Project 10: Canning and Pickling

 

Why would you want to do this? Canning and pickling allow you more ways to enjoy your homegrown/homemade foods and prolong the enjoyment of your harvest (that you’ve saved money on by growing yourself). Home-preserved foods are healthier than store-bought nonperishables because you are using a preservative method, not preservative ingredients.

Why wouldn’t you want to do this? You don’t want to store the canning jars, or you don’t have space to store food long-term.

How does this differ from the store-bought version? Home-preserved food tastes homemade, and you get the pride of having done it yourself.

Is there an easier way? You can buy home-preserved foods from hobby growers or small farms for the nutrition and taste of homegrown food but not the cost savings.

Cost comparison: There is the upfront cost of acquiring the jars (and kettle or pressure cooker if you need one). Once you have the materials, it is virtually free.

Skills needed: Basic cooking skills.

Learn more about it: Can It! ( i-5 Press, 2012) by Jackie Callahan Parente; Well-Preserved (Clarkson Potter, 2009) by Eugenia Bone; The Joy of Pickling (Harvard Common Press, 2009), revised, by Linda Ziedrich; The Beginner’s Guide to Preserving (free PDF at www.homestead
harvest.com) by Dena Harris and Nicole Taylor.

Buying packaged nonperishable food from the store is not the only way to have food on hand outside the refrigerator. You can preserve your own creations easily and cheaply.

Preserving food from your own garden in your own kitchen is a rewarding project that goes hand in hand with growing and cooking the food. The best thing is enjoying the fresh harvest with appreciation for what went into it. The second-best thing is appreciating it again when the warm days and the toils of the garden are forgotten and many of the flavors of harvest season are gone for the year. You can enjoy your healthy bounty again in the winter and early spring, reducing your grocery budget and extending the enjoyment of your homegrown food.

If you don’t have a garden, you can go to a pick-your-own farm or a farmers’ market and stock up during the peak of the season. Even retail operations often sell bulk quantities of produce at reduced prices. Take advantage of the savings and preserve the excess.

Canning

Pressure canning, or heat preserving, is a method of food preservation that long predates refrigeration. By heating containers and their contents to a threshold beyond the tolerance of bad bacteria and sealing them to prevent the entry of pathogens, food can be preserved for years in room-temperature conditions. Most of the flavors and nutrients are retained in preserved foods.

Do some research on preserving your foods of choice before getting started. Certain foods need higher heat or acidifying additives to eliminate the possibility of bacteria growth. Eliminating bacteria growth is critical to preserving the food; otherwise, you’ll end up with spoiled food and maybe even exploding jars!

Canning jars have a two-part lid with an outer ring.

When a jar is properly canned, the lid is tightly sealed to the jar without the outer ring attached.

Glass jars explode when microbes growing in a sealed container create a gassy buildup of pressure that eventually causes the jar to burst. One way to sidestep the possibility of explosion (besides doing everything you can to preserve the food correctly) is to remove the canning rings when you seal the jars. If properly sealed, the lids will stay on without the threaded rings. Without the ring, any pressure inside the jar will cause the sealed lid to simply pop up or off. If I ever find a jar with either a loose lid or mold, I know not to use it, and I’ve avoided the mess of shattered glassware.

The food that most people (us included) seem to mourn at season’s end is tomatoes. Let’s face it, the tomatoes available for purchase in grocery stores just don’t hold a candle to what comes out of our gardens or from the farmers’ markets. However, while it won’t beat a tomato served fresh from the garden, fresh-preserved tomatoes are one of the best ways to carry that summer flavor through the year. Canning your own tomatoes is easy. We make tomato sauce and sometimes whole stewed tomatoes (when we are up to our eyeballs in the harvest) during the flush of summer, often canning as many as we eat. This project focuses on tomato sauce.

For years, we used pint jars for tomato sauce because it was easy to fit five into our pressure cooker. We would use two per spaghetti or pizza meal, and I still find myself grabbing two jars even though we’ve now moved up to quart jars. Most urban farmers are best suited to start with pints—at 16 ounces, they mimic the 14.5-ounce cans of store-bought sauce—and they are easy to store both filled and empty.

