Essential (and easy) SKILL: Water bath canning

➡ Kendra Lynn provides a comprehensive guide on home canning for beginners. She emphasizes the importance of using fresh, quality ingredients and following tested recipes for safety. She also gives tips on how to properly prepare and fill jars, and how to process different types of food in water bath or pressure canners. Lastly, she advises on how to store and consume canned goods to ensure they remain safe and delicious.
➡ This text explains the process of making apple jelly and applesauce. It starts with preparing the apples and boiling them to extract the juice. The juice is then strained, measured, and mixed with sugar and pectin before being boiled again. The hot jelly is then poured into sanitized jars, sealed, and processed in a canner.
➡ The text describes the process of making applesauce from leftover cooked apples. The apples are strained to remove peels and seeds, then boiled and optionally sweetened. The applesauce is then canned in jars, which are sealed and boiled in a water bath canner for 20 minutes. The jars are left to cool overnight before testing the seals to ensure they are properly sealed.
➡ This text simply explains the process of making apple jelly and applesauce, and then repeating the process.

I’m kendra lynn and this is at home canning for beginners and beyond. There are a few safety precautions that I want you to keep in mind before beginning canning. You want to start off with clean, fresh, quality produce and meat. This will ensure the best flavor, texture and nutritional value in your canned goods. Always be sure that the recipe you are using follows a tested and approved method. It’s best to use recipes from a reputable source such as the Ball Blue Book of Canning. If you’ll be combining ingredients, remember to process according to the ingredient that requires the longest processing time and highest amount of pressure.

When canning at high altitudes, be sure to increase your processing times and pounds of pressure accordingly. Before you begin. Examine your jars for any hairline cracks or chips prior to filling them with food. You’ll also want to clean the jars with hot soapy water before each use. When filling jars with hot food, you need to be sure that you’re working with jars that are at least a little bit warm. If you fill cold jars with hot food, the glass will crack. You also don’t want to put any cold food products into a hot jar. For the same reason, you can heat your jars in a dishwasher or you can simmer them in a large pot of hot water on the stove for 10 minutes.

If you do simmer your jars in a pot, be sure to put either a dishcloth or a rack in the bottom of the pot to keep the jars from touching the pot itself, otherwise they may break. Remember to remove air bubbles from your food before putting the lids on filled jars. This will ensure proper headspace and will eliminate any possible cold spots in your food which wouldn’t get heated adequately during the canning process. Never use a metal utensil to remove air bubbles from jars. They could scratch or etch the glass and cause jars to become weak in that area and actually crack over time.

For the same reason, you want to avoid scrubbing your jars with steel wool pads or anything else that might cause etching. You also want to make sure you clean your lids before canning by washing them in hot soapy water, then heat them in simmering water for 10 minutes to activate the sealing compound or rubber seal on the lids. Never boil canning lids as this can damage the seal. Do not reuse standard metal canning lids. Their seals are not meant for multiple uses. Tattler lids, on the other hand, are meant to be used indefinitely as long as the rubber ring isn’t stretched or damaged.

Canning bands can be used for years, but when they start to rust, it’s time to replace them. It’s extremely important that you process your foods in the correct canner. Foods you can put in a water bath canner are fruits, plain tomatoes with lemon juice added for acidity, jellies, sauerkraut and pickles. You’ll need a pressure canner if you want to process vegetables, meats including seafood and wild game and tomato products that have anything other than just plain tomatoes in them. Never process low acid foods such as meats and vegetables in anything other than a pressure canner. Botulism is a dangerous bacteria which can cause serious food poisoning and even death and is undetectable by sight or smell.

So be sure to process meats and vegetables in a pressure canner for the recommended amount of time and pressure. When using a pressure canner, always follow the manufacturer’s instructions and never leave it processing unattended. You may have heard horror stories of pressure canners exploding, although you do need to keep an eye on the pressure and make sure you don’t leave the canner on high heat while processing. Well made Modern canners such as the all American models are made in such a way that it would be extremely difficult to cause one to explode, so don’t let these stories scare you away from pressure canning.

