Canning the garden bounty ...

Already have put up some Dill Pickles and some jars of Sweet Relish.

Tonight we made up some Sweet & Hot Peppers (3 different varieties of peppers in sweet pickle juice) as well as some mixed Sweet Pickled Veggies (an assorted mix of various pickles, cauliflower, pearl onions, peppers)

Lots more to get out of the garden. Probably a half bushel of peppers still ripening. The Roma tomatoes are just starting to get their color.

Not sure what to do with the eggplants ... other than eat them. Can you 'can' eggplants?


EDIT: And yes, these have "crisper" added to them, I added it myself!

Melensdad said:

Probably a half bushel of peppers still ripening. The Roma tomatoes are just starting to get their color.

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That's perfect when the peppers and Roma's become ripe at the same time. It's nice for making sauce(s).

Melensdad said:

Not sure what to do with the eggplants ... other than eat them. Can you 'can' eggplants?

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Eggplants normally turn to mush when you can them. Pickling them is your best shot if you want to give it a go. Freezing is your better option.

Melensdad said:

EDIT: And yes, these have "crisper" added to them, I added it myself!

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We are planning to can up a bunch of spaghetti sauce when the Roma tomatoes ripen up. We'll probably do another batch of sweet pickles soon too, and it will probably be a mixed batch like this one we did yesterday. I buy a brand at the supermarket called Selchers. Its a local Indiana brand, not sure if they have national distribution, but they make a mixed sweet pickle/veggie combo using pickles, onions, cauliflower and peppers and I buy them 2 or 3 jars at a time. I'm hoping that the stuff we just canned up yesterday is close to the quality of their brand. If so then I'll save a bunch of $$$ on pickles annually.

Do you have the gear for making sauce?
If you don't already have one, I'd recommend you picking up the Ball Blue Book.

If you plan to make sauce get a "Victorio strainer". You'll wonder why didn't get one long ago. Linda uses ours to make tomato sauce, apple butter and it will even remove seeds from blackberries. For apple sauce all you need to do is 1/4 them, boil them down and run everything thru the strainer and all the waste is almost dry.
Mike

Victorio or Roma, you'll want to have one. Personally, I like the Roma.
For either, get the electric motor. You can only hand-crank so much and your tomato crop will exceed your hand-crank capabilities, even if you put kids on it.

Getting ready to can up a bushel of Roma tomatoes. Steamed the tomatoes a bit to soften them, ran them though the KitchenAid seeder/peeler/strainer. So now we have pulp/juice simmering to reduce some of the liquid. Then some flavoring, sausage, etc and it will be canned up as spaghetti sauce.

The old KitchenAid machine, bought it for the lovely Mrs_Bob over 20 years ago, make the job a piece of cake. One person can do can ladle in the tomatoes to the top hopper (they sell a larger hopper tray, but this one works fine) and feed them down into the grinder. It spits the seeds and skins out the end, and drops the juice and pulp into the larger bowl underneath.

One thing with the tomatoes is that you have to soften them up a bit by cooking them down until they are softened, if not the strainer attachment will not separate out the 'meat' of the tomato, if it is still firm the 'meat' will simply spit out of the end with the skins & seeds. By cooking the tomatoes down a bit it softens the meat of the tomato enough that the separator will work properly. I have no experience with any other brand of separator/strainer so I don't know if they all need the tomatoes cooked down a bit.

We didn't grow enough of our own. Going to have to go out to the farmstand and buy another bushel, maybe three, of tomatoes if we want to make up chili base, salsa, meat-less spaghetti sauce, sloppy joe, etc.

We now have two crock pots running to cook down the tomato sauce and reduce it.

The sauce is much thicker than it looks, this is a PRE-cooking photo. We only cooked it down about 3/4" of an inch.

Bob - if you put meat in now, you are aware you have to switch to pressure canning instead of a hot bath, right? We prefer hot bath so add our meat in when we finish the sauce before eating.

Other strainers don't require cooking the tomatoes before running them through.

If you don't have the time to cook them down to the consistency you like (I want a wooden spoon to stand up in mine), add some tomato paste.

bczoom said:

Bob - if you put meat in now, you are aware you have to switch to pressure canning instead of a hot bath, right? We prefer hot bath so add our meat in when we finish the sauce before eating.

