I Am A Rebel… Canner.

I’ve been doing some of these things for decades. Mostly I stick with the “approved” processes from the “government” and other “authorities”; but some things I’ve done do not meet with their approval. Some I’d learned were the Old Ways and were handed down as lore by parents, aunts, uncles, or just old folks in my old farm town. (Water Bath with long times for low acid things was still ‘approved’ as late as the ’70s, for example, so was common when I was growing up.) Some I’d found in old books. In particular a write up of how folks were to home can and preserve the produce of their Victory Gardens from World War II (when commercial food production was being shipped off to the armies of the world and folks back home were encouraged to turn their yards into food gardens. And very few folks had pressure canners so it was all water bath). Some things I just did because the “approved” method seemed stupid or gave unpleasant results.

Over time, I came to have my own Style of prepping and canning.

Only now have I discovered that not only am I “not alone”, but there’s a whole lot of “us” and we have a name. “Rebel Canners“. Some folks use other names like “traditional” or even “Amish Canning”, but what it comes down to is the same thing. People looking at the Authoritarian Government telling them “Thou Shalt Not!” (often with an implied “because thou art stupid…”) and saying “A-hem. I have a brain and I’m empowered to use it. STFU Government.” Sometimes, like the Amish, just saying “been doing it for generations and it has worked fine.” Note that there are even books on Rebel Canning (and I’m going to get some of them before they are banned by the Cancel Thought & Culture crowd).

In large part the “thou shalt not” comes down to just a few things.

1) You are too stupid to adjust for altitude.

2) You are too stupid to know about pH or adjust it (and no way you can use a pH strip or meter).

3) WE, the authorities, have not been paid to test that particular method, process or product, and until someone pays us a LOT of money to use our Scientific Equipment to do the testing, we will not approve. So cough up the money.

4) Products or procedures that need special care or are just not something you are smart enough to do.

I’d also assert there’s some amount of industrial influence of the form:

5) THAT would result in reduced sales of stuff from our favored industrial “contributor” so no way we can say that practice is OK. Go out and buy a lot of new stuff and don’t even think about ways to avoid spending that money.

There’s plenty of room to use your brain and common sense to do perfectly fine canning of products that are safe to eat and NOT USDA / FDA or anyone else “approved”. How do I know this? Because folks have been doing it for generations. The Amish, in particular, have been “Water Bath Canning” everything for generations and are not dropping like flies from poisoning. (My Grandma included…)

So the rest of this posting will be taking about how to can things that you are forbidden to can in ways that are forbidden (by Authorities). So I have to put in a Requisite Disclaimer: Anyone who does any of this stuff is on their own. I’m not recommending that anyone do it, nor am I saying it is Just Fine For You. I’m saying “this is what I do” for me in my location. (And location matters. More below). So proceed at your own risk. Do it wrong or against the “advice of authorities” and it can kill you.

(I find it slightly funny that every YouTube video showing these things has such a disclaimer…)

So with that out of the way, let’s look at some of these “Rebel” techniques and products.

First off, why do it? Well, my interest started out as a “Prepper” thing with a bit of “Wait a mo… I remember stories of folks saying they did it for decades or generations…” historical perspective. It branched out a bit into “how can I put up foods more cheaply or re-use materials that might not be available in an Aw Shit catastrophe. Then I also found that some products just worked better or tasted a lot better.

With that, let’s look at some of the Forbidden Things, and how they are done anyway by Rebels like me and like others.

Starting with #5:

You are forbidden to reuse canning lids, or to reuse commercial jars & lids from products you bought at the store. Why? Because they may fail to seal, have a defect in the coating under the lid that can spoil your food, and for commercial lids, they are not the “designed for home use 2 part lids” but are a one piece for machine application at controlled tension – and you are too stupid to do what the machine does. That’s the theory anyway.

