Adventures in Canning

I was born in Iowa, so life just doesn’t seem complete without a big vegetable garden.  I don’t have a lot of space out here in Colorado, so I try to maximize what space I do have.  As a result, in just a few short months my garden goes from carefully laid out and under control….

… to a complete jungle! Note the mammoth zucchini plants in the front!

 

This year it quickly became clear that I was not going to keep up with the yields through my traditional means of incorporating (aka hiding) as much as I could into our daily meals and then making the rest into freezer-friendly formats.  I’m always on the lookout for new ways to use up the aforementioned zucchini, and a friend suggested sweet vinegar zucchini pickles.  I made a batch and they were fantastic - even my five year old liked them!  However, a family of three can only consume so many pickles within the few week safe storage window for refrigerator pickles.

This led me to the dreaded, but obvious conclusion that I must attempt canning.  Now, I’m an Engineer, so I should be able to handle this….right?  Besides, as I mentioned, I’m from Iowa so this should be in my blood somehow.  However, the concept of canning has always filled me with both utter awe when others do it and with the deepest sense of fear when contemplating the act myself.  That said, I was drowning in veggies, so I squared my shoulders and marched myself off to Walmart to buy the necessary supplies to start my first canning endeavor. I bought the traditional Ball canning kit, a few cases of half pint jars and started researching zucchini pickles online.

 

I found a great resource online: http://pickyourown.org/allaboutcanning.htm.  It’s a good thing I read it first too, as I discovered that the basic canning kit was not going to work with my ceramic cooktop.  The standard Ball canning kit is essentially a huge metal pot with ridges on the bottom.  Apparently, a flat bottomed pot is required to ensure sufficient heat transfer between my type of cooktop and the pot.  Otherwise, the water temperature of the bath may not be consistently high enough for safe canning.  In addition, if the pot sticks out too far beyond the ceramic cooktop burner, the bottom of the pot can reflect the heat beyond the burner area and possibly crack the cooktop. Yikes!

So, I marched back to Walmart to return the original canner (Just to be fair, I did later notice that it does say in very small print of the Ball canner "not for use with ceramic cooktops") and bought myself a really big flat-bottomed stock pot with narrow base along with this nifty kit from Ball that turns any pot into a home canner!

 

Thus armed with all my supplies and a recipe for Kosher dill zucchini pickles, I began the process.  I dutifully sterilized all my lids and jars, filled the jars with the zucchini and heated brine, carefully extracted all bubbles and wiped the threads clean before sealing, slowly lowered the jars into the canning bath, waited and watched water boil for the requisite time making sure to add time for my 5,280ft above sea level (yes, I was actually reduced to watching water boil), turned off the heat to let them rest in the canner for five minutes.....

 carefully raised the jars out of the bath and onto the cooling rack, held my breath and waited…..

 

I wasn’t quite sure what I was waiting for exactly as I stared at the small grouping of jars on the cooling rack.  I think I half expected them to explode or crack or utterly fail in some unknown way.  However, out of nowhere came the first metallic pop.  At first my heart stopped as I thought the seals were all failing.  But, I looked more closely and found that the lids had sucked in and they were good and truly sealed!  Hooray! 

 

Emboldened by this small success, I moved on to sweet vinegar zucchini pickles,

 

 

sweet vinegar pickles made from actual cucumbers, a peach salsa that was so good I ended up making two more batches:

and finally, quarts of vanilla cardamom peach pie filling!