Canning notes

From the comments "I love seeing Mason jars, but it’s nicer to see full Mason jars😋"

A couple of nights ago, Mrs ERJ asked me "Can I put away all of this canning stuff?"

I waffled. "Maybe..."

We originally planned to streamline our pantry and only preserve the amount of food we expect to consume in the next 365 days.

Take apple sauce, for instance. We go through one quart a week like clockwork. There are 52 weeks in a year. The correct number of quarts of apple sauce to have at the end of canning is 50(ish) quarts.

But then Quicksilver started eating our apple sauce and she is going through a growth-spurt. Mrs ERJ suggested that we put up a few more quarts. Since the canner handles 7 quarts per load, it became a question of "How many loads?"

Mrs ERJ deigned 2 loads, 14 quarts, to be adequate margin. So...we made and canned 14 more quarts and since we had 3 extra quarts (math is hard), we canned those too. So our 49 quarts grew to 49 + 17.

"What do you mean, "Maybe,"?" she queried.

"Do you remember that young man who graciously volunteered to pick apples for us in the Upper Orchard?" I asked her. "It would be a classy thing if we made some apple sauce from the apples he picked and gave it to him."

Mrs ERJ knows this particular young man and has the universal, maternal urge to feed him.

"What can I do to help?" was her response.

So...Mrs ERJ selected the apples that went into the blend and washed the pint jars. She suggested smaller jars because single guys who eat out a lot don't always go through food quickly.

Even Quicksilver got into the act. She enjoyed turning the handle on the Squeezo-strainer and watching the cooked apples go into the hopper, apple sauce flow down the chute and the pomace eject from the far end of the screw. She was also fascinated that I ran the pomace through the tool a second time to squeeze as much pulp out of the skins and seeds as possible.

Seeing how the cheerful volunteer struggles to keep body-weight on, his custom-made apple sauce had 2 pounds of sugar (about a 12% bump in sugar), 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, 2 teaspoons of citric acid (as suggested by the latest USDA guidelines) AND a substantial dollop of molasses (for depth of flavor).

We can stack up to 20, small-mouth pints in our canning kettle. The load which started out targeting 14 pints ended up at 18 pints.

I let Quicksilver eat the left-over apple candy sauce in the mixing kettle. She didn't complain.

Are we done canning for the year?

Probably not.

I want to can 18 pints of chicken in wide-mouth jars.

I want to can the same amount of venison and, perhaps another 18 pints of ground pork. 

We like using wide-mouth jars for canning meat because some of the meat adheres to the sides of the jars and wide-mouth jars are easier to scrub. One hack is to fill the jars with water and then add a teaspoon of lye (sodium hydroxide) to soften/dissolve the adhering meat overnight before scrubbing. Exercise caution because the lye solution is till caustic in the morning.

And if 20 pounds of steelhead or salmon fell into my possession, I would pressure can that but I would probably opt for 8 oz jars instead of pints.

I might pressure-can cooked beans but I have to study the economics of canned-beans-on-sale vs the cost of the lids.

I would like to have most of that done before November 3, if possible. 

However, I think it is safe to say that we are done using the Squeezo-strainer for the season. 

May be the best minute you invest today