Home Canning 101: Pickled Vegetables and Relishes

1. Introduction: Hi, My name's Janet Hessel birth, and today I'm going to teach you how to do home canning for pickled vegetables and relishes , and I've done home canning ash all my life. My mother tells of putting me in the high chair with a jar of tomatoes, but I've expanded beyond tomatoes and I I do a variety apple sauce is tomato sauces, pickles and jams, and I'd like to show you how fun and easy this could be. I'm going to be stepping through a recipe that my family has always called Billy Green Beans. It's actually very similar to a recipe that's found in a lot of cookbooks, and, um, this is not a fermented pickle. It's just a vinegar style pickle. So it's very quick and easy. I'll be talking you through the different steps that are involved in canning. I'm going to start out with a little bit of food safety and general canning technique just to get us grounded, and then I will show you the different ingredients we're going to use today. The equipment that we need, the preparation what what we have to do to get ready, and then the actual canning process itself. Then finally. Are we done yet? Do we get to take the stuff out of the canner? Yes, we do. And I'll show you how to properly store that for future use. So I hope that you enjoy this as much as I do. I would like to really share how fun and easy home can Incan bay. 2. Food Safety and General Canning Techniques: so I'd like to give you just a little general information before we get started making things, and the first thing I want to start with is some of my more favorite recipe books. It's important, at least when you're starting to do home canning toe. Actually follow a recipe because the acidity and the proper steps and preparation are all very important to get the jars to seal properly. So the ones on my bookshelf are preserving summer's bounty and the bowl blue book of preserving. But my absolute favorite and you can tell this is the complete guide to home canning and preservation. You could tell because it has lots of sticky notes stuck in the top for all my favorite recipes, and I'll put the titles and publication information into the class notes so you can find that. But, um, so when when you're preparing the recipes like I said, you don't just want a wing it In the beginning, the food acidity is very important in canning. If if the foods that you're canning are not of inappropriate acidity, um, you can give yourself botulism, and that's really inconvenient. So we want to be careful with that basically, there are two methods of canning. One is a hot water bath and one is a using a pressure canner. If the food is acidic enough, you can use a more simple hot water bath canning. If it's not acidic enough, you need to use a pressure canner. And that's, ah, larger, more expensive piece of equipment. So, you know, my recommendation is to start out very nice and simple with the more acidic things. So any kind of fruit, um, pickles and tomatoes were considered just acidic enough, although a lot of those recipes you will find they want you to add a little bit of lemon juice or vinegar to the recipe to bring the acidity in a bit more. So, um, as faras as you start to learn and grow in your ability, you can tweak some recipes a little bit, but say tweak the seasoning, not things that the that affect the acidity or the processing time. Okay, Um, something else I want to show you is, um I'm gonna talk about jars for a moment, and so this is a This is actually a point and 1/2 jar. It looks like a court. But you can get a variety of sizes ranging from a couple the way up to 1/2 gallon, and the important thing is that you should use jars that are designed for canning. Please don't go out and use a cleaned out mayonnaise jar or something from you know, another commercial product. Use real life canning jars. They are tempered. They're much stronger. The glass walls are a little bit thicker, so you're much less likely to break the jars in the canner. Very inconvenient. You don't want to do that. So spring for the real jars. Some of my jars came from my grandmother's house. They last forever. If you take proper care of them, you can pass them down to your Children. So when you are getting ready to can and you've decided what size jars you want, um, it's problem. It's important to prepare the jars properly and you'll hear even me say you need to sterilize them. They need to be cleaned. Everybody will tell you, of course, they need to be clean, so the first thing you want to do is either hand wash or, uh, run the jars through the dishwasher. If you're using a dishwasher, you can use a sanitized cycle. And, um, when you are filling the jars, you want to put hot food into hot jars. But hot isn't necessarily sterile, so the question comes up. Do you need to sterilise the jars? And the answer is, surprisingly, not as often as you would think. Um, the National Center for Home Food Preservation says that you need to sterilise the jars if you're going to process in a hot water bath for less than 10 minutes. So that means if you're processing in a hot water bath more than 10 minutes, or if you're using a pressure canner, you don't need to sterilize. And when I think about it, that's almost everything that I make. With the exception of maybe a few recipes for pickles or jellies, everything gets processed at least 10 minutes, so it is sufficient to wash your jars and then keep them warm either in the closed dishwasher. Or you can do what I do, and that's put them into a warm of. And I set my oven to about 225 just to keep the jars hot enough so that they're not shocked when I put hot foods in them. So on a canning jar, um, you'll hear people talk about head space, and that's how. How high do you want to fill the food product in the jar? And that's measured? You'll see. They'll say, Oh, give 1/2 inch headspace And so that's your measuring from the top edge of the jar down 1/2 an inch, and the food should come up no further than that. And that's to allow for the food to expand and not expand so much. It comes out the gap between the lid and the jar. Um, if the food expands too much and tries to push past the lid, it will ruin your seal and venue. Then you'll have to eat it promptly or store in the refrigerator. So the whole objective here, of