My wandering down this stray path started with reusing 2 part lids, and reusing Atlas Mason Jars from Classico pasta sauce. The Classico pasta sauce was advertised as having real canning jars for your re-use, so that was not actually an act of rebellion… much. For the 2 part lids, I started out just reusing them for “test batches”. IF a product was new to me, I’d can a jar or two and as soon as cooled, open and test it / eat some. Failure to seal wasn’t a problem (and everyone has some jars that fail to seal, even with new lids, from time to time). A nick in the lacquer of the lid would not have time to corrode either. I even used some of the old glass mayonnaise jars that you were constantly admonished not to use. (Now they have moved on to plastic mayo jars so that’s no longer an issue of complaint… very old mayo jars had regular threads and an in between step was a move to shallower threads that didn’t fit canning lids well. But that’s all ancient history now.)

Over time, I found other brands of pasta sauce in jars with standard lids and I’ve reused some of them, too. From there, I started to reuse some jars and lids as Canister Jars. I’d put dry goods in them, for example. Why use an “approved” canning jar that cost a $1 for holding 24 oz of sugar if you could use a pasta jar you were going to throw away? That also lead to washing and re-using their lids on canister Jars.

Eventually I decided to do some of my test jar canning in such jars with the re-use of their lids. And it worked fine. Now the theory is that the lid must be screwed on to Just The Right Tension via machine precision to work properly. There’s also a thought that food residue might cause problems (and yes, getting the pasta sauce red out of the rubber / lacquer can be impossible some times). But if you are canning at “kill everything” temperatures and pressures anyway, what’s the problem with a lid that has some tomato red staining? And since hand tightening 2 piece lids is a learned art anyway (with associated failures and failure to seal, or too tight and jar breaks…) why not learn it on free jars and lids? Eh?

Now I’ve never canned very high value things (like meat or prepared soups) in reused commercial jars / lids (other than Classico Atlas Mason jars with new 2 piece lids) just because it is “worth it to me” to use a new 40 ¢ lid on a $2 jar of meat. But I’d be quite happy to do it on some 50 ¢ carrots in a cup or pint jar. You are expected to test the seal (tap to top and it ought to be a high pitch tink not a low pitch dull thunk) and when you open the jar look for spoilage or funny smells anyway. Then boiling for 10 minutes will destroy any botulism toxin if any did grow in the jar.

Sidebar:

So you think commercial product is all healthy, safe, and pure; and far more so than anything you can make at home? Once upon A Time in the ’70s: I worked in a peach cannery. One day a couple of us were assigned to destroy a few pallets of gallons of peaches. We had to take a rock hammer and punch 2 holes in the top of each can and toss them in the dumpster. Why? Because they had not been cooked long enough, and something was growing in the cans making them pressurized. Tops bulging up, not sucked down. Well we had a gay old time of it. Punch a hole and if the “stuff” was slopped to that side, a geyser of peaches would erupt through the hole. By the time we were done, both of us were covered head to toe in slightly fermented peaches and juice. Now if those cans had fermented a little slower, or been shipped faster, they would not have bulged in the warehouse, but on your shelf. So always inspect your commercial cans for bulging ends when you go to open them… Things have improved a lot since then, but it is still possible for commercial products to be faulty.

So since you are supposed to be aware of how to spot spoiled goods even with commercial products, DIY is not really a lot worse.

I now have a hierarchy of lid re-use.

First use is for high value canning.
2nd use is for lesser value canning. (Sometimes reused a dozen times…)
3rd use is if, after inspection, a lid is looking marginal, use it for dry goods or canisters.

After that, really crappy lids (rust inside or out, very scratched up, bent in the removal) get tossed.

I’ve also noticed that the ‘rubber stuff’ on the lid can be returned to more like original by putting the lid (seal up) in a pot of simmering water. This softens the seal compound and it tends to flow a bit back to normal. I’ve also stacked lids with slightly bent edges (not the body of the lid, just the very rim) and rolled them in a stack on the table to reform the edges. “If they were manufactured once, why can’t I re-manufacture them?” was the thought process there.

