service. You did most of the work yourself, the cleaning & cutting of the veggies and the packing in the cans which were put in perforated metal trays. The staff did the loading of the pressure retorts and the sealing of the cans and, for a small charge per can, you were finished.

My grandma had a bottle capper and used to put up ketchup in brown bottles. We took home her last two bottles from our visit in 1962 and I remember offering some to a really good friend and telling her all about it so that she would really appreciate the honor of getting some of a finite treasure. I made some in the Westinghouse RO and canned it in pint jars but that was decades ago.

The main disadvantage of using a pressure cooker with a warped base is that it is very inefficient on an electric stove and will shorten the life of the surface unit. One of the old aluminum cookware manufacturers had instructions for using a couple of pieces of 2X4 lumber and a hammer to remove the curve in the base.

 

[combo52]

Warped Pressure Cooker

Should You use it?, it really depends whether you have a gas or electric cooking top, if you use gas it will perform just fine but a warped pan should not be used on any electric cooking surface with the possible exception of induction. Also if your warped cooker is aluminum be sure it is not cracked or partly melted from severe overheating otherwise it should be fine to use on a gas range.

 

[iheartmaytag]

My mother has two canners, both Mirro, she always preferred the Mirro. Mirro stil produces replacement parts for every cooker they ever manufactured.

Back in the day Monm would be loading one as the other was processing. As the first was cooling, the other was being brought up to pressure. They are still out in the garage as my little garden didn't produce enough to save.

One summer she canned 120 quarts of green beans and over 200 pints, Tomatoes were canned in about every shape from whole to juice. Potatoes--Yes you can, can baby new potatoes and they are wonderful. One whole room of the old farm house was full of canned goods.

When she was growing up they didn't have electricity and hence no refrigeration; so Grandma canned their meats as well. She would tell during canning season Grandma didn't have her own canner so she would borrow the neighbors down the road when she was done for the night. Grandma would can all night and return it back the next morning for the neighbor to do her days work. BTW--with 17 kids, Grandma canned in gallon jars. If you wanted to make it through the winter everything was canned, dried, or cured.

Terrible that such a tragedy in Boston is going to be linked to a hard working home appliance.

 

[tomturbomatic]

My father's mother canned meats. I thought that the canned chicken she brought to the table could have benefitted from a little better presentation because it was mighty pale and boiled looking, but for people who did not have electricity or even when they had it and did not have a freezer, canning meat was the way to preserve it. I think I would have cut the chicken off the bones and used the canning broth to make a soup with some vegetables and noodles. Hell, if I was really inspired, I might have used it to make chicken and dumplings, but that's not the way it was served and I obviously did not die of starvation.

When Sandy was blowing in and the weathermen were predicting mayhem and power failures and wearing suit coats and blazers to hide the fact that they were tumescent and leaking with excitement, I browned up hamburger and onions, threw Manwich sauce over it and canned it in the Mirro 16 qt because it's easier to get to than the Presto 16 qt. All the while it was processing on the Heat Minder unit set just below 250, I kept expecting the lights to go out, but they never did and my emergency stash of sloppy joes is still on the shelf. If the lights had gone out, that's several pounds of ground meat that was safe without refrigeration.

When I am canning, I add some vinegar to the water so that the inside of the cooker does not discolor so much from the water.

 

[retromania]

Thank you...

Thak you all for your comments.

 

[sudsmaster]

The Magic Seal toggle weight has a screw set into its top. I guess it's for venting pressure. You can back off the screw (counter-clockwise) and it will divert steam sideways through side holes in the weight. I wonder if the screw adjustment is also used to help regulate pressure? That would be cool if it was.

As for as the Boston bombs go, I suppose there might be increased scrutiny of pressure cooker purchases, but let's be real. No reason to be afraid to buy a pressure cooker if that's what you need or want. Don't let the nut job(s) who planted those bombs ruin your food preservation agenda.

 

[tomturbomatic]

You probably would not want to regulate pressure that way because the instructions for canners caution against letting the pressure fluctuate because it draws liquid out of the jars since pressure builds up in the jars equal to the pressure in the canner and if the pressure in the canner drops, stuff is sucked out of the higer pressure atmosphere of the jars. It might be for emergency use if you suddenly notice the pressure start to climb, you could bleed off a tiny amount of pressure before it would affect the jars amd then close it once the heat was lowered, maybe.

 

[norgeway]

Re Canning in the old days!

I remember my Mother and Aunt telling about canning in the thirties before they had electricity, They said Grandmother sat on the poarch breaking beans for hours, starting early in the morning,she canned in a copper wash boiler that held about 16 quarts, beans were boiled three hours....now imaging that on a big Majestic wood cook stove..in August, in a room about 12x12!! Mother said she remembered Grandmother going inside to add more wood and coming back to the poarch wiping sweat, at about 5.00 she went in and cooked supper!! Mother said the house was so hot you could never get any sleep after a day of having that stove near red hot!

 

[norgeway]

RE Mirro parts!

I wish they DID make parts for the old cookers, If you know where a gasket can be bought for a Model 394 cooker, please tell me.

 

[norgeway]

The rest of the story!

Grandmothers niece worked at Belks Dept store, their housewares dept sold Presto and Mirro products, when they re modeled the house in 53 she got a Presto canner...Which my Aunt is still using at age 86!!!

 

[westingman123]

hot pack

When I was a little guy, I had to wash and sterilize the jars for Grandma to hot pack tomatoes. She had a big ole' Coldspot freezer, and when the jars were packed we lined them up on the top of that freezer and covered them with tea towels. One by one you would hear those jars "POP" and seal all through the evening. Next day, they went to the "root cellar". I hated that cellar.

I only remember one time she hot-packed green beans (shelley beans, she called them). The majority of the time, that big pressure canner was put to use. If a lot of a particular vegetable or fruit was "coming on" she'd use a hot water bath canner--THE STEAM! I think for jellies, it was always the hot water bath. Anybody else remember having to "look" the blackberries?

We slept in the yard a lot during canning season--the whole house would get steamy hot. Even after she had an electric stove, I remember those summer days and the relief of going to the creek to swim afterwards.