course, is to get a nice, tight seal. Um, what else do I want to talk about? OK, raw pack and hot pack. So there were also two basic methods, besides, um, using hot water bath and using pressure canners there to basic methods of loading food into the jar. And one is raw pack, and when it's hot pack. And as you might guess, the raw pack involves less cooking. So in raw pack you would simply trim your vegetables, not cook them beforehand, placed them directly into the jar, and then you typically put like a hot brine or hot broth over them and then seal in process . Um, that could be really handy for fruits that are more delicate, for example, or things that just don't require a lot of cooking. Obviously, hot pack. You cook the vegetables first, put them in the jar and then process again. You may need to add a hot brian or broth or syrup in the case of fruits. And for those, um, I guess the other thing I find about hot pack is it. It tends to condense the flesh of the fruit or vegetable a little bit more, so you're less likely to get jars where everything floats to the top and you have a whole bunch of syrup at the bottom and a little bit of fruit at the top. That's less likely to happen with a hot pack. Not to say you can't manage, but less likely to happen. Sometimes jars don't seal. It happens sometimes just a little bit of food got into the seal. Or sometimes there was a small nick on the rim of the jar that you didn't see. Sometimes you don't have seals. Take and put the food in the refrigerator. Plan on using it soon. No worries. Um, however, if six months down the road, you go to the pantry and you pull out that lovely apple sauce that you made or whatever it was, and it looks funny. Smells funny. The seals going. Just throw it out. Okay, Don't don't even risk it. If there's any kind of question, it's just not worth it again. Botulism will ruin your day. So, really, though home canning is is quite fun and easy. And although these things do happen, it's it's really unusual anymore, so you can have a very successful caning experience. 3. Ingredients: The important thing about ingredients when you're canning is you want the freshest product that you can get. So yesterday I went to the market and it's a little farm market near here, and we bought £7 green beans. I actually have deal growing out of my garden right now, so we gathered some of that, and I don't tend to like dill seed, But I love dill weed. So I'm doing this early in the season before the deal heads have have matured. Um, in addition to the fresh products were going to be using just a plain white vinegar. I have the store brand the local store brand. For that, um, we're gonna be using hot pepper flakes. Ah, fresh peeled garlic and pickling salt. So the important thing to remember about salt when you're canning or especially pickling, is that you do want to get either a pickling salt or sea salt. The thing you're trying to avoid is anti anti caking agents and iodine, because either of those can cause discoloration or cloudiness in your brine. So just you want just straight salt. And then the other important thing to remember is the vinegar that you use. You do want to check the label and make sure that it's a 5% vinegar. That's important again because we're trying to be as accurate as we can with the acidity of the food so that we don't ruin our day with botulism. 4. Equipment: So, of course, the more most important piece of equipment is the recipe that you want to use. And again today I'll be talking you through dilly green beans. Um, because we're going to be doing a hot water bath canning. We're gonna use a large stockpot. If you want to buy a special large kanner, you certainly can do that. But I happen to have a glass top range in my house, and those can be a little touchy with very large pots because of the weight and because of the overhang on the burners. You do want to check your manufacturer instruction on what kind of pots you can use if you have a glass top range. So I'm going to use a large stockpot and will be working in pint jars. I have already washed them in the dishwasher on the sterilize cycle, and then we'll also be using a two part lid system. So there's Ah, round, flat portion, which always want to use brand new and the rings, which can be re used from year to year. I have some special jar tongues, which I absolutely adore, and they're really handy for reaching down into the hot cantor and pulling jars out. And then I have some more conventional tongs that I used for handling the flat portions of the lids. I have a canning funnel. Very handy. Uh, it's a very wide opening at the bottom, and it helps you direct the food into the jar instead of all over the outside. Measuring spoons. Dishcloth, Um, other than the jar tongs. Really, it's pretty much equipment that you already have in your kitchen. 5. Preparation: so I'm going to start out by making the brine, and it's really simple. The recipe, like I said, is in the class material, and I have my salt and my hot pepper flakes that I'm just going to put into the pot, and then I'm gonna measure out vinegar that we need. I find that the original recipe is a little short, so I'm going to make a recipe and 1/2 which would be, um, six cups total of water and six cups of vinegar. It's too four now. That needs to be nice and hot. So I'm gonna put that on the stove and then go back to trimming my green beans. So when I went to market, I found some lovely green and yellow green beans. And really, what you want to do is just trim off the little ends on both ends. My Children get on my case for trimming into my thumb, but I have yet to lose a finger, and, um, the ends or any bad beans that you have can go in the trash or the compost heap. Hopefully, you have one of those, right? And, um, I've been cutting into just small bite sizes. You'll see recipes that say Oh, and packed them all parallel and neat into the jars. And I'm sorry, I just don't have the patience for that. It does mean that I need Teoh use a little bit more brine, but I like it better that way. If you find a being, you just don't like the look of Don't use it, Um and just keep keep trimming. I have a six court bull here, so I kind of have a gauge of when I have enough to make a cantor load. And I know that in my Kanner Aiken sit seven points. That's what it