Similarly, I’m happy to use 1 piece commercial lid jars for canisters and for test canning runs. I’ve seen them used for production canning, but I’ve not done it myself (yet…). I know it works, and in a real Aw Shit if that was the jar / lid I had, I’d use it. Sadly, many products that were in glass jars have now moved to crappy plastic jars, so the opportunities to reuse commercial jars and lids are dropping. Plastics are just not as rodent and air proof as glass. They are OK for short term storage, but if you want something to protect food for many years, plastic is not ideal. Oh Well.

Un-Approved Methods or Products #4 & Untested #3:

These mostly fall into 2 categories. Thick stuff with low heat transfer, and “not the approved process”. So you are told never ever to can pumpkin / winter squash, and not to can beans without cooking them first, and not to even think about canning fish or use anything but a pressure canner for low acid foods and a water bath is ONLY for high acid foods. Those are The Official Approved Ways. ~”And if WE, the Authorities, have not tested a product in our Laboratory, it will certainly kill you if you try it.”

Well some of that’s just bogus.

You can get around the poor heat flow in pumpkin pie type squash by putting it in smaller jars, cooking it longer, or just not making it mush first but putting it in the jars in chunks with air / water flow around them.

Dry Beans will swell up when canned. OK, but they are limited by the amount of water in the jar. You might end up with beans that are too dense, but it won’t be exploding on you. The basic thing here is just to put in about 1/3 a load of beans and then water to the top. So 1/4 to 1/3 a cup of beans in a 1 cup jar. (This is a good place to use those commercial re-used jars for a test canning session. IF it fails on you, and breaks, who cares?)

I first did this with Ham & Bean soup. The small amount of beans worked fine. Later I did large amounts of just beans. However… This does not de-gas the beans. So I’ve “moved on” to a process that does “soak, change water, 1/2 cook, change water, finish cook, dump water, can the cooked beans in fresh water” as I’m just not fond of being “gassy”… I’ve seen a claim that a Tbs of baking soda in the first 1/2 cook water can help with the de-gassing but I’ve not found proof of it. I did make a batch of ham & bean soup that way that does seem to be low gas, though.

Similarly, I’ve got a couple of books (mostly aimed at folks doing hunting and fishing) that have recipes for canning game and fish. The “bottom line” seems to be that 90 minutes at 10 psi is fine for meat in cups, pints, or quarts (often 75 minutes for cups & pints) while fish must be 90 minutes and in cups or pints only. BTW, that’s why sardines are in flat cans and tuna is in small cans (mostly), so that they can more effectively heat through. So, OK, why can’t the USDA just say “Use small jars and cook a long time”? Maybe the commercial fish canning folks don’t want competition from home canned fish? Who knows…

Using that “90 minutes / 10 PSI (15 PSI at altitude) works for the highest risk” rule of thumb, I then went off reservation with my home canned soups (recipes in prior postings). The Authorities say that since THEY can’t know the pH of YOUR soup, or exactly what is in it, YOU are forbidden to can it. But…. IF you can it as though it is the hardest thing to process safely, why isn’t that good enough? Who knows… and who ain’t speaking. This, BTW, despite being a “rule” I thought up, turns up in may youtube videos of folks doing Rebel Canning. So it isn’t just me. A Lot of folks figured out “Can it like the longest time / highest temperature ingredient in the mix and it works fine”. So soup with meat in it, gets canned like it was all meat. Vegetable based soup, can go at vegetable temps and times. Etc.

One of my first steps “off the reservation” was when I bought a “Steam Canner”. A later step was when I discovered “Dry Canning”… but first a brief introduction to types of canning.

Approved:

Water Bath – High Acid Stuff is put in jars,completely submerged in boiling water, and boiled for the “approved” period of time for that food.

