Canning Pineapple on the Wood Cookstove

First, some news: Nancy and I finally made donuts again, so there are now pictures on that post from April.

Speaking of April, sometime around Easter of last year, one of the grocery stores near us sold pineapples for less than a dollar each with no limits on the number you could buy.  We bought five and I canned at least three of them.  That was the first time I had ever canned pineapple, and when we opened a jar to taste it, we were immediately hooked.  Home-canned pineapple has outstanding flavor!  My personal opinion is that the flavor is so good because it is in glass rather than metal or plastic.

At any rate, pineapple went on sale again at the same store right around Christmas, and I finally got around to canning the ones we bought just last Thursday.

As always when I'm water bath canning on a wood cookstove, I start by putting my canner full of water directly over the firebox.  Because I knew that preparing the pineapple for canning wouldn't take very long, I also put my sugar syrup on to come to a boil.  Pineapple is very sweet on its own, so I made a very light syrup.  Canning manuals say that a light syrup is one cup of sugar to three cups of water.  I made mine a little lighter than that even.

When I'm water bath canning, I always like to have the teakettle near the fire too, in case I've missed my guess and have to add water to the canner.  Using boiling water from the teakettle doesn't cool the canner down when you add it, which is important to keeping your processing time accurate.

The canning lids are in warm water on the cooler part of the stove away from the fire.

The Margin Gem with canner, syrup,
teakettle, and lids heating up.  The
oven door is open because, well, it's
January, you know.

With all of that on the stove, I went to the counter in the pantry to get the pineapple into the jars.  I cut them into pieces that would be larger than commercially canned tidbits but smaller than what are sold as pineapple chunks.  Fill the jars to within a half-inch of the top.

Both times I've canned pineapple, it worked out that you can roughly figure that one pineapple will yield two jars full.

After covering the fruit with the boiling syrup and affixing the lids and bands, all went into the canner.  This time, right after putting in one of the first jars, I heard that telltale "pop" of a jar that just broke.  I tried to lift the suspect jar up to see if that was what happened, but I couldn't tell for sure.  Once I had the rest of the jars in the canner and I lifted the lid to see if the water had reached the rolling boil that tells me when to start counting processing time, look what was floating.

As frustrating as that is, it happens sometimes!  

My most recent Ball Blue Book says that pineapple in pint jars needs to process for 15 minutes in the boiling water bath.

As you can see, the finished product is a beautiful yellow, and it adds a nice bit of color to the fruit room shelves.  Back in April, I pushed the pencil on this, and when pineapple is less than a dollar each and you include the cost of the sugar and the canning lids, you can save quite a bit of money on canned pineapple by putting it up yourself.  Besides that, the flavor is fantastic!

Book Review: "The Prepper's Cookbook" by Deborah D. Moore

It's been a quite a while since I've posted a book review on this blog, but I recently read a cookbook that has been in my collection for perhaps a couple of years: A Prepper's Cookbook: Twenty Years of Cooking in the Woods by Deborah D. Moore.  I don't remember where I found this little gem, but it is available from retailers online.  Originally, I purchased this because the advertisement I saw said that it contained information on how to cook on a woodburning cookstove.  It does indeed.

Situated in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Ms. Moore's home is remote, and she has to be ready to be snowed in for days at a time.  Thus, she keeps a very well-stocked pantry that is a combination of home-preserved and store-bought foods.  Ms. Moore has also cooked on her Enterprise King wood cookstove for more than twenty years, so she definitely qualifies as an expert on prepper cooking.  For me, though, the best thing about this cookbook is that it is a modern collection of recipes that have all been regularly prepared on a woodburning range.

Ms. Moore has included a very wide variety of recipes in her cookbook.  With Harvest Chowder on page 19 and Pecan Chicken on page 165, she's got literally everything from soup to nuts.  The recipes vary greatly in their difficulty levels too: some are a lot of work; others are simple, but all are made with ingredients that could easily be a part of any well-stocked pantry and freezer. 

Before each section of the cookbook, Ms. Moore has placed brief essays on many different subjects.  This is where she includes five pages of information about cooking on a woodburning cookstove.  In such a short space, Ms. Moore does an excellent job of giving the basics.  The only thing she says that I would disagree with is that she advises cleaning all of the ashes off the top of the oven box.  I'm sure that on her stove that gives her the best baking results.  However, in both the Qualified Range and the Margin Gem, I have found that leaving at least a half inch of ash on top of the oven box is beneficial.  See, in these models of cookstove, the oven basically heats from the top down, so to create the most even heating, it is important to keep the flue on the bottom of the oven clean, but a layer of insulation on the top is good.  Other than that, Ms. Moore and I are largely in agreement about these wondrous appliances.

On a side note, I read a negative review of this cookbook online from a reader who said she was disappointed because the information about cooking on a woodburning range was so short.  I wish I could get a hold of her and direct her to my blog!

