Canning On Location

After spending over a week in Indiana with my sister's family, my mom returned home yesterday afternoon. Today, she worked as the overseer in the kitchen, while my dad and I canned a batch of tomatoes. (My mom showed me how she prepares the tomatoes a few weeks ago, but she learned to can from her mom, without a water bath or pressure canner, and I'm just too timid to go there. Although we almost did today, as you'll see . . .)

I planned to visit the garden today, since I had not been there for a while. Turns out, not too much is happening in the garden right now. There may be some pictures on a different camera, I'm not sure. I have about 8 blazing orange pumpkins, there are lots of green butternut squash, and my carrot tops have definitely filled out a lot since the last time I checked on them. Here's one that I picked, just to see how they're doing. There must have been a rock or clump of clay in its way (but it still tasted delicious):
I also dug around by the potato plants today. They are definitely growing! And the onions curing in the garage have thin papery skins, and seem to be ready to put into storage. But our fall crop of peas completely failed to materialize. I'm not sure what's up with that, but it makes me pretty sad.

Before he found out I was planning a trip to the garden today, my dad wanted to bring a big bag of tomatoes up to my house to can. Instead, I brought the canning supplies to him. A mistake I don't intend to duplicate tonight. Um . . . I mean next time. (Princess Bride reference, not a reference to more canning in the very near future.) The tomatoes were gorgeous, and while most were picked yesterday, some came off the vine mere seconds before being washed and dropped into boiling water for a little bit of blanching. I think we had good teamwork skills. But even as I walked into the house forty-five minute earlier, I foresaw a potential problem with our home canning operation.

I realized that I had lugged my 21 quart water bath all the way to Madison, intending to use it on my parents' enamel stove. The pot expressly states in the (basically otherwise unhelpful) instruction booklet that it is not for use on flat top stoves. Oops.

We did it anyway, since the tomatoes were there, and it seemed silly to caravan back to my place. (Okay, we didn't even consider doing that.) The tomatoes were sliced and simmering happily on the stove in the 3 gallon pot while we tried and tried to get the water bath to simmer, thereby sterilizing our jars.
(My dad thought this warning might be in place to prevent the owners of enamel stoves from suing the company after the water bath scratches their stove surface. I thought it had more to do with the uneven bottom of the pot.)

If anyone out there who reads this cans, please advise. How am I supposed to: 1. bring a water bath to boiling; 2. cook 3 gallons of tomatoes; and 3. sterilize jars in a third very large pot of water all on a four-burner stove? Some of those burners are very small, you know. And the dimensions of all of the non-commercial stoves I have ever used make it basically impossible to have three such pots on a stove at once. Yet all of these things need to be going at exactly the same time. My instructions state that I should pull one jar out of its simmering pot, fill it with hot material, put a lid on it (also pulled from a simmering pot) and then place it immediately on a rack in the water bath.

Rather than buying additional stoves for my kitchen and my mom's kitchen, we avoid this dilemma by using the water bath both to sterilize the jars and to do the processing. So my jars spend a few minutes on the counter after being filled, waiting to be re-submerged in now boiling (not simmering) water.

This entire situation was more complicated today because it probably took the water bath over an hour to get to simmering. During that time I decided twice to make the tomatoes my mom's way, heating the jars in the oven, and not using a water bath at all. But then the water was 165 degrees (we were going for 180) and it seemed silly to have wasted all of that energy on the hot water.) So we poured boiling water that my mom had heated in the teakettle and I had heated in the microwave into the water bath to bring the temperature up.

Eventually the water did boil, and I filled the first jar (an activity for which I was almost entirely unprepared, having misplaced my washcloth for wiping off the threads on the outside of the jar, forgotten to bring my lid-lifting magnet into the room, and failed to plan for the fact that there was room for serious drippage onto the floor between the simmering pot of tomatoes and my jar on the counter). I noticed that the tomato juice was very very thin and watery. Right. Because we'd kept the tomatoes simmering on low the whole time we were trying to get the water bath to simmer. We never took the lid off to let the tomatoes cook down, either. Oops. So we closed up that first jar and set it aside, and decided my dad could run out to the grocery store for more lemon juice (we weren't sure we had enough) while a little water cooked off of the tomatoes. We let the water bath bubble away happily, filled with six more quart jars. (I did not weigh the tomatoes before we started, so we weren't sure how many jars we'd need.)

I should mention at this point that the rack for my canner, which was in the water bath with the jars, keeping them off of the bottom of the pot, is already rusty and smells like old metal. I have used the thing twice, and I purchased it new a couple of weeks ago.

Eventually, my dad returned from the store and we pronounced the tomatoes thick enough to be finished. (Actually, we called them "good for more than just Worms," but Worms is a dish my mom's dad got kicked out of kindergarten for eating, and thus, is the story for a different blog post later.) As my dad pulled the jars out of the simmering water, and drained them, I began to notice that the white residue on the outside of the jars (from hard water) was also Inside the jars. My dad was convinced that this would not hurt anyone. (He doesn't cook a lot, but he did make pickled beets and canned tomatoes last summer, most if not all of which have now been consumed. And, like my grandma and my mom, he hasn't ever killed anyone with his cooking yet.) (I don't actually know anyone who has killed someone with their cooking, just so you know.) The residue creeped me out but we kept going.