Pressure Canning – Low Acid stuff must be canned this way. High acid stuff may be canned this way. Stuff is put in jars, put in a pressure cooker, and canned at higher pressures and temperatures for the Approved Time for that product. 10 psi was the norm at low altitude. Lately they have gone to a confusing “10 psi if a rocker / weight or 11 psi if using a gauge” (I think this is because they figure you are too stupid to read a gauge correctly) AND I’ve noticed that Presto canners now have a weight / rocker that is 11 PSI instead of 10. Paranoia runs deep in “Authorities”. IF above 1000 ft elevation, they have you go to 15 PSI. IMHO, 15 psi often overcooks the food and makes the quality worse / flavors funny and over cooked. But I’m at sea level.

UN-Approved:

Water Bath for low acid foods. You will find lots of folks, including the Amish, doing things like water bath canning meat. Instead of 75 minutes for pints or 90 minutes for quarts at 10 / 11 psi, they do 3 hours in boiling water. You will also find folks going all ‘splody saying this will kill you if you do it above 1000 feet elevation. Yes, times would need to expand with altitude, and yes, doing this at 7000 feet elevation is likely to take 9 hours or so; but, applied engineering:

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-altitude-pressure-d_462.html

Altitude Above or Below Sea Level	Absolute Barometer	Absolute Atmospheric Pressure
feet	metre	inches Hg mm Hg	psia	kg/cm2	kPa

01)	0	29.9	760	14.7	1.03	101
[...]
10000	3048	20.6	523	10.1	0.711	69.7

This is addressing “#1 adjusting for altitude“.

So you drop to 10.1 psi at 10,000 feet elevation. This means that you could just use your 5 psi weight for anything above 1000 feet elevation and proceed with what I would call “low pressure water bath” canning up to 10,000 feet. That would be “Un-Approved” and “Un-Tested”, but conforms to engineering (and science rules) and, frankly, “Authorities” do NOT “own” the Science. Science is owned by no one and is free for all to use.

Now why do this? Why not just put on that 15 psi weight and do The Right Thing? Because a lot of foods do not taste as good or fall apart too much if overcooked for too long at too high a pressure. I just did a batch of 6 quarts of Russet Potatoes in a Water Bath (Amish way). I’d done 2 x cups in a test batch, one pressure canned (11 psi / 40 minutes – yes, the small jar can be 35 minutes but I was following a published recipe) and one water bath canned ( 1 Tbs vinegar / quart, 1/2 tsp salt / quart, boiling water bath 2 hours. 3 hours if you don’t use the vinegar). Tasting the test batches, the pressure canned had a slight “over cooked” flavor. The water bath one was like a baked potato. Were I at 5000 feet elevation, I’d do the 5 psi weight and “low pressure water bath” for a better tasting product.

Commercially canned potatoes have a flavor I just don’t like. I don’t know why, but they are just “wrong”. Home canned at 15 PSI (my first attempt because then all I had was a regular pressure cooker and a 15 psi weight) tasted wrong too. But at 10 psi they are “ok, good enough” while water bath with the vinegar to adjust pH is just perfect. BUT it is Rebel Canning the Amish way.

Do note that the Amish are concentrated in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio that are near enough to sea level that they do not need to adjust for altitude in their water bath canning. At 1000 feet you are down to 14.2 psi and at 2000 feet, 13.9 psi. You ought to be able to just extend the time a little bit (if 3 hours is too short…) up to about 3000 feet elevation, as at 3500 feet you are down to 12.9 psi. Some time calculating boiling point at those pressures would be helpful. There’s also an unexplored area of adding salt to raise the boiling point:

https://blvdbakery.com/baking/at-what-point-does-salt-water-boil.html

Pure water freezes at 0 °C and boils at 100 °C (212 °F) under normal pressure conditions. When salt is added, the freezing point is lowered and the boiling point is raised.

