One of the methods of preserving food and great way of storing food at home is water bath canning. This process involves putting food in water canner, where they are processed through boiling. It is a great way to preserve food because most bacteria are killed during boiling and foods with high acid level are good for this canning process. The important thing is to keep the temperature stable and at the level of 100C degrees. You don’t want to waste time and efforts on the whole canning process just because you didn’t follow the required temperature.
You can preserve a lot of different foods with water bath canning method such as fruits, jellies, relishes, pickles, jams, marmalades, acidified tomatoes and figs. The key factor is to pick fresh and ripe fruit for the best canning results. The quality of your preserved food depends on how fresh your fruits are. Fruits need to be precooked before placing them into cans or jars. Canning the cooked fruit is called the hot pack method. And canning uncooked fruits and vegetables is called cold pack method. Not all vegetables are suitable for direct water bath canning processing like tomatoes and figs. Sometimes you have to put commercial acid to these vegetables prior to processing them under the bath method.
You can easily can foods at home with water bath canning method. All the tools and equipments required for home water bath caning are cheap and simple. It is not hard to follow the process because the procedures are quite simple. Here are the simple basic steps for home water canning, if you really want to understand this method of preserving food.
The first step is to pick up only fresh fruits and vegetables without blemishes. Then you should dry, wash and sterilized all the tools and equipments. The next step is to prepare all the ingredients, cut them, peel them and precook if necessary. Place all the ingredients in jars and check that there are no air bubbles before sealing. Then you should boil the jars in water canner at the 100C degree temperature. After boiling, the canning jars need to cool down for about 24 hours. Now, you can test the seal before storing the canning jars in cool, dry and dark place. It is also good to label the jars with information about contents and dates, in order to detect the spoilage easily.
It is the safest way of preserving food at home, because all the guidelines are easy to follow and remember. The tools and equipments for water bath canning are mostly already stored in your kitchen and you don’t need to buy anything extra. That is what makes water bath canning one of the cheapest and convenient ways of preserving food at home.
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