The following method of canning is the boiling-water-bath method. As the food in the jar is heated to boiling by the surrounding water, the air is pushed out, creating an environment of relative sterility. When the jars are removed from the bath and cooled, the lids are vacuum-sealed onto the jars, which is why the rings can be removed for storage.

Tomato Sauce

Materials/Ingredients:

•Glass canning jars with two-part lids (lid plus ring), 8 jars per gallon of sauce

•Large kettle

•Pots/pans

•Clean cloths

•Optional: Funnel

•Optional: Pressure canner

•Homegrown tomatoes (as many as you want to make into sauce)

Step 1: Wash your jars well. This step can be ideally completed by timing the jars to come out of the dishwasher just as you are ready to ladle the sauce into them so that they’ll be clean and already hot (cold glass can crack or break when receiving hot contents).

Step 2: Cook your tomato sauce as you normally would (see the sidebar if you don’t already have a recipe), omitting meat products (it is riskier and more detailed to can foods with meat in them, so you can tackle that project when you’re more advanced). You can put in herbs and seasonings or just tomatoes, depending on how you’ll use the sauce. Because we use ours in chili, as spaghetti sauce, as pizza sauce, and in salsa, I use plain tomatoes and add the seasonings after I open the jars.

Step 3: Put the flat lids for the jars into a small pan of boiling water to sterilize them and soften the rubber rims. Start a big kettle (large enough to hold at least one or two jars fully submerged under bubbling water) of water boiling on the stove.

Step 4: Fill each of the hot, clean jars with sauce no higher than where the “shoulders” of the jar become the vertical mouth edges (this air gap is called the headspace). If you have a wide-mouth funnel, use it; otherwise, any spills on the rim or threads of the jar should be wiped off with a clean, damp cloth before lidding.

Step 5: Place a hot lid on top of each cleaned-off jar and screw on the rings, tightening to “finger tight” (a term that always warrants discussion—don’t wrench it tightly, just screw it on as firmly as you would a regular jar lid).

Step 6: When all of the jars are full, place as many as you can into the kettle of boiling water, making sure that the boiling water covers each jar fully. Keep the water at a boil for twenty minutes (boiling time varies depending on the type of food you’re preserving).

Step 7: Remove the jars from the bath and let them sit on the counter until cool. When properly sealed, the lids should be sucked down tightly onto the jars. You might hear the telltale “ping” of the suction as the jars cool. Push gently on each lid before you remove the ring to make sure it doesn’t bounce—a properly sealed jar should have a taut, inverted lid.

Step 8: Reprocess each improperly sealed jar, if any, by removing and wiping off the lid, ring, and jar rim; replacing the lid and ring; and boiling the jar for another twenty minutes. Alternatively, you can refrigerate these jars and use their contents within a week.

Step 9: Remove the rings from the properly sealed jars and label them with the month, day, and year. Store them in a cool, dark environment for up to a year (enough time for the next tomato harvest!).

Homemade Tomato Sauce

When you are facing 30 or 40 pounds of tomatoes, it helps to make a quick batch of sauce before the fruit flies find the tomatoes. Here’s my tried-and-true method, most easily done with a food mill:

Cut each tomato into chunks, removing the stem ends. Put them all in a big pot on a medium burner. If there isn’t much juice, add a bit of water to keep them from scalding on the bottom. When the tomatoes begin to heat up (you’ll see steam coming from the pan), stir and mash them. Keep cooking them until they lose their shape and are bubbling.

Set up the food mill over a large bowl. Ladle the cooked tomatoes into the mill in batches, milling out the skin and seeds. The sauce comes out of the mill and into the bowl.

If you don’t have a food mill, drop each whole tomato into boiling water for ten seconds or so. Remove each tomato with a slotted spoon and peel off the skin (it should come off easily; if not, put the tomato back into the boiling water for a few more seconds). Cut the peeled tomatoes into quarters, removing the stems and seeds. Put the pieces in a large pot and cook down into sauce.