What is the boiling point of salted water?
For example, the boiling point of pure water at 1.0atm is 100oC while the boiling point of a 2% salt-water solution is about 102oC.

So by making your canning water just a 2% salt solution, you can cover up to 2 degrees C of loss of temperature with altitude. It is about 2 F for 1000 feet. 2 C is about 3.56 F, so figure about 1750 of added altitude. Call it about 2750 elevation at least, or likely closer to 3500 feet elevation given the current paranoid safety margin in the 1000 ft elevation “Authorized Standard” (IIRC, when I was a kid, it was closer to 2k or 3k of elevation before folks were nagged, but that was then…)

Some work here would be a Very Good Thing. It would be nice to have a graph of “salt / gallon” or quart or whatever to give 212 F / 100 C boiling point by altitude. Above about 4,000 feet, I’d just use the 5 lb weight… but I’m lazy and I have a 5 lb pressure weight for my canner…

Steam Canning:

The Approved Way has jars stuck in a water bath that completely covers the jar. This has a known heat transfer property and has been tested with jars that have thermometers in their center and is Approved.

Steam Canning says basically “Steam heat is great, it condenses on cooler surfaces and moves a lot of heat fast. It is highly efficient. So why not just heat the jars with steam?” A steam canner is a shallow pan with a big thin pot upside own on top of it. Put about an inch of water in the bottom, and raise it to the boil. A small hole in the side of the inverted pot thing (about an inch above the top of the tray with the boiling water) vents a nice jet of steam and tells you it is all steam inside and start timing. Times are the same as water bath.

I bought one. I tried it. It worked FINE. It is not approved, but saves a lot of fuel by not heating up a giant pot of water. I’ve since done this with my pressure canner by the simple expedient of not putting the weight on it. Inch or two of water in the bottom, no pressure, stream of steam out the weight spigot. I’ve also seen folks doing this on YouTube videos, so I’m not alone. Plus, the engineer in me says “Steam will condense on anything lower than boiling point, so you can’t get cold spots”. And if it is at boiling point, you would not get heat transfer from boiling water anyway…

Also realize that when pressure canning, your jars are not fully under water either. They ARE being “steam canned”, just at pressure. So why would that not work at atmospheric pressure as well?

FWIW, some decades back on, IIRC, the web site of a University that does testing for the USDA, they had a Poo-Poo posting about Steam Canning saying that since nobody had paid them to do the testing, it was not approved… and the implication being a shake down of the vendor for “study money”.

IMHO, not approving steam canning is either due to the maker of them not paying up for the Academics to do “testing”, or just because said academics are not engineers so don’t understand steam heat. Just remember that in a Survival Situation where water is low, and for some reason you need to can produce, you have the option of a low water use steam canning process.

Dry Pack & Dry Canning:

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/dry-canning-1-year-report/

You will find folks calling “Dry Pack” processing “Dry Canning”. This is a bit of confusion on the part of a lot of folks doing home canning. Don’t let it confuse you. Just remember what the terms really mean and allow that some folks use “Dry canning” to mean “Dry pack”.

Take a jar, put something in it THAT IS DRY, like rice. Put it in the oven and heat it. That’s proper “Dry Canning”.

A lot of YouTube videos call “Dry Pack” dry canning, and it technically isn’t. So what is Dry Pack?

Pretty simple, really. You put the product (a wet fruit, vegetable, or meat) in the jar, but do not add water to it. Then can it like you normally would. Some folks especially liked their potatoes this way. Not soggy mushy things floating in water, but more like a baked potato out of the jar. Chunks of potato, tossed in a jar, and then pressure canned at 10/11 PSI for 40 minutes. Water bath is harder to do as all the air space makes the jar want to float. IMHO, this is a nice example of where steam canning would apply. A jar full of air doesn’t float in steam.

