It seems like every summer for, oh, the past several decades, the Ball Corporation (or more precisely their parent companies, Alltrista and most recently Jarden Home Brands) has declared a “great return to home canning”. Here for example: www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/072408/lif_308049209.shtml. This year the claim has taken on extra weight, what with the drastic increases in food […]
READ ONThe most exciting food fad at the Los Angeles Times this week is high-end chefs going “down market” and opening their own fast food restaurants. Yet the Los Angeles City Council is about to pass an ordinance to ban fast food restaurants. How’s that going to play out when Paul Bocuse tries to open one […]
READ ONIt all started back when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor… …or so quite a lot of people seem to think. World War II may have been the historical high water mark for home canning, but preserving the harvest in jars is a tradition that goes quite a bit further back. As I mentioned, it was […]
READ ONGot a couple of emails last night wondering what it was I was canning in the photos below. Well, it started out as apricot jam, but for some reason the fruit discolored. I can’t say I know what happened exactly, I didn’t cook it too long, the consistency was perfect…I put the right amount of […]
READ ONIt was not so very long ago that canning was commonplace enough that most people had at least seen it done. That’s not true anymore, hence this little photo-primer. Like my jam-making instructions, there’s no recipe included here, though the procedures apply to pretty much any recipe that calls for a boiling water canner. Which […]
READ ONBelow I talked a bit about what the canning process does to rid a jar of micro-critters, but the physics of how canning works is every bit as interesting. Wait — where are you going? There’s no need to…what do you mean you’d rather be water skiing? Don’t hit that quit button, I was just […]
READ ONEver since I was a child I’ve wondered why preserving in jars is called “canning”. Not to sound like a Jerry Seinfeld nightclub routine, but why isn’t it called “jarring”? A mystery for the ages, I guess. Canning is a technology that’s been around since the Napoleonic era, when a fellow by the name of […]
READ ONAn excellent question! If you only had a very small quantity of fruit and made only a very small quantity of jam, you can simply pour it into a jar and put it straight into the fridge. It’ll keep there for months. You can give it away to jam-loving friends (just make sure to tell […]
READ ONFrequent commentator and question-asker Sally C. from Tip of the Iceberg wants to know, given what I wrote about large batches of jam: How can Smuckers make tons of the stuff? Or maybe I don’t want to know…. LOL. The answer is that big manufacturers make jam in large quantities by cooking their products in […]
READ ONYou mean one of these? If you’ve got the three hundred beans to drop, I say go for it. They make great jam and even better wall decorations in the off season. The advantage of a piece of equipment like this lies primarily in the ability of the metal to conduct heat. That quick heat […]
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