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I used to can with my mom when I was a kid, I need to get into that.

This is much easier and less intimidating with a couple of friends or family members to help! In my family everyone had a job (I was the official lid cleaner/sealer) and stuck to that job for the whole process. It made for a fun assembly line and really took the stress out of the process. You could do your job but watch and learn the other stuff from everyone else. I really miss doing this every year!

I've avoided it because I'm afraid of either having something blow up in my kitchen in the process, or giving myself food poisoning because I did something wrong along the way...

canning was a given with both of my grandmothers, but i seem to recall being told to stay out of the way as a kid. i have an aunt who makes specialty relishes and cans them, but she's probably the only family member who still cans. i want to can, but i don't have a pressure cooker, and i shy away from investing in all the equipment out of fear that later it will just take up room in my small apartment kitchen. maybe when i stop moving and have a full sized kitchen? i also have CDC's fears: exploding canners and mold in my jars. i don't think i trust myself to do it right without a grandmother standing over my shoulder.

When I was a kid in 4-H is was the activity my mom liked helping me with the most (she's a little skiddish around livestock). We would make jams and apple sauce every year with my friend and his mom for the big fair. The moms still can every fall, i need to make sure they invite me this year!

I canned for the first time this year -- tomatoes, jam, pickles, even peach pie filling. It's a lot of work, but the payoff is worth it.

I just started canning this summer. My bread-n-butter pickles should be ready to open now as a matter of fact.

I have not made preserves as I never have that much fruit available to can. I find the jams & jellies offered at the farmer's market to be just fine.

I love to can. I can't really find locally grown organic fruit in the fall, so canning is the best way to get it year-round. I just finished 55 pint jars of peaches.

Tip number one: Pay really close attention to the part of the recipe where it says how many pounds of fruit fills so many jars. I got the numbers for pints and quarts mixed up and now have enough peaches to last me through the end of grad school.

Tip number 2: as long as you know the jars sealed, the chances of getting food poisoning from home-canned food is really low. Anything that doesn't seal can be recanned or eaten within two weeks.

#3: Have lots of pots to boil water. In addition to the canner, you need to dunk lids and jars and screw caps in hot water, prepare the food, and have hot syrup or water to pack the jars.

I recommend starting with peaches because they're so easy to prep. You just dunk them in boiling water for 30 sec and the skins peal right off. Slice, toss the pits (Get free-stone peaches!) and you're good to go. Then you can work up to applesauce or jam, which require a little more work. And if you really like canning (and have the space to store the jars) you can move up to low-acid food (most veggies and meats) and invest in a pressure cooker.

Um...by fall I meant winter. My bad!

I've made peach jam in the past. Strawberry and plum jams too. There's something very satisfying in seeing all those lovely jars on the shelf when you're done. And the taste is to die for. Now that we're no longer living in SoCal, finding great fruit at a good price is a little difficult and makes me long for those past jars, lol.

Growing up, it was pretty much a given that most of my August would be spent in a boiling hot kitchen, peeling the skins off tomatoes or peaches that had been blanched and were pretty much still scaldingly hot. Then packing them in jars, etc. etc. Or cutting corn off cobs, frenching green beans. June was spent hulling strawberries and standing over a pot on the stove, skimming scum off jam. At that time, pretty much any vegetable or fruit we ate in the winter had been canned or somehow preserved in the summer.

It was a miserable, hot way to spend a childhood. No more canning for me again, ever. Not when I now know that cans of tomatoes can be had for less than a buck each. Life is too freaking short to torture myself, thanks.

There is absolutely nothing to water bath canning. Make sure that you follow the recipe exactly; make sure everything is very clean and sterile; follow the timing exactly; make sure that the jar lids are wiped clean before they are sealed and that's about it. It's great fun!