So why is this Un-Approved? Would not the jar go to canning temperature and then heat the product inside of it? Yes, but… the heat flow inside the jar would be driven by hot air, not water, and the heat capacity of air is less than water. Is it enough? Judging by the folks doing it and not getting sick or dying, it looks like a “yes”. Given that ovens use air as the working fluid, we have something of an existence proof. I suppose there is a possible for some foods that the air would not heat the food enough, even with void spaces (for things like potatoes), so their is likely some risk if you go ‘off page’ from what others have done and proven by doing it for years.

I further suspect that the “wet” products steam as they reach temperature, and that steam drives the air out of the jars (why the lid seals at the end of the process is that steam condensing and pulling a partial vacuum). So really the food is, to some extent, being steam cooked in their own juices, which I think ought to be enough to prove the product is safe.

Why do it? Several folks on YouTube said the food quality and flavor is better. I’ve not done it with vegetables. I’m going to try Dry Pack vegetables at some point. I was going to do it with potatoes as the 15 psi debacle had put me off canning potatoes, but the 10 psi was OK, and the Amish Water Bath potatoes were just great, so I went that way instead. At some point, I’m going to try it with potatoes (and maybe sweet potatoes ;-) just as a proof of concept. In a real Aw Shit where water was very precious, being able to can some foods without water in the jar would be a big win. Say you had a Hurricane, and the water was out, and you had food in the fridge which would spoil in a few days… might be nice to be able to fire up the camp stove and can them up without using a lot of your water.

I have done “dry pack” with meats. These make a lot of their own juices in the canning / cooking process, so I find it a bit odd to call it Dry Pack; yet it is. Just put raw meat in the jars, put a lid on it, and pressure can it. 10 / 11 PSI 90 minutes for quarts, 75 for pints and smaller. I’ve done Little Smokeys (worked great in 1/2 cup wide mouth with them standing on end) as a better version of Vienna Sausages, hot dogs (full dogs with a wide mouth quart didn’t work so well, as the dogs swell up to stuff the whole jar. One YouTuber cooks them first, others chunk them, one guy put only 4 or 5 in a jar instead of stuffing it with 7 or 8 and that worked too), Various Sausages, chicken, turkey (though I’ve not opened the jar to test it yet, but with chicken doing fine I think it ought to be OK), and some hamburger.

So think about that for a minute. “Meat & Potatoes” just by stuffing them in the jars and running them through the canner… No added water. No added salt or vinegar. Just need a jar w/lid and a canner.

Some Notes

I’ve noticed that several of the Amish Water Bath recipes add a Tbs of vinegar (15 ml of 5% vinegar) to each quart of low acid vegetables. (#2, adjusting pH) I think this is an existence proof of how to adjust low acid foods to be amenable to high acid processes. Do note that various foods may neutralize different amounts of the acid in the vinegar and end up at a different final pH. You can taste acid, so in a real Aw Shit, I'd be willing to just 'calibrate' my taste via a bit of canning liquid from, say, potatoes water bathed with a Tbs of vinegar, and then use that degree of acid flavor to check that other products (in a test jar of, say, 1 cup with 1/4 Tbs vinegar) had the same degree of 'bite' to them.

Preferable would be to have a pH meter and test the food directly for pH of 4 or more acid (so 4 or down to even lemon juice level. BTW, I never quite "got it" on which way is "down" vs "up" for pH. Smaller numbers are more acid, so is that "up" due to more H ions, or "down" due to smaller numbers?)

Some folks say to can fish for 5 hours water bath. I have no idea what is best, the 4 hour folks, or the 5 or whatever. When in doubt, I'd just add some vinegar…

If doing Prepping for an Aw Shit, I’d make sure to have a few gallons of vinegar in the stash. Good for pickling, canning, cleaning, and more.

