Thanks for the idea! We are having fried rice for dinner tonight and there’s a sad cucumber in the fridge. I’ll make cucumber pickles as a side. My recipe is super simple, it’s just cucumber, vinegar and sugar, but it’s so delicious.
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Mine is simple but with a Japanese touch. I add a bit of soy sauce ,and if I want it a bit spicy, I had red pepper flakes or gochuchang paste. So many ways to pickle things. I like miso and mustard pickles as well.
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I love (and am grateful I found) this topic
My family didn’t do much preserving. pickles every so often was about it. we froze tons of stuff. For some reason, that i can’t figure out, I have always had food security fears. Once the whirlwind of young children ebbed I started teaching myself canning. i’m more of a hands on learner, but everyone I knew who did can did it in unapproved methods, so I had to figure it out.
We have apple trees, so I started with sauce & pie fillings. We have wild violets & magnolias so I made jellies. We were given huge amounts of grapes so I canned juice & jelly.
All of these were fine, but I don’t really eat any of these things normally, so it didn’t aid my worries.
I bought a pressure canner (it was a huge investmentfor us at the time) that I was too scared to use for 2 years. Then I canned water. Yep, water. I had to take a step & get out of my fear.
Then I used it to can chicken broth, then stew, BBQ chicken, BBQ sauce, ketchup, soups, beans…. I found a way to make it work for us. Now in fairness I haven’t canned in a few years, (illness, travel, etc) But I think that needs to change.
I have also gotten on a big fermentation kick, (also took a long time for me to get over my fears.) So I fermented saurkraut, green beans, & carrots pretty much consistently now. I just started playing with different flavor combos. Beets, salsa, and hot sauces are probably my next tries once I find good produce or my garden comes in.
These are the books I have on the subjects & though the ball books are very good. If you are looking for meals in a jar stuff, I would suggest the Pressue Canning for Beginners & Beyond by Angi Schneider
Here is the table of contents for that book
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This looks like a great book, and it’s even available in my country! Thanks a lot!
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Here is the Ball book table of contents:
And the low acid foods table of contents:
Let me know if you want me to look further in and post more pics.
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Thanks! Also some delicious sounding recipes.
I just need to get started and try things out.
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I got Pressue Canning for Beginners & Beyond by Angi Schneider and it looks like a very useful book! The recipes and instructions are very clear and very detailed. I really like that there’s no ambiguity about the needed quantities - she’ll write like “400 gr chopped onions, that’s approx. 500 gr onions”. Sometimes, authors aren’t clear about whether you need say, 500 gr of whole tomatoes that will be chopped up, or 500 gr of chopped up tomatoes, but she is very precise. All the measurements are provided in US measurements and metric, which is very practical. The recipes are generally fairly small batches, which makes it easier to try a few. If you don’t like a particular recipe you won’t have to eat 20 cans of it. The recipes are very American (obviously, for an American book). That’s not a bad thing but it means I’ve never had most of the recipes, it will be fun to figure out what we like.
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I’m getting ready to can my first jars this weekend! Two recipes from the Angi Schneider book.
There’s only one pressure canner on the market in my country and it’s absolutely huge - 22 qts. I was worried it might not even fit in my kitchen, but it does. It fits 10 pint sized jars or 5 quart sized jars (0,5 and 1 liter). A lot of the recipes in the book yield 9, 12 or even more jars. Are American pressure canners (and kitchens and hobs) that much bigger or are you supposed to can them in batches?
For now, I’ve picked one recipe that yields 6 pints and one that yields 6 quarts. That means I’ll have one serving left over, tomorrow’s lunch or dinner I suppose.
It’s Sloppy Joe’s, something I only know from the Internet, we don’t eat it here. I hope we’ll like it, we’re going to have to eat it 6 times 
but it seems really convenient for hurried days. Just grab some ready to bake rolls from the pantry and some salad from the fridge and dinner is served. There’s so much ketchup in the recipe lol. Ketchup is sometimes used as a condiment here but measured in spoonfuls (over macaroni for example) not in cups! The condiment of choice here is curry, basically spiced ketchup. Just a slightly different flavour.
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Thats the same size canner I have. You can fit more in there, just stack on racks. But I’vd also canned in batches. I remember being nervous my first try, but you get used to it quickly. Have fun!
I haven’t done sloppy joes canned, or eaten them in a long time, but they are quick!
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I had a bit left over and it was delicious! I wonder how it will taste after pressure cooking. Using that much ketchup immediately made sense while I was cooking. I picked this recipe because it was the easiest one in the entire book, and also a small batch.
I have some experience in water bath canning, so the “motions” were familiar. The actual pressure part was a bit intimidating, all the sounds and the force of the steam, but I managed to figure it out. I’ve got 15 minutes left now. I used the exact amount of water listed in the manual and the manual says it won’t boil dry if you follow it to the letter, but I’m still a bit scared of it boiling dry. The manual says “stop the process if there’s no water left” but there’s no way to check. The weight is still moving so I don’t think this is a rational fear. I’m just afraid I’ve created a bomb somehow.
