Canning and Pickling

I have had the opportunity this week to can plums and pickles as a start to the canning season.  I love putting up produce to last through fall and winter, and I am fortunate to have an experienced mother and grandmother who are happy to pass along the tradition of canning.  We have only used the water bath canning method so far, although we will probably be pressure canning green beans when the time comes.  Putting up your own produce is very cost effective, and it can be as simple or complicated as you’d like to make it.  

My only advice is to stock up on mason jars and unused lids as you find them on sale or at goodwill and garage sales.  If canning and preserving is something you plan on doing a lot of, you will be surprised at how quickly you run out of jars.  You will need new, unused lids for everything you can to be shelf stable, although clean rings are fine to reuse as long as they’re not rusty.

This past Saturday, some friends invited us to pick plums from a tree in their backyard.  Since I have a dozen jars of plum jam from last summer, I decided to can these plums in halves in a simple syrup instead.  I started by washing them and cutting them in half to remove the pits.  I stuffed pint jars as full as I could, and ended up with a dozen jars.  While I was cutting and filling jars, I made a simple syrup on the stove by brining a combination of one part sugar to two parts water to a rolling boil.  I then poured the hot syrup into the full jars until the liquid was one half inch from the top.  I then put the boiled lids and rings on the jars tightly, and submerged the pints into a boiling water bath for twenty minutes.  Once they were done, I let the jars cool and waited to hear the pops of the lids sealing.  Luckily, all of my jars sealed, so they should be shelf stable throughout the year.  

Monday, I joined my grandma, mom, and our friend Gaye for a day of pickling.  We decided to make Kosher dill pickles.  The recipe was easy, but canning 75 pounds of pickling cucumbers was an all day affair.  Here was our process:

First we sorted each bag of cucumbers into “pint size” and “quart size” groups.  The larger cucumbers were too tall to fit in pints, so they were canned in quart-sized mason jars.  

Next, we washed the cucumbers and cut and cleaned the fresh dill.  

Then we filled the jars- first we put in peppercorns, garlic cloves, and dill, and then stuffed each jar as full as we could get it with the halved cucumbers.

While we stuffed jars, we prepared the brine on the stove until it was boiling.  The brine was a mix of canning/pickling salt, distilled white vinegar, and water.  

When the brine was ready, we filled each jar to 1/2 inch from the top and put on our boiled lids and rims.  The jars were then submerged into a water bath, where they boiled for 10 minutes for pints and 15 minutes for quarts.  

Once they were removed from the water bath, they were left to sit and cool under towels as we waited for the lids to pop and seal.  The reason we covered the processed jars with towels was because we were canning in my grandma’s garage and we didn’t want any cool breezes to blow through and ruin our seals or break our jars since they’re so sensitive to temperature changes. 

My Grandma turns 92 years old this September.  She has spent many days in that garage canning all sorts of fresh produce for her family, which she was always eager to share.  She helped us cut cucumbers for a while in the morning, and made a guess at how many jars we would end up with at the end of the day.  She wrote her guess of 102 on the wall (which I believe should be a new family tradition), and after eight hours of canning, wouldn’t you know it that she was only off by two jars.  We canned an even 100 jars that day.  Four of these jars were canned garlic cloves, since we had so much left over from the pickles.  If you’ve never had canned or pickled garlic cloves and you like garlic at all, I would encourage you to try it- they are wonderful. 

The cost breakdown: we spent $105 on all of the ingredients that we needed (we had salt, peppercorns, jars, and lids already.  $105 divided by 100 jars equals $1.05 per jar, and about a third of the batch was quart jars, which are twice as large.  If you price them by the pint, that equals approximately 82 cents per pint.  I’d say that was a pretty good return on our money, since store bought pickles are three to four times as much, and many of them have dyes and preservatives in them.  Plus, homemade pickles are way better.

At the end of the day, we enjoyed dinner and a martini on the back deck, as Mom, Gaye, and my aunt Pam told old stories, and we laughed.  It was the perfect end to a day of canning, even if we did smell like garlic and dill.  Happy canning and pickling to you, and thank you for reading.