In the Stanford University Book Store ("Leland Stanford; Junior-University!" was what we UC folks would chant at the games vs them ;-) I once found a book on commercial food preparation and canning. It was $120 something at the time, so about equivalent to $600 now, so I could not buy it. But… it had a very nice nomograph for the killing of botulism spores. What kills them? A combination of TIME, pH to the acid side, and TEMPERATURE. You can swap acidity for time or temperature (limit case is room temperature pickles. Just make it all vinegar and you are good ;-), you can swap time for temperature and acidity (so 3 or 4 hours water bath vs 240 F pressure canning at 75 minutes), or you can swap temperature for time / acidity (so pressure canning at higher temperatures instead of 3 hours water bath or adding vinegar).

I've looked on the internet but not found that nomograph again. I wish I had it. Commercial canning (and all the 'approved' methods) are just done by assuring that the center of the jar reaches a high enough temperature, long enough, at the acidity of that particular food, to kill any botulism spores. With that graph and a pH meter, one ought to be able to "DIY" for any food that isn't a paste (i.e has water flow). All the "Authorities" do is put a temperature probe in the center of the jar, and watch the temperature as they do a test canning, then read off that graph when it is "safe". That is then the minimum time / temperature for that particular food. These are typically rounded up to "The Usual" recommendations for home canning (so a LOT of foods have the "same" approved time / temp despite being different foods). I'd likely buy that book today, just for that one graph. Oh Well.

IF you do Rebel Canning, remember that any food with botulism toxin in it can be made safe with a 10 minute boil (don't know if that works at 10,000 feet, but it does work near sea level, per the "authorities") There's other bacteria that can make food in a jar "go off" despite being canned, though I've never encountered them. So smell the jar when you open it. Food that's gone off will let you know, and if it smells fine, then a nice bit of simmer in the pan can assure no botulism…

Not rebel canning, but the recipe I used to can up a bunch of mini-bella mushrooms. Want something other than bland old white buttons in a can? DIY to the rescue!

https://www.healthycanning.com/canning-mushrooms/

Next stop for me? Whole Foods or Sprouts or an Asian Market if I can find one, and some canned Shiitake and / or Oyster Mushrooms!

There’s also a lot of folks canning “Pickled Eggs” in various ways:

https://www.foxvalleyfoodie.com/mustard-pickled-eggs/

Some Semi-Random Videos

These are various folks Rebel Canning recipes. I’m especially fond of “Make it Make” as she has been understudy to a traditional Amish friend and has documented their processes. It is her recipe that I used for my Amish canned potatoes ;-)

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Like Beans & Franks? AKA “Beanie Wienies”? As I have to avoid beef to reduce tendency to arthritic joints, being able to “make my own” with chicken, turkey, or pure pork franks is a big win for me:

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A successful ‘dogs in a jar’ approach:

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Dry Packed Potatoes:

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Another take on Dry Pack potatoes:

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Making “Shelf Stable” pickled eggs that can keep for years. I’m likely to try this a bit later in the week as I have a big bowl of about 15 hard boiled eggs I made in preparation for the hurricane… She also goes to some length to point out that even same day fresh eggs can be easy peeled if instead of boiling, you steam them. Nice trick, that.

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Lots of folks do baked beans. Technically it is Rebel Canning as there isn’t one recipe and one pH and one thing for the USDA to “approve”. But lots of folks do it:

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Here’s an example of someone saying “Don’t DO IT!” largely due to altitude variation of temperatures. OK, so what about the vast bulk of everyone who lives below 1000 feet elevation? Eh? But it does give a view from “The other side” and it does point out the importance of altitude and the need to either up the temperature closer to 212 F / 100 C or to up the acid.

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What to do with a 20 lb Easter Ham and a load of beans? For two people? How about canning up some soup?

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Too many onions?? How about French Onion Soup?

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Get the idea? Foods that you can actually eat from the jar as a meal, not just a one ingredient thing.

That’s a big part of the attraction of Rebel Canning. Yes, having some home canned meat is a nice addition to the pantry, but having your own split pea soup, your own ham & beans soup, your own NICE to eat canned potatoes; those are priceless…

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