Pickling

Pickling is a different animal than canning because it changes the food’s flavor and thus isn’t suited to all foods or all palates. Pickling preserves foods by creating an environment hostile to bad bacteria through the high acidity of vinegar and the saline content. In some formulations, the fermentation produced by putting edibles into this environment also generates beneficial bacteria that aid digestion. Devotees of pickling and fermenting insist that these methods offer myriad health benefits, and they are popular among certain circles, such as paleo-diet and raw-food practitioners.

We love sauerkraut, and pickled beans are tastier than their frozen counterparts, retaining a great snappy crunch. “Dilly beans” are one of our favorite foods, and I often find that my kids have opened a recently prepared jar while I’m still picking plenty of fresh green beans from the garden. Frozen beans can get soggy when cooked, and this recipe is a great way to preserve the bounty’s crispness.

Okra pickled with mustard seeds and spices.

Dilly Beans

Materials/Ingredients:

•Large pot

•Eight 1-pint canning jars/lids

•Optional: Pressure canner

•3 cups white vinegar

•3 cups water

•½ cup pickling salt

•3 pounds green beans

•Approximately 8 generous sprigs of dill leaves (unopened flower heads are pretty also) 50–60 whole peppercorns

Step 1: Bring the water, salt, and vinegar to a boil, and then remove from heat. Set aside.

Step 2: Remove the strings and stem ends from the beans, breaking or cutting them into similar lengths that will fit in the pint jars. Pack the beans into the jars so that the beans are standing up inside the jars. Place at least one sprig of dill in the midst of the standing beans.

Step 3: Drop five to eight peppercorns into each jar.

Step 4: Ladle the salt/vinegar mixture over the beans, covering the beans entirely and filling the jars to their shoulders. Put the lids and rings on the jars.

For a variation on this recipe, you can make basil beans by putting in sprigs of basil and a clove or two of raw garlic instead of dill and peppercorns before adding the salt/vinegar brine.

Properly pickled foods should not necessitate a boiling-water bath or pressure canning, but I like to use one of these methods as “back-up” preservation if I will be storing the jars at room temperature. You can do the boiling-water bath as described in the foregoing tomato-sauce project. I process the jars in a pressure canner for ten to fifteen minutes to create the vacuum seal.

Sauerkraut

Ingredients/Materials:

•Large (3- to 5-gallon) food-grade tub or vat

•Large bowl

•Clean cloth

•Optional: Pressure canner and canning jars/lids 1 or 2 large cabbages (enough to make 5 pounds)

•Up to 3 Tbsp pickling salt

Step 1: Shred the cabbage as finely as possible (or to the coarseness that you like for sauerkraut). Put it in a large bowl and sprinkle the salt over it. Combine and mix the salt and cabbage together well.

Step 2: Put the cabbage/salt mixture into the tub. Within a half hour or so, the salt should cause the cabbage to release liquid (fresh cabbage has more natural liquid; if the cabbage has not been recently harvested, it will be drier). If you find that you need more liquid, add a brine of two parts pickling salt dissolved in three parts water.

Step 3: Pack the mixture down tightly in the tub, making sure that it is covered entirely by liquid. You’ll need to put something on top of the cabbage to keep it fully immersed in the brine—a plate with a slightly smaller diameter than the tub works well and can be held down with a clean heavy can or bottle on top. The purpose is to keep air away from the cabbage so that it can ferment.

Step 4: Cover the container with a clean, thin cloth and let it rest in a cool, dark place. Check the sauerkraut daily, making sure that all of the cabbage remains submerged. Add more brine if needed. If a scum forms, skim it off with a spoon, wash the plate and whatever you have weighing it down, and replace.

Step 5: Wait two to four weeks for fermentation to be complete.

Store the finished sauerkraut, tightly covered, in the refrigerator or a very cool place (40 degrees Fahrenheit maximum). For room-temperature storage, can the sauerkraut in jars as described in the tomato-sauce project, processing pints for twenty minutes.

You can sanitize and reuse glass jars for your pickled sauerkraut as long as the lids close tightly.