It is not recommended that you use a canner on a flat top or glass top stove. This is more due to carelessness than anything. Canners are very heavy when full. If they are dropped onto a glass top stove or if you slide them across the burners when full of jars, they can damage the surface of your stovetop. If you do decide to use a canner on a flat top stove, be careful not to drop or slide it and don’t use anything larger than a 21.5 quart canner. Allow your canned goods to cool down for 16 to 24 hours before testing the seals.

Always make sure your lids have properly sealed before putting jars on your shelf. If you can easily pop a lid off of a jar with your hands, then the lid did not seal. You can either put that food in the fridge to be eaten right away or or you can dump the food out, reheat it, ladle it into a clean jar, seal it with a new lid and reprocess it in your canner. If a lid ever comes loose from a jar that has been sitting out for longer than 24 hours, discard the food from that jar.

If you find mold growing in a jar or if the food has a bad smell, throw its contents away. It’s better safe than sorry when storing your Canned foods, keep them in a cool, dry location. This will ensure a longer shelf life. You may remove the band from the lid once it has cooled and sealed completely. Wipe the lid with a damp cloth and dry it well to remove any stuck on food which can cause a metal lid to rust. If you are going to be stacking your jars on top of one another, put a piece of cardboard or wood between them to keep the jars from directly resting on top of each other.

When reheating meats and vegetables from a jar, it’s recommended that you heat them to a boiling temperature or for 10 minutes before eating just to be safe. Try to consume your home canned goods within one year to ensure the best nutritional value and quality. However, as long as the lids and jars are intact and there is no mold growing inside of the jars, home canned foods can be safely consumed for several years down the road. Their nutritional value will slowly diminish and the taste and texture may change over the course of several years, but the food itself will still be safe to eat.

Having said that, personally, five years is my limit. Remember, as long as you follow these simple guidelines, you can be confident that the food you are putting up for your family will be delicious and safe to enjoy. Before we start canning, I’d like to walk you through the equipment that we’ll be using. There are two basic types of canners that we’ll need. There are water bath canners which are used for high acid foods such as fruits and jellies. And there are pressure canners which are used for low acid foods such as meats and vegetables. Throughout this video I’m going to be using my favorite pressure canners.

These are all American pressure cooker canners. You can cook in them and you can can in them. They’re not the same as a regular pressure cooker, so be sure that you have a pressure cooker canner if you’re going to be canning. These have an exclusive metal to metal seal, which means they don’t have a rubber gasket like all other pressure canners. This is a feature that I really like. They’re made of heavy duty cast aluminum, so they’re the most durable canners and they’re the only ones made in the USA. These canners actually come in six different sizes.

Here is a 915. This is a 921. And this is a 930. The 921 is the most popular. It holds approximately 19 pints or seven quarts. Don’t let these fancy lids intimidate you they’re actually really easy to use. Besides the canners that you’ll need, you’ll also need your jars. Now, the jars come in various sizes. These are pretty uncommon. These are the half gallon jars. The only thing that you can can in the half gallon jars are apple juice and grape juice, which is what I have here. You also have the standard quart jars. You have the pint jars and the half pint jars which are great for making jellies.

The lids also come in different sizes. There are the wide mouth lids and the regular lids. You’ll also need bands that go with them that are the matching sizes. I also have here my favorite product, which is the Tattler reusable lids. These are great because they work indefinitely as long as you take good care of them. They come with a separate gasket seal which you just place on the lid before putting it on your jar and then you will affix the ring to that. Those also come in both sizes and you can use the toddlers in the water bath canners or the pressure canners.

You’ll also need your various canning tools. The funnel is a definite must have. It’s great for filling your jars and not making a mess on your countertops. You’ll also need a jar lifter, which is very important for getting your hot jars out of the canners once they’re done processing. Tongs are really handy to have, especially for these tattler lids. They’ll be in really hot simmering water, so it’s easy to to grab them out without burning your hands with these tongs. We also have a lid remover for people who have a hard time unscrewing the rings. These can actually be a really handy tool.

You’ll also need canning books to do your canning. Two of my favorites are the Ball Blue Book of Canning and Jackie Clay’s canning book. Jackie Clay actually has a lot of recipes in her book that are not in the Ball Blue Book. So if you feel like experimenting, Jackie Clay’s book is a great one to have. The Ball Blue Book is actually the bible of canning recipes. It has just about everything that you’ll need to get started canning in here. And it’s important that you use approved recipes when you’re canning. There can be some unsafe recipes out there running around on the Internet.

