Are You Still Using These Outdated Canning Practices?

Are you still following outdated home canning advice from 1988? Chances are, you might be and not even know it!

These are the new and updated guidelines for safe home canning, and being familiar with them will save you time and money in the kitchen.

Beginners and experienced home canners alike may be surprised at what the new studies reveal about jar sterilization, lid warming, and boiling water bath canning.

Frozen fruits make excellent jams and preserves.

01.

Freezing your fruits locks in all their nutrients, so you won’t lose any of their benefits when you finally get around to canning them.

02.

Chopsticks make great bubbling tools.

You can bubble your jars with any narrow utensil, and in my canning recipes, I often recommend using a chopstick because it’s the perfect profile and material for the job: long, thin, and usually wood or plastic.

03.

No canning pot? No problem! Use a stockpot with a cooling rack.

I could use the stockpot for actual cooking (seafood boils, bone broth, and the like) and reuse the cooling rack for its intended purpose (as well as for steaming or holding hot items as a trivet).

04.

Steam canning is just as good as (if not better than) boiling water bath canning.

In a steam canner, the pure steam environments gets up to 212°F, giving it the same sterilizing heat as a boiling water bath canner.

05.

Don’t store your processed jars with the bands on.

Doing so will not only keep the bands from corroding onto the lids and making them hard to get off (it happens, especially if you don’t get to the jars for a while), it’ll extend their useful life because they won’t rust as quickly.

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