My only negative criticisms are that there was some kind of a printing error on one of the recipes, making it obviously incomplete.  I also did not enjoy some of the essays at the beginning of the different sections of the cookbook.  These are generally small, though, so they aren't a big problem for me.

When I read this book in the late summer, one of the recipes that really caught my eye was the one for "Canned Cole Slaw."  I did not grow any cabbage in my garden this summer, but I had everything else the recipe called for, and the idea of having cole slaw in a jar was intriguing.  I tried it, following the recipe to the letter.

On Sunday, October 18th, I opened a pint of it to see what it tastes like.  Following Ms. Moore's advice, I rinsed the slaw twice.  This allowed much of the sugar, vinegar, and celery seed to come off.  I then mixed some sugar and a little pepper into some mayonnaise and folded that into the slaw.  The end product was good, if a bit krauty, but even Ms. Moore says in her narrative that the recipe is not meant to be a substitute for fresh cole slaw, rather a close second during the long winter months when fresh produce is harder to come by.  

I'm looking forward to trying other recipes from this cookbook in the future.

How to Can with Antique Zinc Canning Lids

My upfront disclaimer:

I am NOT recommending that anyone can with zinc lids.  The safest way to can foods at home is to use the flat metal dome lids that have the sealing compound attached to the outer rim.  I find that kind of lid to be extremely convenient and reliable, and the "ping" that you hear as they seal is one of the most rewarding sounds that I know.  They are definitely my favorite canning lids to use.

After I started writing my last post about canning with glass lids, I had to do my Covid-altered grocery run, and Nancy and I made a trip to our closest formerly-Amish stores.  I've talked to a few others too, and the current canning lid shortage is confirmed.  In fact, one of our friends told us that her canning lid supplier--a very fascinating Mennonite store named The Dutchman in Cantril, Iowa--called her and told her that they would not be able to get canning lids until September!  My thinking is, with the way 2020 has gone so far, what's to say they will even be able to get them then?

And so, while I'm not advocating canning with anything other than new dome lids, it seems like knowing how to can using other types of canning lids might be a prudent skill to have right now.  Plus, friends, zinc lids seem to be EVERYWHERE.  You frequently see them at antique stores, second-hand stores, and estate sales; and, if you're like us and living in a farmhouse that has been in the same family for generations, there is likely a stack of these in your basement.  If you can't find them in these places, never fear; Ebay has a ton of them too.

You will also need rubber sealing rings.  These don't seem to be as plentiful as the lids, but that's all right because they are still available new.  I see them in Amish stores, and Lehman Hardware currently carries them, too. You can buy them here: https://www.lehmans.com/product/standard-old-style-canning-jar-rubbers/  They also carry wide-mouth ones.  The rubber rings used with zinc lids come in two styles: with a tab and without a tab.  I see the ones with a tab far more often.

The kicker with zinc lids, though, is that you need to have older canning jars.  Whereas nowadays the sealing edge is the top lip of the jar, it used to be down on the shoulder.  The new style canning jars don't have a sufficiently wide shoulder to create a seal.

Two Kerr canning jars.  This is not the best example, but the one on the left is older and has
the wider shoulder.  The jar on the right is newer, and you can see that the shoulder
has been reduced.

Before using zinc lids, inspect them carefully.  Zinc is a pretty malleable metal, so these lids can be a bit susceptible to damage--especially after decades of use.  They should not bulge up in the center, and when you lay them right side up on a flat surface, the bottom edge of the lid should sit flat all the way around.  Also, look on the underside of the lid and make sure that the white piece of milk glass is present.  I don't know how it could fall out, but apparently it happens.

This is an example of a lid that is in good shape.  Notice how the edge sits
on the counter all the way around.

A view showing the milk glass on the inside of a zinc lid.

To prepare zinc lids for canning, both the lids and the rubber rings need to be thoroughly washed and then scalded.  They are to remain in hot water until used.  Some vintage canning books recommend the lids (not the rubber rings) actually be boiled for anywhere between ten and thirty minutes before use, and with this sort of lid, that would be fine, too.

A zinc lid and rubber ring sitting in scalding water on the Margin Gem.  It 
was so cool here a week ago today (Aug. 4) that I fired up the Margin Gem
and did the day's canning in the house.

Once your jars are packed with whatever you are canning, the first step is to stretch a rubber ring over the top of the jar and seat it down on the shoulder.  

Screw the zinc lid down as firmly as you are able; then unscrew the lid a quarter inch.  

Place the jar in the canner and process according to what is required for the food you are canning.

Immediately upon removal from the canner (you shouldn't let jars remain in a pressure canner to cool once the pressure has gone down), tighten the lid down as much as you can.  

Testing to see whether you have a good seal is not all that easy with zinc lids.  This is probably why they fell out of favor.  The top of the lid should have a slightly concave shape.  Once the jar is completely cool, you can also turn the jar upside down or on its side to check for leaks.  If it leaks, you definitely don't have a good seal and need to start the whole canning process over.