So you need to be careful with what you’re doing. And when you’re just starting out, I would definitely recommend the Ball Blue Book of Canning. So now that we know what we’re going to be Using and everything that you need to get started. Let’s get in the kitchen. I’m going to show you my favorite way to use a bunch of apples by making apple jelly and applesauce out of one batch. So what I have here is I have my lids simmering. You don’t want to boil them because that can ruin the seal. So they’re simmering. I’ve got a large stock pot here, which is what we’re going to need to hold all of our apples.

And I have my bowl of already chopped apples. What I did with these is I just took my whole apples, washed them. You need a good medium sized apple to do this. Cut off both of the ends of the apple, make sure that the stem is removed and then just chop it into good sized chunks. You can see these are pretty big chunks. It doesn’t need to be really small and leave the skin on. So you really need to have at least four heaping quarts of apples to make a good batch of apple jelly. You can see that these have kind of browned because they’ve been sitting out.

But that doesn’t really matter because the apple jelly that you’re going to get is going to turn a goldish color anyways. So we’re just going to fill this four cup measuring cup, which is one quart with apples, and pour it into our large stock pot. You want to have heaping cups so that you have enough apples to make your jelly. What we’re going to do is cook these down and make a juice. And the juice is what you need to make your jelly. And when we’re done with these apples, I’ll show you how to turn them into applesauce.

Alright, now we’ve got our four heaping quarts of apples. You’re going to need one cup of water for every quart of apples that you have. So this is about 4 cups of water. We’re going to pour it into our pot and we’re going to turn it on high and we’re going to bring it to a boil. Now, once these get boiling, I like to use a potato masher to kind of smash them down and help some of those juices flow out. You really want to have a lot of juice to make your apple jelly. So we’re going to let these cook and I’ll let you see what the juice looks like when we’re done.

All right. So while our apples were cooking, I ran my jars through the dishwasher. You need to make sure that your jars are clean and sanitized before you use them. If you don’t have a dishwasher, you can get some water boiling in a large stock pot and just put your jars in the boiling water and let them boil for about five minutes. So these apples have cooked down nicely. I’ve been mashing them to get all of the juice out. As you can see, there’s a lot of juice in the pot. We’re going to strain this off now to get the pulp out so we can just have the clear juice.

Be careful as you’re pouring because it’s very hot. I have a cheesecloth lining the strainer over a large bowl so that we can catch the big chunks and even the small chunks because you don’t want any of the apple chunks in your jelly. You like to have just pure juice in your bowl. We’re going to scrape the pot out and get all of those little chunks out. We can have our nice clear jelly. We got a lot of juice out of these apples. My favorite apples to use for apple jelly are Galas or Honey Crisp. Those are the.

The sweetest ones, and those are my favorites. You don’t want to use sour apples for making apple juice. Those are best for apple pie filling. All right, we’re just going to let this strain out, and I might even use my spoon to help push this around, get all that juice out. Ideally, you’ll have about four cups of juice. At least four cups. When we cook it down, that’ll give you about four half pints of apple jelly. You don’t really want to do much less than that because then it really isn’t worth all the trouble. I’m going to set these cooked apples aside because like I said, we’re going to use these for our applesauce in a little bit.

Now that I have all of my juice strained out, I need to measure how much I got so I know how much sugar to put into the juice and how much pectin I’m going to need. So I’m going to measure. I’m going to measure out four cups because that’s all I really want to do right now to show you how this is done. So I’ve got my four cups of juice. I’m going to pour it back into the pot, And I’m going to add my lemon juice. Now I’m going to use pectin this time. You don’t have to use pectin with apple jelly.

Apples naturally have pectin in their core. So if you don’t want to use the pectin you can just cook down the apple sauce or the apple juice until it’s the right thickness. But today I’m going to use the pectin just to save on time. So I’m going to sprinkle the whole package in there, and we’re going to bring it to a full rolling boil. All right, it’s been a minute, and it’s at a nice, frothy, rolling boil. Let’s start filling our jars. You’ll need a funnel, and you’ll need a ladle. And we are just going to carefully fill these jars.

