Pressure Canning on the Wood Cookstove

Several years ago, I was reading an article about canning in one of my homesteading/country/hobby farm magazines.  I was excited about the article because it was written by a fellow who is considered a recognized authority on wood heating and cooking.  All was going well until he wrote that pressure canning on a wood cookstove was impossible because you couldn't adequately control the pressure in the canner.  I was amused and a little angry, to say the least.  Apparently, he has never tried to maintain a constant pressure on an electric push-button stove--now that IS a challenge. 

I'm here to tell you that pressure canning on a woodburning cookstove is not only quite possible, it is pretty easy.  In fact, the Presto canner that my mother and grandmother bought at Minden Hardware in 1979 came with instructions on how to can on a "constant heat stove."  It is just about knowing where to put everything on the cooktop.  Furthermore, it only makes sense to me that the farm that produces much of my food should also be able to produce the energy needed to cook and preserve it. 

Below, I'll show you how I pressure can on the wood cookstove.  I want this blog to be helpful for people who want to know more about using a woodburning cookstove, but I don't claim to have all of the answers.  My hope is that by showing others what I do, they will have a better chance of finding success with their own stoves. 

This post assumes that the reader is familiar with the pressure canning process and focuses on how it is accomplished on a wood cookstove.  If you aren't familiar with canning, resources about it abound in both print and electronic forms.


I start by building a hot fire of small sticks and pieces of what I think of as "biscuit wood."

Small pieces of wood burning in the cookstove.

Once the fire was burning nicely, I closed the oven damper halfway.  All I need in this particular case is intense heat over the firebox.  The rest of the cooktop doesn't need to be all that hot, and I'm not going to be baking anything at the same time, although I have done that before, so the oven doesn't need to be evenly heated.  I'm going to be canning green beans (courtesy of my mother-in-law's beautiful garden) for this post, so the first hot item that I need is boiling water to pour over the beans once they are in the jars. 

Boiling water in the teakettle to the left.  Canner and lids on the
cooler part of the stove on the right.

I start with the various vessels arranged on the cooktop as shown above.  Directly over the firebox at the back (usually the place with the most heat) I have the teakettle with water coming to a boil for the beans.  In the pink saucepan in the front, my canning lids are warming up.  The base to the canner already has water in it, and it is warming over the coolest side of the cooktop, which of course, is still way too hot to touch.  The white coffee pot in the back has water in it and is there simply to absorb some BTUs since the outside temperature was in the 90s.

While I wait for the water to come to a boil, I fill the canning jars with the produce.

When the water in the teakettle has come to a boil and I'm ready to start putting it in the jars, I move the warm canner over to the top of the firebox so it can begin heating more.

Jars are then filled, lids are adjusted, canner is filled, and the lid is put into place.

Putting the lid on the pressure canner.

Now here comes the fun part.  This canner belonged to Ruth Nickle, my wife Nancy's grandma.  As near as I can tell from the instruction book that came with it, she purchased it sometime in the 1940s.  Ruth had only a wood/coal stove until the early 1950s, and I can tell from the bottom of the canner that she frequently removed a lid from over the fire and placed the canner right over the fire.  With the other pressure canners that I've used, I've always tried to keep their bottoms in pristine condition.  This one left pristine condition in the dust over three score years ago, so I'm going to speed things along and follow Ruth's method.

What is it about men always wanting to cook over flames? 

Above, the canner isn't centered over the eye of the firebox, just so that you can see the fire.  As soon as the picture was snapped, I moved the canner forward so that the eye was completely covered; otherwise, removing the lid is pointless because it spoils the draft and cold air rushes right by the canner to the fire.

As this is a dial guage canner, it has to exhaust for about ten minutes over high heat.  At the end of that time, I closed the petcock so that it could begin to build pressure.

In a few minutes, the canner had reached the correct amount of pressure for our elevation. 

Thus began the 20 minute countdown for pints of green beans, and thus began "the dance" of moving the canner to a location with less intense heat to just maintain the correct pressure level.  In the following sequence of pictures you can see the clock above the warming oven and notice the location of the canner as the twenty minute interval progressed. 

Canning on the wood cookstove.

The canner didn't have to move much because I only added a small piece of wood once. If I were going to can more after this batch, I would probably have kept the fire hotter in order to bring another teakettle of water to a boil, etc. Therefore, the canner would have had to be moved farther to the right to a cooler portion of the cooktop so that its pressure did not continue to rise.  If the fire slows, I move the canner closer to the fire so that it doesn't lose pressure.

I could tell that the fire was not going to get too hot or too cold very quickly, so I didn't stay right with the canner the whole time.  I went outside of the summer kitchen and weeded the gladiolus and sweet peas, but I didn't go far.  I wouldn't go far from a pressure canner on any kind of stove, for that matter.

By the end of the canning time, it had gotten quite dark in our summer kitchen.  Since it has no electricity, the lamp that you see in the last picture was necessary when the camera wasn't flashing.  You can also see that the fire had burned down to just coals.

Once the correct amount of processing time has elapsed, I move the canner completely off the stove so that its pressure can go down.  Once the pressure is gone, I remove the jars to a towel on the countertop for them to cool, and I begin waiting for that all-important and rewarding sound of canning: the ping of a canning lid sealing.

I got a little artsy with the camera while I was waiting.

Vintage cookstove in the lamplight.

All of this batch sealed.  Canning with a pressure canner on a wood cookstove is not only possible, it is easy.

Update: For more information about pressure canners and wood cookstoves, please see this post.
If you want to pressure can on a wood cookstove with two pressure canners simultaneously, check out my post about that.