I canned a jar of food using zinc lids with my grandma Marian once.  When she had first started canning on her own, these were the lids of choice, so she knew what she was doing.  She reminisced about her own mother using them, saying that Grandma Gladys kept a small hammer in the kitchen and tapped around the edges of the lids once the jars were cool to make sure they had a good seal.  I can't think that this was at all helpful. 

To open the jar when you are ready to eat its contents, you can pull the tab to break the seal and then unscrew the lid, or you can just unscrew the lid.  I would advise listening for that telltale sign of a good, safe vacuum which is the sound of air rushing into the jar when you open it.

Again, I wouldn't advise canning with zinc lids if you don't have to.  But if you have to, it's best to know how to do it properly.

How to Can Using Glass Canning Lids and Top-Seal Rubber Rings

First of all, let me say right up front that I am NOT recommending that anyone can with glass lids.  The safest way to can foods at home is to use the flat metal dome lids that have the sealing compound attached to the outer rim.  I find that kind of lid to be extremely convenient and reliable, and the "ping" that you hear as they seal is one of the most rewarding sounds that I know.  They are definitely my favorite canning lids to use.

However, from what I read online and what I see in stores around here, we are currently in a nationwide shortage of that type of canning lid.  Our experiences so far in 2020 have taught us that supply lines can certainly become unreliable, so I think it is anybody's guess as to when canning lids will be readily available again.  And surely Nancy and I are not the only people in whose basement rest boxes of antique canning supplies which have been passed down from generation to generation simply because no one took the time to throw them out!

Now, part of this blog's purpose is the preservation of the nearly lost skill of cooking on a woodburning cookstove, and let's be honest: its tone is unmistakeable.  I am a huge proponent of using wood cookstoves.

This post is different, though.  This is not a ringing endorsement for the use of glass canning lids; it is merely an educational post so that information about another nearly lost skill is out there and available for others.  I'm afraid it could come in quite handy in the near future.

Enough with the disclaimers and onto the meat of the post:

The data that I'm going to share with you comes from my 1937 Ball Blue Book, my 1946 Kerr Canning Home Canning manual, and my 1953 Ball Blue Book.  While I wouldn't consider the canning time tables and the instructions for oven and open kettle canning pertinent anymore, the information on how to operate the canning hardware itself is still accurate for these vintage lids.

The equipment that you will need is unique to this type of jar closure.  Of course, the first necessity is the actual glass lid itself.  To be clear, there were two types of glass canning lid marketed in the first half of the twentieth century.  One type was for the bail-type jars and had a niche in the top in order to accommodate the upper wire bail which held it in place. These are larger in diameter and have a convex shape.

The lids that I'm talking about here are the same diameter as today's dome lids and fit over the opening of the jar just like they do.  They have a lip on the bottom side which fits down inside the jar.

A picture of a Presto brand glass canning lid.

These lids can only be used with metal bands that are specifically made for them.  I have two different styles of bands; one has the hour-glass shaped opening in the top, and the other looks like a standard canning jar ring.

The picture below is of a canning ring for glass lids on the left and a standard ring for dome lids on the right.  You can see that the ring for the glass lids is taller than what is used today.  That is because the glass lid and the rubber ring are much taller than the sealing edge that a dome lid has.

To use glass lids, you also have to have a "top-seal" rubber ring.  These are entirely different than the rubber rings that are used with the old zinc canning lids; they are smaller in diameter and never have a tab.

When you are going to use them for canning, the rings must be softened and hydrated.  This is accomplished by scalding them and leaving them in hot water until you are ready to put them on the jar.  You can also boil them for five minutes.

Once your jars are packed with the food to be canned, fit the rubber ring around the outside of the bottom of the glass lid.  

Place the lid and rubber ring on the top of the jar.

The next step is to screw the ring onto the jar firmly tight.  Then unscrew the ring one quarter inch.

Process the food in whatever method you would ordinarily use for what you are canning.  In these pictures, I was canning Grammer's Sweet Pickles ("Grammer" is our name for my paternal great-grandmother who was the first woman to live in our house).

At the end of the processing time, remove the jar from the canner and set it on a towel.

Immediately tighten the ring that quarter of an inch that you backed it off before processing.

After the jar is completely cooled, you can check whether the jar has sealed by lifting the jar by the glass lid.  If you can lift it by the lid only, the jar is sealed.

To open the jar, insert the tip of a paring knife between the rubber ring and the lip of the jar.

I've read that glass lids are still popular with some home canners for extremely high acid foods like pickles because the food doesn't touch any metal.

Obviously, this kind of canning lid can be reused indefinitely.  Vintage instructions indicate that new rubber rings should be used, but rings were very often used multiple times.  I have used both new (unused old stock) and used rings with equal success so far.  I don't know whether the rubber rings available for use with the new Tattler lids would work for this type of lid, but I suspect not, due to the fact that their width is not the same.