You need to make sure your jars are hot. If your jars have cooled off, they will crack if you’re pouring this boiling apple jelly into them. So make sure that your jars are very hot. We’re going to fill to about a quarter of an inch headspace. That just means that we’re leaving just about this much from. From the rim of the jar. It’s not going to expand much during the canning process, so we don’t really need to worry about leaving a whole lot of head space. I’m going to fill that one a little bit more. Keep your apple jelly boiling during the whole process.

You want to keep it very hot. All right. I have a whole lot more apple jelly in here, but I don’t have enough jars, and this is all I really need to show you. So we’re just going to let that turn off for now. And we’re going to finish off these jars. You need to have a rag that is wet to wipe the rim of your jars to remove any jelly that might have gotten on there that would prevent the lid from sealing. So we’re just going to. I like to dip it in my simmering water here and just wipe the rims and get them nice and clean.

And now we’re going to put the lids on. For the metallic lids, you want to use the magnetic wand here. And this just gets it right out of the hot water for you so you don’t have to reach your hands in there. We’re going to put that lid right on. Grab our ring and screw it on like this. Tighten it. I’ll do one more metal lid so you can see how that’s done. Ring, Tighten it down well. Now the tattlers are a little bit different. I’m going to use the tongs because they’re not metallic, and I’m going to get them right out of the water.

They come in two pieces. They’ve got this little rubber seal and the plastic lid part. We’re going to put the rubber seal right on and put it on the jar. Get your band, your ring, and for tattlers, you want to screw it on just barely. You do not want to tighten it at all. You’ll tighten it after you’ve done the canning. But for right now we’re just going to keep it very, very loose. If you can see how loose that is, just enough for it to stay on there. One more. Alright, screw the band on very loosely and that’s that.

Now our jars are filled and they’re ready to go in the water bath canner. But before we do that, we’re going to make the applesauce and then we’ll put it all in together. All right, so we have our cooked down apples left over from our apple jelly. And now we’re going to pour it in this strainer to make our applesauce pulp. So we’re going to pour it right into the top of the strainer. It’s still very hot and I’m just going to turn the handle and what it’s going to do is push the pulp through a little screen over here and it will give us that nice pureed apple sauce that we want.

And through this side it will discard all of the peels and the seeds and things that we don’t want. Going to use this little pusher tool so we can get all of that applesauce right down in there and help it feed through. Now you can also do this with pears. My kids love pear sauce. They actually prefer it over applesauce, which is great because my mother in law has a pear tree so I get all the pears I want for free. So you can do the same thing. Just cook down the pears just like we did the apples.

And you can make pear jelly also if you want. And you just put it through this strainer. If you don’t have a strainer, you can also peel your pears. If you’re not going to be making jelly, you can peel your apples or your pears beforehand and core them and chop them. And that way you won’t have to worry about straining out the peels and seeds and stuff like that. And then you can just puree it with a stick blender or just mash it up really good with a potato masher if you want. If you like it chunky, we like it pretty pureed.

So you can see it coming through the chute here. This is our yummy applesauce. Squish it all down in there, keep it going. Isn’t that beautiful? And the discarded part, the part that we’re gonna throw away, makes perfect chicken feed. My chickens love this stuff. Okay, so now that all this has gone through, there’s a little bit left, as you can see here on the screen. So we’re just going to scrape it off so none of that goes to waste. Turn the whole thing around, get all the way behind it. Scrape all that applesauce out. Alright.

And now we have our applesauce that we’re ready to pour in our pot and add a little sugar to. So now we have our beautiful applesauce. I’m going to pour it into the pot and we’re going to bring it up to a full boil. You need to keep stirring it so that it doesn’t scorch on the bottom of the pot. But we do need to get it nice and hot. Stir it and stir it. And you don’t have to put sugar in your applesauce. If you start with really sweet apples, it might taste fine without sugar.

You might just need to taste test it yourself and see which you prefer. You might also want to try some cinnamon in it. That’s really good as well. And while that’s cooking, I wanted to tell you about the importance of running your fingers around the rim of each jar before you use them. If there’s even the tiniest little nick in the glass, the lid won’t seal. So be sure at each canning session before you get started, started to run your finger around the rim of the jar to make sure that. That it’s fine, that there are no cracks or nicks or anything wrong with the rim.