Other strainers don't require cooking the tomatoes before running them through.

If you don't have the time to cook them down to the consistency you like (I want a wooden spoon to stand up in mine), add some tomato paste.

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FWIW, we are roughly following this recipe for the sauce, doctoring up the spices a bit, adding a couple different peppers and some mushrooms. LINK => http://www.simplycanning.com/canning-spaghetti-sauce.html And yes, it is a pressure cooker recipe.

Our tomato sauce is cooked down to meet your spoon stand up test.

The sausage and peppers are cooking now.

Not sure why/how the photo attachment works now?!? iPads are funny that way I guess?

Now I'm hungry...

Looks real good Bob.

bczoom said:

Now I'm hungry...

Looks real good Bob.

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Looks a lot better now that the mushrooms are added and cooked down

• Jars, lids, rings all sterilized and hot (keep in hot water until needed).
• Spaghetti sauce hot!
• Fill jars to 1" below the top.
• Add lids and rings.
• Add 3 quarts of water to pressure cooker, pre-heat.
• Add the jars to the pressure cooker.
• Steam the pressure cooker for 10 minutes before setting the weight.
• Set the weight and bring pressure up to 10# (for my elevation, higher pressure for higher elevations!) then start timing as per recipe (60 minutes for this recipe, never let pressure fall below 10# during the cooking cycle, if it does, bring back up to pressure and start the cooking cycle over from the beginning).

In the photos below you can see the pressure in the cooker rising. There is a lock on the front of the kettle's lid, that is the disk that has elevated, its a pressure lock that will not allow the cooker to be opened while it is under pressure. If you look closely you can also see a plume of steam coming out of the nozzle. It should do that for 10 full minutes before you begin the timing process.

In the next photo you see the pressure weight added and the pressure dial climbing up to the desired pressure. Currently at 9# and climbing.

Finishing up batch #2 of the spaghetti sauce w/meat today.

30 minutes left to go in the pressure cooker.

The kitchen is heating up a bit, the AC is running in the house, thankfully its raining and overcast outside and not too warm today. If it was 90 and sunny it would be a miserable day to do this inside.

Seriously thinking about buying couple turkey fryers, building them into a wooden table, and making an "outdoor canning station" that can be folded up and put away when not in use. It could run off a propane cylinder and wouldn't heat up the inside of the house when doing big batches.

Melensdad said:

Seriously thinking about buying couple turkey fryers, building them into a wooden table, and making an "outdoor canning station" that can be folded up and put away when not in use. It could run off a propane cylinder and wouldn't heat up the inside of the house when doing big batches.

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That's what I did and it works perfect.

Here's my setup more or less.

A pair of Camp Chef Expedition cookers. This is a good time of year to find them on sale at places like Cabelas. There's the 2X model (2 burner) and the 3X model (3 burner). The 3X isn't any better than the 2x when canning since the pots are so big, you can't get 3 of them on there. Wind shields collapse and legs remove for easy storage.

When we do the canning, the jars are being sanitized in the stock pots.

We use the whole family but you can do it by yourself or with another person.

First person takes the jars out and puts on the stainless table.
Second person is on the right side of the table and adds the salt and lemon juice.
Third person is on the right side where the jars get filled with sauce then pass across table to left side where the 4th person cleans jars, applies lids and puts in rack on the stainless table. When we have all 7 jars filled it goes in the hot water bath. We have timers for each pot.

Last of the TOMATOES are being canned up as SALSA with some of our final peppers.

Last of the PEPPERS are being canned up as JELLIED PEPPER RELISH. Some will probably be hot, some probably sweet. We will see how it goes tomorrow.

We still have EGGPLANTS producing, as well as some CUKES (but not pickles) still producing and the PEPPERS are producing but have slowed down dramatically. Of course the ONIONS are still growing in their bed.

You still have cukes and onions? Dang. We're normally done with those by sometime in June.

Pulled some bell peppers and cabbage yesterday. I hear Mrs. Z cutting them up now.

Didn't have time to do any canning of tomatoes this year so there's a ton of them out there... rotting on the vine.