Canning Book/Newbie

[btupper2001]

Hi Everyone,

 

I used to be a regular reader and member of the forum. I was actually shocked to see when I logged in today that I hadn't logged in for two years. Things have changed for me since I last put anything out here on the forum. My daughter Cosette was born. She ended up having some medical issues so she has now had two surgeries in Indianapolis (we're from MN so this took a lot out of us). God's grace has allowed everything to turn out wonderful for Cosie and the surgeon has said we should never have to see him again!! I also got my MBA and have started looking for a new job that will hopefully allow my family a larger income so we can improve our lot in life. God willing this will also be possible.

 

I do have a question for everyone here. We are trying to become better at storing the harvest from our gardens. We actually froze 5 gallons of homemade spaghetti sauce from all our tomatoes and got 20 quarts of garlic dill up as well. What I'm looking for is a good canning book so we can start doing that with items like green beans as well as maybe canning (vs the freezing) of our spaghetti sauce. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance,

Bret

 

[Violet]

The safest and most reliable sources are the current Ball Blue book and So Easy to Preserve from the Univ. Of Georgia. You order the So Easy book from their website. You can also just use the website and get all the information. Basically, if you don't find the kind of food you want to can in those two sources it most likely is not safe to can.

Guidelines have changed over the years, especially with tomato based food.Please, do not take a recipe that calls for fresh tomatoes and try to use canned ones in it. The density will not be the same and can make the recipe unsafe to can. In that case, freeze the sauce instead.

Be sure your pickled foods are from current tested recipes as many old ones were based on vinegar that was much more acidic. Cucumbers are low acid foods and need enough acid to make them safe to pickle.

Same for salsa. Lots of low acid things added.

You will need a pressure canner if you don't own one, too, for those green beans unless you will pickle all of them.

Here is the link to Univ. of Georgia. Look on the left side and you can find out how to do all methods of food preserving.

Not all books and things online are safe to follow. Especially things people have made up trying to take cooking recipes and canning them.

I teach food preservation and food safety, so feel free to ask any questions you may have.

http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/index.html

[btupper2001]

Thank you Violet for your quick response - I'll take a look at getting the ball blue book as well looking at the link you posted. I know that I'm going to be disappointed in canning spaghetti sauce as I know you need to follow a particular recipe and not just modify your own. I know I need to be safe and not just think I can drop my own sauce in a jar and process unless I'm 110% certain it's safe. I've closely looked at my garlic dill pickle recipe against the extension service site from the U of MN and my recipe should be safe as it calls for a higher concentration of vinegar than all their recipes do. It's my grandmothers recipe so that has always made me nervous (probably had a higher concentration of acetic acid than our vinegar today does) but that made me feel better to see that mine's higher than what their recipes are.

Thanks again,

Bret