10 Tips for Successful Home Canning from The Canning Diva®

Home canning is a labor of love. Each of us puts a great deal of time into planning, preparing, and processing our canning recipes.

One way to lessen the load is to have friends or family join you in the fun. As the old saying goes: many hands make light work. Working together will greatly lessen the time it takes to prep ingredients, cook the recipe, and fill the jars. I will often get together with three or four girlfriends and rent a local commercial kitchen so we may create an assembly-line production type of setting to really crank out the jars. At the end of our six-hour session, there’s nothing more satisfying than hearing the sound of 150 lids sealing. We then divvy up the jars and enjoy going home to clean kitchens.

Top 10 Rules of Pressure Canning

1. Treat your glass jars like you would a glass coffeepot! Avoid vast temperatureswings when working with glass.

2. Keep the vent pipe clean and free from debris. The vent pipe must be able toadequately exhaust steam. Hold the canner lid up to the light. If you do not seelight through the vent hole, it is dirty and must be cleaned with hot runningwater and mild detergent.

3. Consult your manual for the proper venting time. The canner must adequatelyvent prior to processing. The most common venting time is 10 minutes.

4. Add one ounce of vinegar to the canner water prior to adding the jars for processing.Doing so will keep mineral deposits off your canning jars.

5. Use a reliable timer to avoid under- or overprocessing your food in the jars.And do not start your timer until your stovetop pressure canner has reachedthe required processing PSI.

6. Do not ever let your stovetop pressure canner’s PSI get below the requiredPSI. If you’re using a dial gauge pressure canner, going over the required PSIby 2 to 3 PSI is okay, but you must never go below it. If the PSI gets below therequired amount, you will need to reprocess the jars.

7. Always let your pressure canner drop to zero pounds of pressure before removingthe lid. Rushing this process could cause injury to you and your jars.

8. Once you are permitted to remove the canner lid, allow the jars to sit for aminimum of 5 minutes in the pressure canner before removing the jars to coolon a towel-lined cutting board on the countertop.

9. Food within the jars stays hot and active during cooling. Do not disturb the jarswhile they cool or you could prevent the second phase of thermal processing.

10. When using a digital canner that doubles as a water bather, be sure you haveselected the proper pressure-canning setting to process low-acid foods.