One can usually purchase new old stock rubber rings on Ebay.  Be sure that they are labeled "Top Seal."  Common brands are Top Flite, Ball, Cuppers, and Bulldog.

Again, this is not a recommendation to use this type of lid, but who knows what skills we may need to revive in the future?

Let me know in the comments what you think.  Have you used this type of lid before?  Should I write a post about using the old zinc lids too?

Be safe, everyone!

Oven Canning Dry Goods in a Wood Cookstove

I don't think I'm an alarmist, and I really wouldn't even consider myself a prepper, BUT...

I'll admit that when everything fell apart in practically the blink of an eye back in March, we were thankful that a) we had a well-stocked fruit room, pantry, and freezer, b) that for years now we have made it a practice to have more than enough toilet paper on hand at all times, c) we had kept a complete year's worth of garden seed (hadn't planned that intentionally--just a happy accident this time), and d) we had more than enough work, projects, puzzles, board games, and other activities to keep us so busy at home that there has been no time for boredom.

I don't have a crystal ball that lets me see into the future, and I think I'm like the vast majority of people who, if they are being truly honest, don't know which "experts" to believe regarding what the coming months of the continuing Covid Saga will look like.  And so, while most things are readily available again, we are slowly replenishing our stockpiles of a few things "just in case."

When we were at our local Sam's Club a few days ago, they had 25 lb. bags of long-grain white rice for under $10.00.  I don't know that we even eat five pounds of rice in a year, but we do like it, and in some kind of major catastrophe, it could be a welcome thing to have on hand.  As a regular habit, we keep rice in the freezer for a while and then transfer it to an antique two-quart canning jar that we use it out of.  However, we are in the season where our garden is steadily contributing to the contents of our already-full freezer, so we didn't want to sacrifice the real estate there to a large bag of rice.

I remembered reading an article in the May/June 2012 issue of Countryside & Small Stock Journal about oven canning dry goods.  I hunted up that article and reread it; then I did some further online research about oven canning flour, rice, beans, and such.  In a nutshell, the idea is that you heat the dry goods inside open canning jars for a length of time and at a temperature sufficient to kill any of the insect larvae that are inherently present in such foods.  The temperature needs to be low enough that you don't toast the food, of course.  Then, you put a hot canning lid on the hot jars of hot food, and the canning lids seal as a vacuum is created while everything cools.  This would allow us to store the rice on a shelf in the fruit room rather than in the precious space of the chest freezer, and it would be safe from both pests and environmental issues (aside from earthquakes).

However, another discovery that I made in my research was that there are no hard and fast rules for dry canning.  Each video I watched instructed me to use different times and temperatures ranging from a half-hour to an hour and a half at anywhere from 215-250ºF.

Initially, I thought I'd probably do this job in one of our modern stoves because I've never tried to maintain such a low oven temperature in a wood cookstove.  Being able to digitally set an exact temperature on our newer Frigidaire gas range was particularly enticing.  I wasn't excited about turning on one of the ovens in the air-conditioned house, though, and--truth be told--it seemed pretty hypocritical when I'm always saying that you can do anything on a wood cookstove that you can do with a modern gas or electric stove.

Then I remembered another truth that the modern appliance companies don't want to talk about much: oven temperatures in modern ovens are really not all that steady--especially in gas ovens.  I know this for a fact because when our gas oven is first turned on, it gives a reading of what the current oven temperature is.  Sometimes, I've accidentally turned it off and then had to turn it back on right away, and I can assure you that when you are choosing an oven temperature on a modern oven, you are choosing an average temperature.  Thus, I figured that oven canning in a wood cookstove was certainly possible and struck out on a new adventure with the Hayes-Custer out in the summer kitchen.

The first thing I did was wash a bunch of one-quart canning jars.  Then, to make sure that they were completely dry inside, I put them on a jelly roll pan in a slow oven for fifteen minutes.

After that, I removed them from the oven and filled them with the dry rice.  

It seems important to note here that one of the jars in this first batch had a regular mouth on it and the Atlas insignia on the bottom, though it didn't have the traditional "Atlas Strong Shoulder Mason" embossed on the side. We have used it for wet canning before, so I thought it would be fine for this application.  Not so.  The empty jar came out of the oven with fine lines that looked like crazing on the inside.  I ran my finger against the inside of the jar, and it came out with shiny glass powder on it. Obviously, the jar's useful life is over.  I know that there were lots of regular mouth glass jars which were used to package coffee, salad dressing, and other foodstuffs years ago, and many of them have been successfully used for home-canning against the advice of the jar companies and the USDA for a long time.  However, it appears that oven canning may be particularly hard on this type of jar, so I would advise strictly using canning jars.