was. Seven points. So I'll be ready to start canning very, very soon. So I ran the dishwasher unsanitized and what I'm gonna do is store my stars in the oven at 225 degrees Fahrenheit. And I want to do that so that the jars are very hot and sterile. When I add the hot broth, I don't want to shock the jars. And while we're waiting for that to sit again, it needs to be about 20 minutes. I'm gonna turn on the canner to bring that up to temperature and will state stage the work environment. So when you are getting ready to can, it's really important to think about how your equipment is laid out where everything is. So I have my can already. I have my hot brine and my hot lids ready, and I have all the equipment laid out within easy reach, right next to the beans. So now that I have everything ready, let's fill the jars. 6. The Canning Process: Okay, so now that everything is hot, let's start filling the jars. I'm gonna grab a hot jar, put it over here, and because it is very hot and I really don't want to burn myself, I'm going to use my final. I'm gonna drop a piece of garlic in, and I'm going to take a piece of deal and put that in. And then just using the hands, I am going to start filling with beans on, and I'm gonna try to pack them in there as tightly as I can. Okay, so now for some hot brine, Okay? And as a final check of the top to make sure everything is clean, I'm gonna wipe along the surface and then, with standard tongs, I'm going to grab a flat lid. Make sure I grabbed only one. I've done that before. Can with two lids. It still works, but what a waste. And then grabbing the jar with a cloth tightened down the lid. You don't need to get out your gorilla level strength. Just use ah firm hand, grab it with the jar halls and put it into your candor. And there we are. I keep going for another few jars, and then we'll bring the cantor up to temperature. Okay, so my here's my last jar going in. You can see and hear the jars. Starting to rattle is we're up to temperature and you'll see there's about an inch of water over top of the lids, and that's very important. So now we'll have to let them process. We're going to boil for 10 minutes. 7. Are We Done Yet?: Okay, So now Arcandor has boiled for the entire 10 minutes. And additionally, I let it cool another 10 minutes because you don't want to rush cooling down the canner. So as we peek inside, if you see anything, start to boil again. Then put the lid back on and be patient. And then as we lift our first jar again, same thing. If you see things start to boil, then put it back and be patient. It's your cooling it down too fast if those things happen. But it looks like we're good, so I'm gonna go ahead and pull the rest of the jars out. Now, what's important is to make sure that these Kenbrell undisturbed until the jars seal. They're not actually sealed right now. But as they dio, you'll hear each lt'd make a sharp pop sound. And in fact, the lids will pulled down and become firm right now. If you tried to push them down, they actually would go down. But it's not a good idea to force the seal on a jar. Now. The other thing you'll notice about these is because we cold packed them. We are getting a little bit of floating for the for the beans. If you don't want that, you can actually blanche the beans beforehand. But this is more true to the recipe my my mother always used. So now we have to be patient and wait so the following morning, and I do think it's important to let the jars rest overnight. Teoh, help the seal set following mornings. Take the rings off and your jars are ready to store in the pantry. My mother for many years did not take the rings off, and what we found was that the rings would start rusting and they'd be very difficult to remove, you know, six months down the road. So the way that I recommend that you store these is without the rings in your pantry away from Heaton Light. 8. Conclusion: So now we're at the end of a successful day of canning. You went to the market, you've got the green beans, you trim the ends and either chose to pack them in all parallel or cut them up and just threw them in like I do. You covered the beans with brine process them waited the allotted amount of time, pulled the jars out of the canner. Let them cool. And voila. You have lovely jars of Dili green beans. And so there you have it. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you can understand how, how easy it is to do your own home canning. So as your challenge as your project, I would like you to either use one of the recipes that I have provided or find a recipe that you would enjoy and make your own recipe of home canning pickled vegetables. Put them up on the website for me to see. I'd be happy to see those, and I would love to comment or answer any questions. Thank you. 9. Bonus Round: Pickled Beets: So I've shown you how to make the dilly green beans and, honestly, a lot of the pickled vegetable or pickled relish type. Recipes work very, very similarly so I'm going to very quickly step you through doing another one of my favorite recipes, and that is pickled beets. I adore them, and one really great way to use them is when you after they've finished pickling and it's, you know, a month later opened, the jar poured into a larger jar with some hard boiled eggs. Let that rest for a few weeks in the refrigerator, and then you have pickled eggs and beats, and it's just wonderful. So to do the beats, you first need to cook the beats, clean him up a little, trim the ends, get the greens off, save those aside to eat later, cooking for about 30 minutes and then cool them down and slip the skins. Rinse them if you need to, and then slice them into nice rounds. Or if you prefer small cubes, you can do it that way. Instead of cutting up the green beans, you're slicing the beats and then you prepare the brine in a similar manner. Although this recipe has a little sugar and some spices. The recipe is in your class materials and to bring the beats up to temperature, you go ahead and add the beats to the hot brine and let them boil together for about five minutes. From there, you pack the beats into Joerres and process very similar to the beans, although the beats are a longer process. Time. 30 minutes in this case, but otherwise it works very much the same as the daily green beans did.