How to Fill 66 Jars in a Day

In the late 90s, I became a certified "Master Food Preserver" through my local county extension office. It sounds very fancy, but at the time, canning and food preservation was truly out of favor. I was undoubtedly the youngest person in my class of about a dozen people.

As Master Food Preservers, we were expected to field questions from county constituents contacting the understaffed extension offices as well as give demos and teach classes. In the entire time that I lived in Weld county, I never once got a question nor did I ever teach a class. I fulfilled my required hours mostly by helping out at the county fair and manning a little visited food preservation booth at various county functions.

Fast forward to 2008, after a long time away from my canner, I decided to make some pickles. I wrote this about the craft:

There is no doubt that canning is as laborious and useless a kitchen task as there currently is. But there are fewer culinary tasks more satisfying than seeing rows of your own (tastier) pickles lined up in the pantry. 

And while that is still true, over the past three years, for whatever reason, canning has seen a resurgence. Whenever I mention my pickles, which is frequently as I am an unabashed canning evangelist, I inevitably get a request to "teach me how!" I started with a small class to a  friend and her husband, then another much larger class to my church, and then my closest friend asked to learn. One hot August day, we put up our favorites:  jams, pickled beets and bread and butters pickles. The Annual Cannual was born.

This year was the third Annual Cannual and every year we learn more. Canning is still useless, hot and laborious, but this is how you do it right.

The Set Up

Apparently, glass top stove manufacturers forbid canning using traditional ridged-bottom canners due to a combination of weight, pot size and the temperature fluctuations of the glass top stove. Knowing the volume of the Annual Cannual, I was unwilling to accept canning in my smaller flatbottomed canner. So we did this instead:

Yes, a propane-powered, dual-burnered camp stove with an output of 35,000 BTUs per burner. We kept two canners constantly going (even in the rain), the heat stayed outside and all four burners were available on the range inside for cooking. Also, spills? No problem.

The Bounty

Tomatoes from fellow choristers, peaches from coworkers, cucumbers, onions and chiles from the local farmers markets and the rest from the uber gardeners, my parents. The fresher, the better.

The Tribe

Many hands make light work - never truer when you have pounds and pounds of produce to convert into pickles and jams. Everyone did prep work at home so on the morning of the Cannual, we only had about two hours of blanching, peeling, chopping and foodmilling left to do.

Cilantro and tomatoes for salsa

Apples for apple butter

Peaches and strawberries for jam

The Yield

We started at 10:00 am and finished at about 8:30 pm. Plenty of time left for ice cream and consuming extra jam.

7 pints of peach salsas

7 pints of tomato salsa

4 pints of pickled beets

7 pints of bread and butter pickles

10 half-pints of apple butter

17 half-pints of peach jam

9 half-pints of strawberry rhubarb jam

5 half-pints of plum preserves

10 half-pints of apple butter

Everything definitely has a season.

Link Round Up - Crafty Goodness

Oh, for an extra hour in the day! There would be no limit to what us crafty types would accomplish!

Of course, sleep is always a terrific option too :-)

• For those of you like Chris and me who think the crust is the best part, these lattice cookies look to die for.
• Can art be practical? Yes! Especially if you have tons of thread laying around. Make them beautiful with this framed spool holder.
• Just what I need...another afghan to make. But this Missoni pattern and the colors have already spurred me to look through my yarn stash.
• Once we figure out how to bring more light into the hallway, these herb planters are going up. It's not like we don't have plenty of mason jars.
• This painting is definitely going to be made for the new office. I planned it even before I picked the office colors.

I can tell I am going to be busy when the choir season ends.

A Lost Art

I can see why home canning is out of favor in today's world. The process is fairly complicated, you need to be hyper-clean and the best time to can is the worst time of the year. Who wants to spend a July afternoon in a hot kitchen filled with several large pots of heavily boiling water? And most importantly, why bother? You can buy perfectly adequate pickles, jams and canned fruits at your local grocery store for cheaper and easier.

But even against those odds, the siren call of little baskets of bright green cucumbers called out to me at the farmer's market this weekend. I remembered snorting from getting a face full of tangy boiling vinegar and fingertips tingling from boiling hot lids and water. I remembered a kitchen so hot with billowing steam that I canned in a bikini top and shorts. I remembered being able to serve my own pickles as relish with every meal and knowing exactly what was in them. I bought the cucumbers.

And yesterday I turned out six lovely pints of deep yellow-green bread and butter pickles. Air conditioning and a strong husband helped with the heat and the lifting. It's enough to get me barely exited for winter with hearty bowls of soup and sourdough, soft cheese and pickles. (Yes, Chris and I understand and accept fully that we are hobbits).

There is no doubt that canning is as laborious and useless a kitchen task as there currently is. But seriously, there are fewer culinary tasks more satisfying than seeing rows of your own (tastier) pickles lined up in the pantry. And of course, the knowledge that the carbon footprint on these pickles is much smaller than the ones at the store is a pretty nice side benefit too.

Hooray for canning!