A lot of up and coming growers, and perhaps even the well established among us, look at canning as sort of the mecca of food preservation. We’d mostly agree that there’s some truth to that, even though the majority of our preservation efforts use other methods. We see it as one of our most valuable preservation focused skillsets.
To us, we’ve sort of learned that there’s a time and a place for canning. And when it’s the right method, for the right product, there’s nothing that can beat it. Like in the case of these dilly beans, made from our recent harvest of bush beans. These pickled veggies are super flexible, delicious and can be used across many kinds of dishes, in charcuterie and even decorating the occasional bloody mary.
Water bath canning, like we’re practicing here, is the simplest way to get started with canning and it’s where we encourage those who have never practiced it to start. Fortunately, there’s tons of canning territory you can cross until to have to breach the barrier of pressure canning! This stuff is practically as simple as boiling jars in water!
Those with a paralyzing fear of canning might not fully understand the data behind food poisoning and the problems that can happen with canning. Modern canning is incredibly safe, especially if you’re not dumb and don’t do stupid things. Millions of cans of food get put up every year without a single incident.
For the science minded, there’s been studies commissioned on the incident rates of botulism across every sector where it’s possible. Home canning is responsible for a very small fraction of botulism cases. And in every single incident, those people were eating obviously bad food from damaged cans or so negligently disregard safety protocols that it’s almost criminal. The warning signs were there and they were ignored. In fact, you’re far more likely to have an issue from commercially canned goods, but most won’t bat an eye at that!
As a starting point, we always recommend the Ball Blue Book as the “gold standard” for canning recipes and a general introduction to the process. We’ve been using this book for decades now, every edition is timeless and there’s always some true gems in each edition. We have quite a few “tried and true” recipes that we use out of this book and if you can only have one book, this one’s it.
We do encourage our readers to practice canning, if they don’t currently do so. Again, we see it as one of our most valuable skillsets. Being able to render food shelf stable has some very strong advantages. It’s the right tool for the job for certain produce and end products, irreplaceable by other methods.
You might notice we’re not putting up dozens of jars of pickled beans. We’ve learned we simply don’t need that much, so we’ve “right sized” our preservation efforts. We do a surprising amount of “micro-batch” canning efforts. In this case we split our interests with bush beans, where we blanch & freeze 75% of our crop and left the remaining 25% to dilly beans. This gets us maximum value from our crop, but also keeps things interesting and diverse.
For now, though, we had a long day of hard work and we’re ready to call it a day. We hope you practice something new-to-you this year, whether it’s canning or something else entirely!