Once the jars were full, everything went back into the oven.  I'm not going to share the time and temperature that I used (I'm not throwing my hat into that ring!), but I will tell you about regulating the oven temperature:

Longtime blog readers will no doubt be tired of me preaching the value of using little pieces of wood for building hot fires for high oven temperatures, but the same is true for maintaining the temperature of a slow oven.  The difference is that you just don't put so many pieces on the fire at once. Instead, let each piece burn down quite a bit before you add another.

Actually, there is another method for maintaining a slow oven, too: once you have a well-established bed of coals but before the oven is very hot, add a single large piece of wood which is dense and will burn slowly for a long time.  I used this method with a piece of black walnut on the second batch of jars, and it worked great, too.

As a side note, I think it would be rather difficult to do much other cooking while simultaneously oven canning just because you are keeping such a cool fire.  The fire might be perfect for stews and the like, though.

Place the lids and rings that you are going to use in a shallow baking pan. During the last fifteen minutes of the time that the jars of dry goods are in the oven, put the pan of lids and rings in the oven to heat up as well.  A nice feature of oven canning dry goods is that you can use canning lids that have already been used once.  I used half new lids and half used lids to see how it would go, and everything sealed just fine.  Tattler lids are not recommended for this application.

When the jars are ready to be sealed, take one jar out of the oven at a time.  Fix the lid and ring on the top and place the jar in a draft-free place to cool and seal.

In case you are curious and for my own record-keeping, 25 lbs. of rice fills 15 quart jars.

On that same day, I also canned our first small picking of green beans (on the right in the picture below), and then I tried something new and canned hamburger patties.  I've canned meat on a wood cookstove several times, but I've never canned hamburgers.  The idea came from Linda at the Youtube channel "First Coffee Then Life Sustainably Off Grid & Happy." We'll see what we think when we open them.

I will take the rings off the jars of beans and meat before putting
them on the shelf, but I can see no reason to remove the rings from the rice.

Everything I have read about oven canning dry goods tells me that the shelf life of foods stored in this way is anywhere from 20 - 30 years.  I know it won't take us that long to use this rice!  Another advantage is that as long as you've got plenty of jars (we do), have kept a few used canning lids and your firewood is free, storing rice in this manner costs only your time.

Canning Homemade Pork and Beans on the Wood Cookstove

Life has certainly been different the last two months, hasn't it?  I never would have imagined that the last day of school for the 2019-2020 school year would have been Monday, March 16th, and I would never have predicted that I would have as much time at home as I've had over these last several weeks. 

It seems like we've been in this COVID-19 situation for such a long time.  It was winter when everything seemed to come to a grinding halt, and now we have arrived at the unofficial start of summer.  We had a few warm days early on, but then our temperatures dropped back below normal, and our biggest snowfall of the season occurred on April 16th.  We haven't been overly warm since then, but we've got a beautiful garden this year, even though we lost a few green bean plants to frost, and our tomato plants were a bit damaged.

Our wood cookstove has been very busy during all of this time.  We turned off our electric water heater for the season on October 11 last year, which means that the Margin Gem cookstove has been fired daily ever since (except for the single whole day we spent in San Antonio where my brother was honored as the president of the National Corn Growers Association). Since October 11, every meal that we've made at home has been cooked on the wood cookstove except for one crockpot supper and one recent dinner that was cooked on the grill.  The only thing we've done on a modern stove is make popcorn (We've popped corn on the wood cookstove too, but that needs to be its own post.) We've been very thankful for the economy of the wood cookstove since the financial state of things has changed so dramatically.

We've also been very thankful for a well-stocked freezer and fruit room. The rows and rows of home-canned fruits, vegetables, meats, pickles, juices, jams, and jellies have been such a blessing during this time.  For many years, I've enjoyed canning lots of different foods, but we never seem to eat as much of it as we should.  That has changed dramatically. Since March 16th, we've eaten out (carry out only) a total of five times. Now, I know that for some of my readers that is more than they would normally eat out in that amount of time, but for us this is a dramatic change.  Thus, we are barreling through our canned goods right now, and it is a good thing for the inventory.

I have also done a fair amount of canning since being home during the quarantine.  At the time everything shut down, we still had three bushels of fall apples in our utility room.  They were my first priority.  Other than an apple crisp and Danish apple bars, I canned the rest of them.  While the water bath canner was on the stove, I also made and canned a couple batches of grape jelly from juice that my sister-in-law canned some time ago.

One of the supermarkets in Council Bluffs had a sale on pineapples for 98¢ each a couple weeks ago, so I bought five and canned three of them.  I had never canned pineapple before, but if I can find a bargain like that again, I will certainly do it in the future.  Nancy and I agree that the home-canned pineapple tastes much better than commercially canned pineapple, and when I pushed pencil to paper and figured the cost of the lids, sugar, and fruit, I discovered that we saved almost $5 over the store brand pineapple tidbits and nearly $8 over Dole brand.

