Before you can: Some things to think about
Canning is a lot of fun and is a great way to enjoy delicious local produce in the depths of winter, but there are some important questions you need to ask yourself before you begin. These are the things I learned after a few dozen times of doing it, and they’re issues I wish I had thought about before I started the process. The answers to these questions will affect how you go about processing food, and may even help you decide whether or not canning is something you are able to undertake.
Hey, every good endeavor requires planning, so consider this your blueprint:
Who are you? Who do you cook for? How big is your family? Do you have picky eaters? Do you have people with sensitivities or food allergies?
Before you begin canning all kinds of (admittedly yummy) food, think about the people/person who will be eating this food. I love spiced peaches too, believe me, but if I lived with someone who was allergic to peaches I probably wouldn’t put up a couple bushels of them. Them’s a lotta peaches. And if you have picky/unadventurous eaters, the same thing might happen with everything you can. So before you start processing a few bushels of tomatoes, ask yourself if anyone will be eating the food. Fortunately, if you just cannot resist canning, even if you and your family are not able to eat all the food, there are other options. You could:
- Give it as gifts. I can’t TELL you how many people loved getting my grape jelly last year. In the beginning you might want to try canning a few times until you’re sure that you are producing a safe product, but once you’re sure your food won’t kill people, you can start giving stuff away. Plus, home-canned food is so unusual that it’s not like they’re going to be getting home-canned sauerkraut every day.
- Give to your local food pantry, if they’ll accept it. Food pantries and soup kitchens in large cities probaby wouldn’t, but if you live in a small town you can probably give them some and they’ll be grateful to get it.
- Volunteer to help in a local fundraiser dinner, and offer to bring your canned goods to supplement what they’ll have. You can assure them that they’ll be able to tell whether the food is safe just by looking at and smelling it – you don’t want to poison the old folks at the monthly VFW dinner – but again, this is more likely to be accepted in a smaller town.
Where do you live?
This is more of a concern for actual canning recipes. Remember high school earth science? Well, as your altitude increases and you get farther from sea level, the atmospheric pressure decreases, and water boils at lower temperatures (because boiling point is defined as the temperature at which the vapor pressure of a liquid equals the environmental pressure surrounding the liquid). This means that water that is boiling on a stove in Manhattan (at sea level) is actually hotter than water boiling on a stove in, say, Denver, Colorado, which is a mile above sea level. Or on a stove in Central City, CO, which is nearly TWO full miles above sea level, and where Bunker Hubby and I lived for a year when we first got married. So even if you boiler can your food, you may not be getting it hot enough for long enough to kill the bacteria. Don’t believe me? Here are the actual temperatures at which food boils, by altitude (and yes, I know barometric pressure also affects boiling points, but for the purposes of canning food, it’s not a significant concern):
Sea level: 212.0 degrees F
3000 feet: 206.4 degrees F
4000 feet: 204.6 degrees F
5000 feet: 202.8 degrees F
5500 feet: 201.9 degrees F
6000 feet: 201.0 degrees F
7000 feet: 199.2 degrees F
8000 feet: 197.5 degrees F
9000 feet: 195.7 degrees F
10000 feet: 194.0 degrees F
So you can see that my boiling water, in New York, is a full eighteen degrees hotter than someone else’s boiling water in the Rocky Mountains.
For canning, the rule of thumb is, for every 1,000 feet above sea level, you need to increase the processing time by one minute if the recipe calls for a processing time that is 20 minutes or less. If the recipe calls for a processing time that is more than 20 minutes, increase by two minutes per 1,000 feet.
What are your “facilities” like?
No, not your bathrooms. There are three areas you need to examine before undertaking canning.
1. Prep/cooking room. Take a good look at your kitchen. What is the counter space like (canning needs a fair amount of horizontal space to be comfortable)? Can you maneuver around your kitchen comfortably? If you will be canning with assistance, is there room for both of you to work without climbing all over each other? Do you have a big enough sink that you won’t be overrun with dirty dishes while you can (for those of you who prefer to clean as you cook, this is sometimes not possible when you’re preparing things like jelly, which need constant watching)? If your space is not very amenable to canning, there are a lot of alternatives:
- Bringing in folding tables if your horizontal space is lacking (my friend uses four-foot plastic folding tables, because she has nonexistent counter space but a decent amount of floor space).
- Using large plastic tubs as “temporary sinks” so you have a place to put dirty dishes that won’t clutter your space
- Canning in someone else’s house (I also do this with my friend); one person can bring the food, one person the equipment, and one provides the space (or some variation on this). This also helps the time fly, because it’s ALWAYS more fun to can with other people!