While this is cooking, I’m going to taste it and see if I think it might need some sugar before it gets too hot. Maybe little. I don’t measure, I just put as much as I think it needs. So we’ll just see how that goes. Alright, stir that in to dissolve it and let’s try it again. That’s good. You really don’t need that much. Apples are usually pretty naturally sweet. Pears are too. So you might not need too much sugar with the pears as well. So this is boiling. I definitely don’t want it to scorch on the bottom, so I have to be careful about that.

I’ve got my hot jars here and I’m just going to do like what we did with the apple jelly. I’m going to ladle the hot applesauce into the hot j. Hopefully we’ll have enough to fill these two pint jars. If you don’t have enough to fill it all the way, we’ll go about a half an inch headspace. If you don’t have enough, if you’re a little bit shy, that’s okay. With apple sauce, it won’t really make that much of a difference. You just don’t want to fill a jar halfway. It’s not really worth having a jar halfway full on your shelf.

If you do end up with a jar that’s only about halfway full, you can just stick it in your fridge and use it up pretty quickly instead of processing it with a lid and all that. Alright, we’re going to shake it to get any air bubbles out and tap a little. It’s pretty thick. So there aren’t really many air bubbles in applesauce. You don’t have to worry about that too much. Going to wipe the rim. Get any food that might be on there off. So the lids do seal. And magnetic lid lifter. For our metal lid, Screw on the ring tightly for that one.

And for our tattler we use the tongs. Put that rubber seal on the lid, put it on the jar and remember not to screw it down too tightly just enough that it doesn’t come off. All right, our applesauce jars are filled, our apple jelly jars are filled and now we’re ready to get them in the canner. Alright, we’ve got our small water bath canner going. The water is very hot and it’s at a full rolling boil. So we’re going to go ahead and put our jars in. Now this is a really small water bath canner. They come in a lot of different sizes.

If you don’t have a water bath canner, you can actually use a stock pot as long as it’s tall enough that you can cover the jars by two inches of water. You’ll also need to put a rack or a towel at least in the bottom of a stock pot if you’re going to be canning in it. The jars can’t be sitting directly on the bottom of the pot. Water bath canners come with these racks in them to hold the jars and to keep them off the bottom. So we’re going to fill our rack with our jars.

Alright, this is a nice small canner for a nice small batch. We’re going to lower them in and the water should be at the very least an inch above the jars. Two inches is better. We’re going to put the lid on and apple jelly only needs to process for about five minutes in the water bath canner. But applesauce needs 20 minutes. So we’re just going to leave it for 20 minutes, and after that time, we’ll take it out. All right, so it’s been 20, 20 minutes. We’re going to take our jars out of the water bath canner.

We’re using our jar lifter because, again, these are super hot, and I like to put them on a cooling rack so they get some air underneath them to help cool them off more quickly. Now, in a minute, we’re going to tighten these Tattler lids down because, if you remember, they’re loose with the Tattlers, you want to tighten the ring after you’ve processed them in the canner, and they will be hot, so you want to have a rag in your hand. Going to set this aside, and I’m just going to tighten these rings as tight as I can get them by hand.

All right. Once we’ve got all of our rings tightened on our Tattlers, you want to let them cool overnight, at least about 16 hours or so. Let them completely cool before you test the lids. You do want to test the lids to make sure that they sealed properly. You can do that by unscrewing the lid. And I actually have applesauce right here that I’ve done previously, and it is cooled off, so I’m going to test the lid. You just pull off the ring and you just pull up on it, and as long as it doesn’t come off, it’s good.

The thing about the metal lids is that they will pop when they’re sealing. You’ll hear the pop in the background, and you’ll know that they’re sealing properly. The Tattlers don’t make that noise, so you really do need to just wait until they cool off and then test those seals. If any of your jars do not seal properly, you can either put it in the fridge to eat right away, or you can dump out the ingredients into a pot, heat it back up, put it into a new sterilized jar, and do the process all over again. And that’s pretty much it.

There’s your apple jelly and your applesauce.
[tr:tra].