Then with rhubarb coming available and in an effort to clean out our freezer, I've made and canned three batches of pineapple-rhubarb jam and one batch of strawberry-rhubarb spread.  Of course, all of this has been done on the Margin Gem wood cookstove.

The only time I have used the pressure canner during quarantine has been to can homemade pork and beans.  This was the second time I did this, and I am so happy with the results.  See, I love Van Camp's pork and beans (doctored up, of course), but the price of these has really gone up quite a bit since I first started doing my own grocery shopping twenty-some years ago.  Besides, I like being able to make foods myself when I'm able.

The method and recipe I use is based on the "Baked Beans" recipe in my Kerr Home Canning and Freezing Book from the 1970s, but I've changed it to suit my taste and updated it to meet today's standards for safe canning.

The first thing you do is thoroughly wash four cups of navy beans.  In a heavy enamel or stainless steel kettle, cover the beans with plenty of water and let them soak overnight.  You may have to add water to them in the morning; I certainly did.  Place the pot of beans directly over the firebox and bring to a boil.  Continue boiling for 45 minutes.  You can move the pot to a cooler spot on the stove if you need to as they don't have to boil fast.

  

As the beans cook, they will absorb more water.  Add boiling water from the teakettle as needed to keep plenty of moisture on the beans.

At the end of the 45 minutes, the beans will not be cooked thoroughly enough to be tender yet, but that is all right.  They will finish cooking during the canning process.

At the end of the 45 minutes, drain the beans in a colander, reserving the juice.

At this point in the process, build your fire very hot and put your canner on the stove to begin heating.  Also put your canning lids in hot water over a cooler part of the stove.

Return the beans to the heavy kettle that you were using in the initial cooking time, and then add two cups of the reserved bean liquid.

Now is the time to dress the beans up in whatever way you desire.  A little bacon or salt pork may be added at this point, and in the pictures below you can see that I added some of my Homemade Heinz Ketchup and some brown sugar and four teaspoons of salt.  I also put a little bacon in; I have used salt pork before too.  Some people like to add molasses, prepared mustard, or onions at this point.  Mix all together well.

Pack into canning jars leaving one inch of headspace and making sure each jar has a little more moisture than what you think is ideal.  This is very important.  The first time I canned these, I didn't keep them wet enough and packed them too full.  As a result, I had several jars that didn't seal because the beans expanded while they processed and the thick juice was pushed up between the lid and the sealing edge of the jar.

Pack jars into the canner, and begin the pressure canning process.  For more details on how to pressure can on a wood cookstove, please visit this post.  Baked beans need to process for 75 minutes at whatever pressure is appropriate for your altitude.

Those four initial cups of beans resulted in six and a half pints of canned beans.

It's been a couple of years, but I have pushed the pencil on this recipe, and canning your own baked beans does result in a small savings over purchasing them.  My mother and grandmothers always said that another advantage of home canning is that you always know exactly what is in each jar, too.  If you use canned pork and beans, consider giving these a try sometime.

Cooking Rhubarb/Pineapple Jam on the Wood Cookstove

I like to say that Nancy's grandmother was the Rhubarb Queen.  In her repertoire of spring recipes, some of her most famous foods featured rhubarb.  I've already blogged her Rhubarb Cobbler, and today I want to share her recipe for Rhubarb/Pineapple Jam.  By far and away, this is Nancy's favorite spread for toast, etc., and it is very good. 

Ingredients:

4 cups rhubarb, cut into 1/4" pieces

4 cups sugar

1 can (20 oz.) crushed pineapple

1 package (3 oz.) strawberry gelatin

1 tsp. powdered fruit pectin

1. If you are using fresh rhubarb, combine the rhubarb and the sugar and let set overnight.  The sugar will draw the moisture out of the rhubarb and make it cook faster.  If you are using frozen rhubarb, just be sure to thaw it and and save the juice and this step is unnecessary.

2. Starting directly over the firebox of the wood cookstove, cook the rhubarb with the sugar.  This will come to a boil quickly because there really isn't that much volume to heat.  Once it comes to a boil, you may need to move it away from the fire a little.  Boil the rhubarb and sugar together for 12 minutes.

Rhubarb and sugar cooking together.

3. Add the can of crushed pineapple.

Rhubarb, sugar, and pineapple.

4. Add the gelatin and the teaspoon of pectin. 

All of the ingredients boiling together.

5. Bring the entire mixture back to a boil and boil for one minute.  Remove from the fire.

6. Now you have a few options.  You can pour the hot jam into sterilized jars, and it will keep in the refrigerator for up to a year.  This is what Nancy's grandma did, and we still have the pickle barrel-shaped jars that she used.  We do this sometimes, but I have also put this in jelly jars and water bathed it for ten minutes.

Unfortunately, the sunshine clearly shows that
the rhubarb and pineapple are not very evenly
distributed in this jar of jam.

