The Old Way Gardeners Make a Harvest Last All Winter

If you're like most gardeners, you'll have vegetables and fruit that don't keep quite as long as you'd like, or perhaps you've had a bumper harvest and don't want to waste any of it, especially as it's taken months to grow. Well, today I'm going to share with you the one method to store as much of this bounty as possible. No freezer space required, no complicated recipes, and it will mean you can store almost anything from your garden for a year or more. I'll be sharing two effortlessly adaptable variations, and making the case for why this piece of kit might just be the best investment you could make. But first, let's get picking. Of course, anything you preserve is only going to be as good as what you pick, so timing your harvests is of the essence. For beans, you want to pick them while they're young, firm and snappy. There we go. And before they turn stringy, all the beans inside start to swell too much. Carrots are best picked while they're still fairly young and tender, before they go all woody at the core. And whatever you're picking, always go for produce that's nice and clean and blemish free. We don't want anything split, bruised or in any way past its best. Preserving won't improve on what we harvest, so we need to make sure only the best stuff makes the grade. Right, we've got a basket nicely filled with goodies. Let's get this lot into the kitchen. So today we're going to can this little lot, or more specifically, pressure can it. Now this one method can be used to preserve just about anything, including vegetables with a low acid content, which is just about anything coming off the vegetable garden. Pressure canning is it exactly as it sounds, canning or bottling produce under pressure. And it's a fantastic alternative to the other form of canning, water bath canning. Now water bath canning only ever raises food to boiling point, and that's fine for foods with a high acid content like fruits. But for produce with lower acid content like vegetables, that could still leave the produce harbouring spores that cause botulism, a rare but very serious form of food poisoning. Pressure canning traps steam to create a build-up of pressure, which means the temperature, the boiling point, can go way up to 240 Fahrenheit or 116 Celsius or more. Now that is more than enough to kill any lurking spores, and it's the only safe way to properly process these non-acidic vegetables. Now you can water bath can vegetables by pickling them, but you don't want everything sharp and tart all the time. This means you can just deal with them as they are. So let's get canning, and as well as our pressure canner, we will need some canning jars with two-piece lids that have been thoroughly washed and left to air dry, a rack to pop them onto, a jar lifter, a ladle, a wide-mouthed funnel, and something non-metallic like this rubber spatula to release any air bubbles. Do check your canner's user manual for its exact capacity and settings because, well, they do vary and yours might be different from mine. And good news, modern canners do not explode. They've got lots of inbuilt safety features, so if it's your first time and you are worried about the top blasting off and exploding, it won't. Before filling our canning jars, we need to bring them up to temperature. At the moment they're cold, and if we put boiling water in there, they're just going to crack, so we need to try and equalize that temperature. Now there are two ways of doing this. Pop your cans into the canner on a rack, and then fill the bottom with about 4 inches or 10 centimetres of cold water, and then bring it up to a gentle simmer, and then keep them rolling there until you're ready to use them. Far simpler, in my opinion, is to load them up into a baking sheet like this, and then just pop them into the oven. And I'm going to set that to around 200 Fahrenheit or just under 100 Celsius. Leave them in there until the glass is completely warmed through, and then you're good to go. So first up, the very simplest thing you can do with a pressure canner, which is preserving your vegetables just as they are, with nothing more than a little bit of water and perhaps a pinch of salt, and that's it. Now this works for all low-acid vegetables that you might be harvesting from your garden, whether that's beans or carrots, peas, sweet corn, beets, beetroot, you name it. So the first job is just to get our produce nice and clean, get all that mud off, and I find a strong brittle brush like this helps me to get into any nooks and crannies and just get every last bit off. Isn't that a lovely carrot? To prepare the carrots, I'm simply just slicing them into rounds. The beans I've got here will be just kind of cut into about one inch or three centimetre long pieces, that's all. And once I've done all that, I'll then have a choice of how to pressure can this produce. I can either raw pack it, which just means simply filling the jars with the raw produce, or I can hot pack it, which means boiling the produce first before then canning it, and the advantage of that is that it better preserves the colour. I'm a bit lazy so I'm just gonna mostly raw pack today. Let's start filling the jars. Now the jars are very hot so do be careful. I'm just gonna pop my produce in and because it's cut up fairly small, oops there we go, it's nice and warm, I'm just gonna fill it in loosely like that, poke it down a bit but don't ram it down. We want to have it so the produce comes up to about no more than an inch or a couple of centimetres from the very top of the jar like that. And now the next step is where we can add some salt, and the reason for adding some salt is purely for flavour. Now you can get special canning or pickling salt which has zero kind of preserving agents or anti-caking agents, things like that. It's nice and clean, 100% salt. Kosher salt would do, or this stuff here, Atlantic sea salt, just anything without any anti-caking agent in. But if you can't find that, normal salt is fine, it just might be a little bit cloudy. And it's half a teaspoon for a pint-sized or 500 milliliter jar like this, and a full teaspoon for a quart jar or litre jar. And then we're just going to cover over the produce here with boiling water, and again so we're maintaining that kind of inch or couple of centimetres of headroom at the top. Now there might be a few bubbles in the side there, bubbles aren't good news, so I'm just going to drop our spatula in here to release them, and if necessary I can top up again with the water. And then all I'm doing is wiping the rim of the jar clean like that, and then I'm going to fish out a lid from here, they've just been soaking in very warm water. Pop that on, and then the screw band is what holds it in place, so pop that on like that. Let's get my cloth there to hold it, and we want it so it's just finger tight like that, don't over force it because some air will still escape from here, so just finger tight is fine, and that is ready to go into our canner. And now it's time to load them into the canner. Now I've popped our rack in the bottom, and in the bottom of