Canning catch up

I finished my contract on Friday and turned in the 20,000-word series of gardening articles to the client, so I actually have some free time again! Well, the edits will be coming back tomorrow, but still, the bulk of it is done. 

This means I get to catch up on the posts I’ve been wanting to make for the past month, but haven’t had time.

About a month ago, I used my pressure canner for the first time to can some turkey stock. Because we were ill over Christmas, we didn’t cook & eat our (local, organic) Christmas turkey until February, and then I finally got around to boiling up the carcass for stock. The process for pressure canning is essentially the same as for water-bath canning, it just requires a different (and vastly more expensive) canner.

The hot stock is ladled into clean, hot jars that have been sterilised by dipping them in boiling water, and capped with canning lids and screw bands that have been similarly heated and sterilised. This means having 3 large pots of boiling liquid on the stove at one: the stock, the water for sterilising, and the canner itself, which is quite huge:

I decided to use one liter jars for the stock, assuming I will be using it mostly for home-made soup.

Once the filled jars are all in the pressure canner, the lid goes on. My canner has 6 big screw clamps with black plastic handles that need to be tightened 2 at a time, cross-ways (like you would tighten bicycle spokes or the lug nuts on a car wheel). It also has two gauges, a pressure gauge and a weighted gauge. The pressure gauge is for reference (and to let you know when the pressure has dropped back down to zero when you’re finished).

With its warning labels, the canner is quite intimidating-looking. I was quite apprehensive as it came up to pressure  and vented steam. Then I put the weighted gauge on the pressure vent and fiddled with the temperature of the burner attempting to get the prescribed “one or two jiggles per minute” from the gauge.

40 minutes of steam and jiggling and fiddling with the burner temperature and looking things up in the manual and online, and then another 30 minutes of waiting for the pressure to drop back down to zero and the canner to cool.

And success! I have 4 liters of turkey stock on the shelves in the basement.

I don’t think I will be canning very many vegetables, but this fall, I am looking forward to canning my own baked beans, and also some stews and chilies for quick home-made meals on busy nights.