Maybe the shape of my jars is the issue? I can only fit 5 in one layer. I can stack two rows of pint size, but I can’t stack the quart size jars, two rows are higher than the canner.
It’s true there are a lot of shapes out there. Might be worth experimenting, but doing multiple batches isn’t too big a deal. You can always put in extra water if you’re worried, just don’t let it come up over the rims, and it will take longer to come to pressure.
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Looks like my first attempt was a succes!! Plenty of water left, looks like the manual was right about the amount of water needed. Who would have guessed. The jars are now cooling but the food looks like it’s supposed to look. I can’t wait to try it - I have no idea what meat tastes like after pressure canning.
The only widely available brand here is Weck. American brands can be imported but they’re literally ten times as expensive. This picture I found online I think explains the issue:
Weck jars seem much wider. So I guess it will be multiple batches for me.
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I made these over the last two weekends:
4 quart Vegetarian lentil stew, 8 pint chili con carne, 3 pint sloppy Joes (one failed) and 4 quart tex mex chicken wings in salsa. Canned food always looks a bit brown and blegh, it doesn’t look great in pictures. I removed the fat from the meat when I cooked it but you can see there’s still quite a lot of fat in the sloppy Joes. Because it’s solid now I can just remove it before I heat it up.
Today we had a busy day and we decided to open up the first cans. The chili is in pints, according to the recipe it can’t be canned in a larger size jar, and we had a pint each. It was actually delicious! I was a bit worried if the beans weren’t going to be too mushy, but it came out great. Before I had a chance to heat up his portion, Mr Imma had spooned his out of the jar, cold. He liked it so much that I’m sure he’s going to grab a can next time he’s in the mood for snack. But I suppose that’s exactly the point - home-cooked food from real ingredients on the table in 5 minutes.
When I ordered the pressure canner, Mr Imma was a bit sceptic, he’s always trying to tell me we live in the middle of a big city, not in the Little House on the Prairie. But he’s totally convinced now and he wants to can together next time. For chaotic people like us, this is so much more convenient than freezing meals that need to be defrosted in time.
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Sloppy joes are very versatile. My dad used to can that with his pressure cooker when I was a child. We ate them as sandwiches but he also made casseroles by cooking pasta and adding cheese. Delicious and filling. My mom made a cabbage dish with a jar. Since there was 5 of us, she often had to stretch the meat to feed us all.
I keep sloppy joe mix on hand to use up ground beef that has been in the frig or freezer a bit too long. The taste is strong enough to cover a bit of freezer burn.
You did a great job…and now, your success should give you confidence to try more!
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We also ate the jar of Sloppy Joe’s that failed in the pressure canner. Mr. Imma’s judgement was “if McDonald’s ever get into Italian food, this is what their spaghetti sauce would taste like!”. It reminded us of Filipino-style spaghetti too (which is very sweet and contains sliced hotdogs). I think we associate the taste of ketchup with McDonalds. It was nice though, and it’s going to be such a convenient fast meal later. We always have rolls or buns in the pantry.
I’ve already bought ingredients for the next batch: beef stroganoff. We eat vegetarian stroganoff quite often and it’s one of my favourite recipes (my secret ingredient is capers), so I figured we’ll probably like this version too.
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I made lots of canned fish this weekend. Here’s my tutorial/recipe: Canned Shad Tutorial
They are delicious!
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Interesting that shad is not native there but so prolific it should be caught as much as possible. Shad is called “elft” in Dutch, it’s native here but has been extinct for a century. Your recipe looks delicious. It’s a bit of work, cleaning, smoking, then the canning process, but it’s a quick, convenient and healthy meal eventually. It would be a shame to let the fish go to waste just because it’s a bit of a hassle to conserve it.
We are in the middle of an early heatwave, and we’ve eaten canned food every day for a week to avoid cooking. Tomorrow is the first cooler day so we’re planning to can 16 pints! Chicken teriyaki and enchilada soup. It’s a bit of a puzzle sometimes to find recipes that we can get all the ingredients for. I’m not confident enough yet to significantly change recipes. One of the recipes called for “hominy” which is a thing I had never even heard of! I will look for it next time I’m in the ethnic grocery store.
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We did can 16 cans on Sunday, but 3 of them are gone already by now! It was a baaaadd idea to keep the cans on the empty shelf near Mr. Imma’s work from home space. The first time he was a bit sceptical, but ever since he found out that canned food is indeed edible and actually delicious it’s all he wants to eat lol.
Today when my work day was over, I walked to the kitchen where I bumped into Mr. Imma. Normally that’s when we start cooking and eating together. I asked him what we were going to eat and he said he didn’t need dinner, he’d already opened a can! Was so tempted by the can he couldn’t even resist until we were both done working and could eat together! He helped canning this weekend. He cut all the chicken and prepared the food while I was setting up the cans. He has never previously helped with canning (I already did hot water bath) and his family didn’t can growing up, so he was quite unfamiliar with the process, but I think we will make an efficient canning team once he gets the hang of it.
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Woo hoo for Mr Imma getting so involved.