the canner here is about three inches or seven, eight centimetres of now boiling water. So we've got boiling water in the jars, and we've got boiling water in here so there's no temperature gradient, and the idea of sitting them on the rack is so that they are off the bottom because it's going to get very hot on the bottom and that could damage the jars. So I'm popping them on, they're not quite touching so they're not going to rattle too much. Space them around to get them nice and balanced on the rack, and now it's on with our lid. Now the next step is easy to rush but we really mustn't. What we're waiting for this to do now is fill up with steam and then blast the steam out of the vent here, and once we get a steady flow coming out of here, which I'll show you shortly, we're going to leave it 10 minutes before we put on our weight or pressure limiting valve. That's when it goes on. Great, so you can see we've got a nice steady stream of steam coming out here. We can hear it beautifully humming away there. We just need to start a stopwatch for 10 minutes and that will make sure that all of the air is completely cleared out of here. While that's doing its thing, let's address the elephant in the room, the cost of these things. They're not exactly pocket change. A decent canner can cost anywhere from about 100 to 300 dollars, which is say 70 to 200 pounds depending on all the features it's got. This was a relatively cheap one and well it's doing its job just fine. Now consider the cost of fresh organic beans in a litre jar. They might cost anywhere between sort of about six dollars or five pounds, something like that, and you can see that just by canning 20 or 30 jars of produce over the course of the season, you've already paid for your canner. And that's before you've taken into the account that it's all homegrown and totally delicious. And of course this canner will last for season after season, year after year, repairing itself many times over. But the bit I especially love about any type of canning is that once it's done, there's no more power needed. No more worrying about freezer space or potentially being interrupted by a power cut that spoils months of hard work. Just stuff on your shelf at room temperature in a dark cupboard to pick and enjoy as and when you need it. For anyone serious about growing their own, I honestly think this is one of the very best investments you could make. Just fabulous. And there's our alarm, we're ready to put on our little weight here. The pressure inside here is now going to start building, exciting times. We want it to build to about 10 pounds for a weighted gauge or 11 pounds for a dial gauge like this here. So keep a beady eye on it. Now how long you keep it at that pressure for will vary according to what you're canning. For most vegetables it's between about 20 to 30 minutes. But it does vary according to the vegetable and the size of the jar as well. So I'll pop a table of some common vegetables and sizes of jars here so you can get an idea. Once it's had its allotted time, just turn the heat off and then this is the important bit. Leave it alone. Don't try and force cool it, anything like that. Just be patient. We want the dial to drop right back down to zero so there's no pressure and only then will we take the lid off. My second variation uses the same principles but takes a slightly different tack to create something indispensable for all kinds of meals. A homemade vegetable stock. And I love this because it uses all sorts of bits and pieces. So here for example I've got the ends of onions and the cut off leaves, old bits of celery bottoms, carrot leaves and tops, herb stalks and then you can add whatever's growing well in the garden that you've got an excess of to make a lovely rich vegetable stock. It's super efficient like that. For my stock I'm just going to go for a classic combination of celery, onions, carrots and then a good old bunch of herbs here. I'm going to chop everything up quite roughly, it doesn't really matter. Anything goes here because it's all going to get strained out later on. And then pop your roughly chopped veggies into your big stock pan like this and then cover generously with water. This can now go onto the stove top, bring it up to a rolling boil and then once it's there turn it down to a gentle simmer and let it continue like that for at least an hour so all that lovely flavour can seep out from the vegetables into the water to create your stock. Once the time is up it's time to strain it all off through a cheesecloth, muslin or strainer and then it's time to fill your warmed up jars. Doing exactly the same as before, leaving about an inch or two centimetres of headspace at the top, using your spatula to remove any air bubbles and then wiping the rims clean before adding on your lids and on with your screw tops. And this is what's called a hot pack because the food that's going into the jar is, well, hot. You can see how it's got its name there. And just like before we'll lower this into our canner, we'll put the lid on, we'll vent it for at least 10 minutes, then we'll bring it up to pressure and maintain it at that pressure. And stock needs a little bit longer than most plain vegetables. About 30 minutes for a pint sized or half litre jar or about 35 minutes or so for a quart or litre jar. And that's genuinely it, come the depths of winter you'll have your own homemade vegetable stock to join all those vegetables, perfect for turning into soups, stews or risottos. Oh, just beautiful. To safely remove our canned jars from the canner we need to wait until the pressure has completely reached zero and then sit back for another 10 minutes and only then is it safe to deal with. So open up the lid, you can hear it's no longer hissing or anything like that, then open the lid away from you like that just so the escaping steam doesn't go straight into your face. Now we can use our lifter jar things to grab the canner, the cans and pop them onto a waiting towel here. They look beautiful don't they? Now all that's left to do is to let these completely cool down. Now that can take anywhere from sort of 12 to 24 hours and during that time they'll create a proper seal. After that time just remove the screw band and check the seal on top. It shouldn't have any give, if it pops up and down it's not correctly sealed. You can reprocess it or just pop it in the fridge and use it up in the next few days or so. All that's left to do then is to give each of these a label of what it is and the date and then pop them into a cool dark cupboard where they will keep for a year or even more. While these cool I've got this little lot here to go in next and that is pressure canning demystified. A fantastic way to make sure that nothing you've grown ever goes to waste. Now if you'd like to know more about water bath canning which is a fantastic way to deal with all those pickles and acidic fruits then check these videos out next. Or if you want to know more about how to grow food that you can then can, why not download the completely free abridged version of my book over here and I will catch you next time.