This jam is excellent on anything, but I think it is particularly good on English muffins.  In the picture below, it is spread on some of our homemade bread.

Hope you are enjoying a good rhubarb harvest this spring!

It Can Be Done: Using Two Pressure Canners Simultaneously on a Wood Cookstove

I had wondered.

I had plotted and planned.

I had reasoned and pondered.

But I did not know whether it would work.

I'm here now to tell you that it can be done.  You can can  (see what I did there?) in two different pressure canners at the same time on a wood cookstove!

You might be wondering why this is a big deal, especially since one could easily can in two different pressure canners on most modern ranges and since it is not difficult to pressure can with a single canner on a wood cookstove.  (See my initial post about that here.)  To understand the significance of my discovery, you have to remember that to adjust the heat when you are cooking on a woodburning range, you move your cooking vessel closer to or away from the fire.  It is not as simple as turning a pair of dials.  Furthermore, as soon as a pressure canner has reached the necessary pressure, you must reduce the heat in order to maintain the adequate pressure without having it continue to climb.  Thus, I wasn't sure that it would be possible to move two very large canners across the top of the stove in order to accurately maintain the pressure in both of them.  But it worked!  Let me tell you how it went.

First, you need to know that one of the canners that I was using is a weighted gauge canner, and the other has a dial gauge.  This is very important.  I'm not going to go into all the details about the difference between the two types of canners here because you can find that information in many other places on the Internet.  However, it is important to know that a weighted gauge canner releases any extra pressure from the inside of the canner, while a dial gauge canner does not.

To be sure that you are maintaining adequate pressure in our weighted gauge canner, the weight must jiggle at least three to four times per minute.  This is much easier to manage than keeping our dial gauge canner at 11 pounds of pressure, which is the amount that I use because of our elevation.  Therefore, I started the weighted gauge canner first.

Always at the beginning of the pressure canning process, I have a raging fire going.  This is particularly easy to do when you are using summer fuel.  To retain as much of the nutrient value of the food being canned as well as the physical quality of the food, you want to keep the total time that the food is in the canner to a minimum.  Thus, you want the raging fire so that the canner reaches the desired pressure as quickly as possible.

Now, a big teakettle is an integral part of the canning process because you need boiling water to pour over the food inside the jars.  For that reason, when your fire is first started, the teakettle is perched directly over the firebox.  A small saucepan with your canning lids covered by hot water is placed far away from the firebox so that they stay hot but do not boil.  I put the kettle portion of the canner with the necessary water inside it on the middle part of the cooktop to heat the water.  This way, you reduce the risk of jars breaking if a hot jar of food and boiling water makes contact with cold water in the bottom of the canner.

Once the weighted gauge canner was loaded, I put the lid on it, and it was moved so that it sat directly over the firebox to begin building pressure.  More water was put into the teakettle, and it was also put over the firebox so that it could come back to a boil in order to fill the jars in the second canner (Sorry!  I forgot to get a picture of these first steps.)  The second canner was also put on the middle of the stovetop so that it could begin getting hot.

By the time the weighted gauge canner had reached the correct pressure and the weight had begun to jiggle, the dial gauge canner was loaded, so I switched the locations of the two canners so that the dial gauge was now directly over the fire and the weighted gauge was in the middle of the cooktop and began counting the canning time for the weighted gauge canner.  I snapped a photo of that, so it will be easier for you to understand what I'm talking about now.



Two pressure canners on the wood cookstove.
You can see the weighted gauge canner on the
right.  It had reached pressure before this photo
was snapped.  On the left is the dial gauge canner.
It has already exhausted; if you zoom in on the
picture, you can see that it is at about seven pounds
of pressure at this point.  The small saucepan in
front of the canners is filled with the beans that
were too many to cram into the jars but not enough
for an additional jar.  I cooked them so that they
would just have to be warmed up for Sunday dinner.
On the back right side is a 16-quart kettle filled with
tomatoes and onions cooking down for homemade
ketchup.

Once the dial gauge canner reached the desired pressure, "the dance" began.  I call it a dance because you have to move the canner around until you find that sweet spot that maintains the correct pressure.  You can see that I moved the weighted gauge canner back over the firebox, but I offset it quite a ways so that it wasn't receiving the full heat of the fire.  The dial gauge canner took a trip to the far right.

At this point in the process on this particular evening, I quit adding fuel to the fire because I knew I was not going to can anything more.  So, in the next two pictures, you will see the dial gauge canner slowly migrating closer to the firebox in order to maintain its pressure.  The weighted gauge canner was quite happy to stay right where it was for the duration of the canning time.  Its weight jiggled more than three to four times a minute, but that is all right.  It didn't jiggle constantly, and because of the way that the weighted gauge canner works, it was maintaining the correct pressure on its own.