2. Stove room. Do you have a stove that will let you can without driving you insane? What do I mean? Well, my girlfriend Amy, who also likes to can, has an old electric stove in her kitchen. There are several problems with this stove (besides it being a piece of crap): First, she’s not able to have two large pots on the stove at the same time because the heating elements are just too close together. This means that she can’t run two canners simultaneously (and when you’re canning three bushels of tomatoes at a time, you really appreciate being able to do this). She also can’t have a large pot (of sauce, brine, peaches, whatever food she’s canning) on the stove at the same time as her canner. This is unacceptable in canning, because you need to keep the food being canned AND the glass jars BOTH hot at the same time. To say this frustrates her is an understatement. This can be overcome if you have a friend who will let you use her kitchen, or who wants to do a group canning day.
3. Storage room. You may not realize this if you’ve never canned before, but a couple dozen quart jars of pickles (or tomatoes or whatever) are pretty damn heavy. They also don’t like being jostled, and they REALLY have a problem with being dropped onto a hardwood floor (you’ll have a problem with this too if it ever happens). So do you have room to store the preserved food? A place that’s sturdy enough to hold the weight of the jars, that’s away from direct light and heat (both kill the taste of canned foods) and away from any “disruptive elements” (toddlers, manic border collies, unsteady elderly folk, and monkeys all fall into this category). In reality, this is an issue when you’re doing any sort of food preservation; drying herbs need a place to hang out, and brining sauerkraut needs a place to quietly do its thing, unmolested. If you don’t have a pantry or basement (yes, even a damp basement is fine to store jars of food, as the dampness won’t get into the jars and the darkness is a good thing), try the following options:
- A set of sturdy bookshelves in your bedroom, or in a spare bedroom or craft room. People usually keep their living space well within the recommended temperature range for storing canned goods (between 50 and 70 degrees F); however, if you live in a very hot environment and don’t use air conditioning, you might want to think about a cooler location.
- A sturdy set of shelves in another living space, such as your living room or bathroom. Again, the only real limitations here are that the shelving be as sturdy as possible, and that the temperature and direct light be within the parameters.
I can’t stress enough that you need to think very carefully about the structure that will be holding your jars. A quart jar of stewed tomatoes weighs approximately three-and-a-half pounds (yes, I weighed it). A dozen quarts comes to about 40 pounds, and you may wind up canning a lot more than that (my last canning season resulted in over a hundred quart jars). I recommend you use only very sturdy shelving (NOT your kitchen cabinets) if you’re going to have more than a couple of jars stored. Trust me – the sound of 50 quarts of tomatoes crashing to the ground is NOT something anyone wants to hear.
And don’t forget, if you do wind up enjoying canning and decide to do it again, you’ll probably wind up obtaining some canning supplies. Even just the basic supplies – a canning pot and lid, tongs, and canning jars – will require some room to store. If you decide to brine (sauerkraut, for example) you’ll need even more room. Just another consideration to think about.
What’s your family like?
I talked a little bit about some considerations to do with the people you live with. The main thing to think about here is, Will the people I live with disrupt canned food or food that’s being processed (such as drying herbs or brining sauerkraut)? The average 6- or 7-year old can probably be trusted to leave the jars alone (after first making a throrough inspection, of course), but a 1-year old is probably not capable of that. Rambunctious pets and unsteady elderly parents can also constitute a threat to shelves of glass jars, and could result in injury if they are hit by falling jars. So make sure that any food you’ve canned or are processing is in a place that doesn’t pose a threat to the other people in the household, and vice versa.
What’s your schedule like?
I’m the last person in the world to tell you that you shouldn’t can; in fact, I’m the one responsible for getting my friend Amy involved in it (the one with the crappy stove). But you do need to be realistic when you think about whether you can try canning. As with most activities, you can dabble in it or you can become insanely enmeshed in it (and everything in between). Before you step foot on one path or the other, though, it makes sense to figure out how much time you can devote to this new activity. After all, it’s better than finding yourself with three bushels of fruit to can, a colicky newborn, dinner to be made for eight people, and a strategic report to send out to the Board, all in one evening. So don’t burn yourself out on this, and don’t commit yourself to it beyond what you can sanely take on. It’s the best way to ensure that you continue to enjoy it, and that those around you won’t feel the need to do an intervention (not that I’ve ever been there. Ahem).
Why didn’t I mention cost?
You might be surprised that I didn’t mention the cost of canning as a consideration. This is because, although you can wind up dropping lots of cash on this endeavor, there are also ways to make it an extremely cheap activity (although probably not free). I’ll go into that in more depth in another article.
