Home Canning Guide: How to Can Foods

Put up the garden and stock your pantry! Home canning is a fun and satisfying hobby to learn.

By MOTHER EARTH NEWS Editors
Updated on August 1, 2023
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by Adobestock/nruedisueli

Why Do We Can?

We looked to our readers to find out why home canning is experiencing a modern revival. Their answer: Canning produces flavorful, high-quality food that saves money, builds self-reliance and creates lifelong memories. Check out some of their responses and get inspired to start stocking your pantry with home-canned food: Putting Food By The Old-Fashioned Way.

How Canning Works

The Science. The more you learn about food science, the more confident you’ll be in the kitchen. This is true for all kinds of cooking, but is especially helpful with food preservation. When you preserve food, you are either trying to freeze time or to encourage specific bacteria to proliferate and crowd out harmful bacteria. Canning is all about freezing time.

With the simplest method of canning — water bath canning — you fill jars with acidic food such as tomatoes, berries or cucumbers in vinegar, cover them with lids and boil them until a seal forms under the lid. This action forces air out of the food and out of the jar and creates a vacuum in an acidic environment in which bacteria will not thrive.

Water bath canning can provide you with a number of delicious foods, including jams, jellies, whole tomatoes and pickles, and it’s a great place to start. A more advanced method is pressure canning. It requires a little more skill and some specialized equipment, but it will unlock a wide world of food and flavor options. If you want to put up the main ingredients for many meals, rather than just supporting players and condiments, you’ll need to get into pressure canning.

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