preservation

[dragonlady7]

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grrlcookery https://tmblr.co/mj8paJCKJ4bu8eOJ2DbdsBw reblogged a post https://grrlcookery.tumblr.com/post/660136776198995968/tomatoes and added:

Preservation question: how much space does canning take? By which I mean tools and empty jars etc, and I’m assuming the household is functionally lile ten ppl since you tegularly feed staff?

If you have the spoons to andwer, of course; you sound knee-deep in harvest season

Ah it’s not that it’s harvest season, it’s a lack of staff and a long-ago-planned family vacation, but I can answer this pretty quickly.

Empty jars take up as much room as full ones, and you can’t use just any jars; even specialty canning jars sometimes burst in the water bath, and reused spaghetti sauce jars etc. absolutely don’t hold up– likewise, you need a new lid every time, though you can reuse the ring part of the lid– the seal is a one-time-use thing. Other equipment you need is a large pot with a metal rack to hold the jars in the water bath, and a set of lifting tongs to remove jars from boiling water, and you really want a canning funnel, which is just a wide funnel that fits exactly into narrow-mouth jars (and usually is designed to sit well in widemouth ones too). You’d also want some regular tongs about, to put things into and take them out of boiling water baths. And I tend to keep a few kitchen towels around to put things on.

Canning takes a lot of energy. I got the big pot boiling by first using the electric kettle to boil batches of water for it, since we’re on solar here and so the electricity is cheaper and more green. Our stove runs on propane we have to have trucked-in, and canning can be a severe drain on that.

The other preservation method is freezing, however, and that– well you have to boil things down first for that too, but then the expenditure of electricity is small but ongoing, and it’s taking up finite space in a freezer for ages.

(Many, many vegetables are easily-preserved as frozen, but must be parboiled (or blanched) first to halt enzyme action– peas, beans, broccoli, etc. These veggies aren’t good canned because they’d have to be boiled in the jars so long they’d be thoroughly cooked. We only use the canner for salsa, some kinds of pickles, and lots of jars of unseasoned tomatoes.)

Canning is very energy-intensive both from you doing it (and it’s a lot of time-sensitive things; I had to can the sauce immediately after finishing boiling it down, which was very tiring, but it was more efficient than letting it cool and then having to bring it back up to a boil) AND from a standpoint of using cooking gas. I was sore just from standing around; it was exhausting and I spent probably nine hours on it all-told, with the stove constantly on in the heat.

We only really bother with it because we grow so much, and so it’s just sitting there already, waiting for someone to eat it before it’s too late. It’s not so much a money-saving thing as a kind of ecological thing. It would be cheaper to buy the fruits of someone else’s harvest and labor in the grocery store, once we tallied up the time and labor and cooking gas. But it’d be someone else’s harvest and labor, and ours would have been wasted. From an ethical standpoint the best way to avoid feeding into an agricultural system that chews up and spits out its workers and the land is to opt out, so that’s a part of this as well.

But no, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend anyone take up large-scale home preservation to save money. It is, however, a lovely bulwark against food insecurity, so if there are times when things are cheap and you have time, that’s a way to have control over it.

We don’t generally can to meet the needs of the farm crew, it’s for the core staff over the winter and into the spring. It’s a way to avoid buying imported summer foods in winter. It’s because we grow so much and want to have it put by for use later. We have the big freezers already for the meat we sell, so it’s not a big deal to put in lots of vegetables too. Etc.

We still always run out before the new season comes on; this year we used the last of last year’s canned tomatoes in April, when the new ones didn’t ripen until July, so there was a long gap and a lot of anticipation. (Your picture was not posted)

Comments

[unicornduke]

space is never really the issue with canning (plus I think Ball just came out with an electric plug-in canner and someday I will own that) but my god the time and effort in August when it's hot as fuck is the real problem with canning.

[dragonlady7]

yeah, the person asking lives in a place where they have a very tightly metered gas line and i thought you know, that's-- not an insignificant expenditure.