My husband's grandfather canned the most delicious pickles, and I don't even LIKE pickles. Even the filled jars were gorgeous ... worthy of an art show. I don't think mine have ever tasted as good as his. But for pure brilliant beauty, nothing beats homemade wild plum jelly: it's the color of love. The trick of course, is to get someone else to pick and pull the fruits and vegetables.

I love to can... pressure canner and water bath. I also dehydrate things.

yes, Lindsey - you don't need a pressure cooker
(I did years of water bath canning as a kid with my mom)

you can find the jars and large pot with wire rack used, since it's not done by as many people anymore

the lids pop outward if the seal is no good
get the Ball Blue Book, and follow the easy directions!

Lindsay, to add to guido's comment, you don't even need to buy a canner if you're putting up smaller (pint or half-pint) jars and have a 12-16 qt. stockpot with a cover. Just put a small rack or folded tea towel in the bottom of the pot and you're good to go.

When I'm making marmalades, I put them in 8-oz jars and use my 12 qt stockpot. For a rack, I bought the small rack that goes in the bottom of a Weber bbq because it was sturdier than the round cooling racks I could find. Before that, I used a flour sack dishtowel to keep the jars off the bottom.

A few points about canning I picked up this summer at a canning class in Oregon:

For acid foods (nearly all fruits and anything pickled), there's zero risk of botulism--the bacteria doesn't survive above a certain pH level), which is why simple water-bath canning is sufficient.

For low-acid foods (vegetables and meat), botulism is a risk ("activated" if oxygen remains inside the jar; hence the pressure cooking method to remove that oxygen) so a pressure cooker is absolutely necessary. One reason you don't see home canned vegetables for sale at farmers markets, but you do see lots of james/jellies, is the importance of safe pressure cooking for the former.

I don't have the equipment to can, so I don't do it myself, but my mother cans a lot of fruits and tomatoes (a fruit) grown by my father. They are from the generation when you did everything possible to avoid throwing out wonderful fresh food. It's a shame we've lost that in today's culture, but I'm guilty of convenience: I left my green beans in Oregon (too heavy to carry in my luggage I reasoned).

I found an easy way to use a pot full of boiling water to process pickles. I have about a million extra jar rings laying around my kitchen, so I put a bunch in the bottom of the pot and they act as a rack. Multi-tasking!

Also, the best way to seal up jam (in my opinion) is to simply turn the hot jar upside down. When it's cooled, you turn it back over and your jar is sealed. My father and I have always used this method and our jam lasts for years.

I've canned homemade salsa in the past and it was awesome. I didn't use a recipe - just tasted along the way and made sure all the equipment was clean and sterile. It was such a money saver and we ate a ton of yummy salsa on almost everything for a good year. They make good gifts as well.

Did lots of canning (more out of necessity, than out of pure love) in the past, but in my family we traditionally manage to turn necessity into fun.
Couldn't resist the tempting look of the Italian plums, so made some jam last weekend.

According to Barefoot Contessa at Home, with the recipe concerning orange marmalade, you can run your jars on a cycle in your dishwasher on the top rack with no soap and it will do the canning for you - no tongs or boiling water necessary!!!


Can anyone vouch for how well this works?

My mom used to make "strawberry fig preserves" by using strawberry flavored jello with figs. The figs had a strawberry-ish texture, but I can't remember why not just have the fig taste. Methinx she did some with and some without.

And in the south, there was just no telling what all kinds of canned things neighbors would give you, and which you had to at least pretend to try and then pretend to like, and often actually like.

My mom (and her parents) always went into a frenzy of canning, pickling, jam-making, and preserving at this time of year. The results were GREAT but the process was major. I've always been scared off it--all that boiling water and hot wax and tongs and nowhere to put all the mason jars! I'd love to see/hear about small-scale canning.

As for the tomato comment, that was the one thing we never canned. My mom claimed it was a botulism hazard, which of course it is, but so are other things. Are tomatoes that much trickier to handle safely?

Me--I miss the home-canned pears!