Apparently my parents' water was unusually hard today. While I do not have a water softener, and there was a little bit of residue on my jars when my dad came up and we canned tomato sauce a week ago, it was nothing like what we saw today - and my parents have a relatively new water softener. And some of the residue had a faint brownish tinge, which I suspect came from the rustiness of the rack in the water bath.
See that residue on the jars? Eww.
But we did have good teamwork. My dad was in charge of getting the jars out of the canner, handing me lids, and, eventually, helping me get the last of the tomatoes out of the bottom of the pot. I filled jars with lemon juice and tomato sauce, and my mom captured it on film.
We added vinegar to the pot when we put the jars in to boil (five quarts), which I had read would help with hard water buildup. But I wasn't sure if I ought to have vinegar in the water while the jars were being sterilized. As I previously posted, I'm very worried about introducing foreign elements to the recipes I use, because I am afraid of botulism and other deadly diseases.

All six quart jars sealed (the first one I made sealed itself on the counter, after my mom and I had kind of given up on it -
and we felt a little bit of my grandmother's old wonder and awe at the sound of a metal lid sucking down over a glass jar filled with homemade goodness when it did finally pop) so we'll probably wait a while before digging in, and finding out whether we poisoned ourselves with rusty canning rack residue. (Things to note about the above picture: this jar spent significantly less time in the water bath, which may be why it is not covered with yucky white lime buildup. Also, my mom lacks a snowman plate, so she uses this yellow one for canning purposes. In the background are two jars of the Animal, Vegetable, Miracle tomato sauce we canned at my house on Friday the 13th.)

Next time I can tomatoes (or jelly, if I can get enough fall berries), I will do the work at my house, for easier heating capabilities and apparently softer water. My mom and I are unable to coordinate our schedules through at least the end of this week, but we'll see what happens next week. We may try to can some tomato puree, since I'm now a master chinois user. (Except I studied that Wikipedia article a little more carefully and discovered that Wikipedia actually refers to the device I have as a China Cap. A Chinoise is more like a conical sieve/strainer.)

Here is the recipe for the sauce we made today:
Ingredients:
One large tote bag full of tomatoes from the garden.
Dash of salt
Dash of pepper
Lemon Juice

• Blanch the tomatoes in boiling water until the skins crack.
• Core tomatoes and remove skins; cut tomatoes into large chunks.
• Simmer tomato chunks on the stove.
• Add salt and pepper to taste.
• They are ready to be put into jars and processed in the canner when they smell right. Seriously. That's how my mom knows. But for those of you who do not know what tomato sauce (for Worms) smells like: 15 minutes of simmering is a good length of time. Today we simmered the tomatoes with the lid on for probably an hour, and then with the lid off for another 30 minutes, trying to cook them down. But we were using the wrong kind of stove, you know?
  
• Pour into quart-sized Mason jars, adding two tablespoons of lemon juice per jar to ensure proper acidity. (If you use pint sized jars, add one tablespoon per jar.)
  
• Wipe the top of the jar, and cover with a vacuum-seal lid that has been in simmering water (but not boiling - that ruins the sealing material). Tighten a band around the jar just until your fingers meet resistance - not too tight!
  
• Process in a water bath for 40 minutes. Then turn the heat off and let them rest for 5 minutes.
  
• Remove jars from water bath. If the bands have loosened during the canning process, Don't worry. Leave them alone. My grandma will roll over in her grave if she sees you messing with those jars.
• Let the jars sit on the counter, or the kitchen table, or somewhere that little (or big) fingers won't touch them for 12-24 hours. If you want, stand nearby and listen to the "Pop!" of the lids sealing. Rejoice that your hot labor in the kitchen means rosy homegrown tomatoes in February. (If you miss the pop, you can tell it is sealed because the lid is concave, or at least flat - not poking up in the middle.)
  
• Store in a dark place. Apparently light affects the nutrient content of canned vegetables.
• If a lid fails to seal, the product is not canned and is not safe to leave out. Put it in the fridge and eat it very soon. (The Ball Blue Book has rules about re-processing the vegetables, but eating it now seems like an easier solution.)
  

(Note: I tried to find a similar recipe in the Ball Blue Book but couldn't find any, so the processing time I used today is what they recommend for canning raw tomatoes. If you like to use very watery tomato sauce for things like chili, and you are planning to use a pressure canner or a water bath, you could probably process your tomatoes raw, rather than simmering them until they smell right. But we don't know if that recipe has killed anyone yet. Just sayin'.)

Check back for an update on the healthfulness of this particular recipe after we've opened up a jar to make a batch of Worms.