Every Jar, Every Altitude

Learn to can at home with recipes you can trust: every canning recipe in this book comes from a laboratory-tested process, and the page tells you which one.

Most canning questions come down to one worry: is this recipe safe? This guide answers it on every page. Each of its 170 recipes names its tested source and the date we checked it, prints the processing time for each altitude band (with both dial and weighted gauges for the pressure canner), and tells you what the test fixed and, where the source allows it, what you may change. The recipes come from the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning and the National Center for Home Food Preservation; university extension research fills in the rest of the advice. No recipe was invented, and we did not test any process ourselves: the testing belongs to the laboratories named on each page.

Learn it step by step

• Why canning works: acid, heat and botulism in plain words, so every rule makes sense.
• Water bath, steam and pressure canning, move by move, with drawings for the water-bath and pressure moves and the current rules for atmospheric steam canners.
• Your altitude: how to find your elevation, read every recipe table for it, and what to do above 8,000 feet.
• Today's equipment: what each kind of canner is for, electric canners and multicookers, glass-top and induction stoves, jars and lids.
• After the canner: seals, jars that did not seal, storage and labels.

170 tested recipes, plain basics first

• Water bath and steam: tomatoes, tomato sauce and juice, salsas, peaches, pears, applesauce and apple butter, berries and cherries, pie fillings, dill and bread-and-butter pickles, sauerkraut, pickled peppers and dilly beans, relishes and chutneys, jams, jellies, pepper jelly, marmalade, lemon curd, juices, ketchup and barbecue sauce.
• Pressure canner: green beans, potatoes, corn, carrots, pumpkin cubes and other vegetables, dry beans, chicken, ground meat, beef and venison, spaghetti sauce, chili, stock, soups and fish.
• Small batches: 1, 2 or 4 jars where the batch rules allow it, marked as our arithmetic on the tested recipe, and a plain "make the full batch" where they do not.
• Lower-sugar choices where a tested recipe exists, and why sugar can be cut in canned fruit but not in regular jam.

Straight answers

• Can I can...? Food by food: butter, milk, eggs, rice, pumpkin purée, zucchini, pesto and more, with the tested option or the reason there is none.
• Myth or tested: water-bath vegetables, oven and dry canning, turning jars upside down, with the evidence and without scolding.
• Is it safe? Troubleshooting tables for lost liquid, cloudy jars, a forgotten timer, a seal that failed on the shelf and more.
• Your family recipe: how to keep it safely, by finding the closest tested recipe or freezing it.
• A canning log and jar labels to fill in.

Every process time, pressure, headspace and ingredient amount on a recipe page is printed straight from a recipe database that was copied twice from the sources, in two separate passes, and compared line by line by script. Where sources differ, the book follows the stricter rule and says so. A companion website lists all 247 usable recipes of the database, 240 of them for canning (70 more than in print), with a process-time finder and a dated page of changes.

Paperback, 8.5 × 11 inches, 402 pages, printed in black ink with drawings.

An independent guide. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the USDA, the National Center for Home Food Preservation, any university or extension service, or any jar, canner or pectin maker.