The weighted gauge canner completed its canning time first and was removed from the stove to cool on top of our modern gas stove just to the right of the wood cookstove.  The dial gauge canner then remained on the wood cookstove for a little longer to reach its specified time.

I was extremely pleased at how easily this worked, and I'm looking forward to doing it again sometime.  It certainly increases the efficiency of the canning process when one fire can do so much!

Canning Pickled Beats on the Wood Cookstove

Sometimes it is just hard for me to spend large amounts of electricity or propane on cooking jobs that I know can be put off until I can do them on the wood cookstove.  I'm such a skinflint!

Pickling beets is one of those jobs that I have put off this year.  Besides the pots of hot water that are inherently a part of the canning process, some canning recipes have extended pre-cooking times that also take a fair amount of energy.  Therefore, they are perfect for the wood cookstove, so I save them for as late in the season as possible.

Pickled beets are a food that make me think of my mom's side of the family.  I remember both sides of her father's family making these delectable treats, and it is one of those foods that I associate with dinners at my grandma's house when I was very young.  That is not to say that I enjoyed them when I was very young, however.  For me, pickled beets--and beets in general--are an acquired taste, and even now, my relationship with them is kind of strange.  At the beginning of this last summer, for example, I was really longing for fresh beets to cook, but couldn't find any, and those in our garden were growing extremely slowly this year.  I found a jar of pickled beets on a shelf in the fruit room and savored them, stretching them out over several meals.  Now that autumn is here, I have no desire to eat beets, but I know that this will change again when I least expect it.

At any rate, pickled beets are kind of fun to make because of their vivid color, and they are really pretty easy as pickles go.  This recipe for pickled beets is the one that my mom's side of the family has used for many years, and so I have no idea where it originated.  It may not be as exciting as what some people have in mind when they think of pickled beets (it has no onion or visible spices in the final product, for example), but it provides exactly the flavor that I want when I bite into a dark red slice of deliciousness.

This was the first year in several that I have managed to grow a beet crop to maturity.  The multitudinous colony of rabbits here have an affinity for beet greens, and they and I have been having an annual battle about who owns the beets that I plant.  I won this year, but not without a fight.  Unfortunately, the beets were of widely varying sizes.  I'm a gardener, but not a good one, so I have no idea why this was.  The one thing I know is that it was not due to them needing to be thinned.  I decided to can the small beets whole, and slice and pickle the larger ones. 

The first step for both processes is the same: wash the beets and boil them for about fifteen minutes.  This allows them to be peeled easily.

The washed beets getting ready to boil directly
over the fire.

Once the time is up, fish the beets out of the boiling water with a slotted spoon and plunge them into a basin of cold water so that they will be cool enough to handle.  Slice the tops off the beets as well as the roots, then slip the skins off.

Oh, side note: I carried the cooking water out to the driveway and dumped it there.  I didn't put it down any of our sinks because I didn't want it to stain anything.  When I dumped it out, it looked like I had just committed some kind of heinous murder because it was a bright blood-red.

The peeled, parboiled beets.  Don't they kind of look like gems?

At this point, we took the large beets out and cut them horizontally in slices about a quarter-inch thick.  The small beets were put into pint jars to be pressure canned.

Now you must make a spice bag.  We use a 4" square cut out of one of my old undershirts.  Onto this square of cloth, place 1 tsp. allspice, 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1 tsp. cloves.  Pull up the edges of the cloth, give them a little twist, and tie them with some cotton cooking twine.

Place this spice bag into a clean kettle and add 2 cups white vinegar, 2 cups water, and 2 cups sugar.  Bring all of this to a boil and add the beet slices.  Bring everything back to a boil; then move the kettle away from the fire so that it can simmer for 15 minutes.

A busy cookstove!  The beets are simmering in the middle.

Once the beets have simmered for fifteen minutes, they need to be packed into jars for canning.  I can remember my mom and other women in the family using the open-kettle method for canning pickles.  I'm not scared of it, but I don't like having to mess with sterilizing jars and then handling them hot, and then I've never had very good luck with them sealing, so I opt to water bath these.  I process them for ten minutes in a boiling water bath, but you do the research and find out what you think is safe.

I use the green sweet corn kettle that you see over the back of the firebox in the picture above for small batches of water bath canning.  I've put a rack in the bottom of it to keep the jars from resting directly on the bottom of the kettle because that can cause jars to break.  It works really well. 

Once the jars come out of the canner, rest them on a towel that you don't care about because if any beet juice escapes, it will cause a fantastic stain.  Then wait for that ever-rewarding pinging sound of jars sealing.

I wish that there was a way to capture the beautiful color of pickled beets in a photograph.  Wait.  Let me rephrase that.  I wish that I knew how to capture the beautiful color of pickled beets in a photograph.  I did the best I could with the photo above.

During every family canning or freezing event, Meme would always say, "Oh, these will taste so good when the snow flies," and she was always right.  These are definitely summer in a jar.