Water bath and pressure canning

We’ve had some requests from some of SWMBOs friends for me to teach canning classes. We have not set a date yet on the classes but due to her requests and the fact that she’s filling the class before I even have it scheduled I’m going to host some canning classes this year. The first will be a water bath canning class taught late spring. The second, held sometime mid-summer, will be a pressure canning class.

In the water bath canning class, we’ll learn the easiest method of canning, boiling water canning. This is the one that you can do as soon as you get home with no special equipment (excluding canning jars and lids) when you get home and handles 90% of what you’ll can in the future. We’ll likely can some green beans and maybe make some pickles. It depends on what is coming in from the garden and the market at that time.

Lesson one of canning, you can learn it here and now for free, is canning depends on natures bounty. There won’t be any store bought produce going into our canning so we’ll be in full garden production on canning day. Everyone will go home with something that you’ve canned yourself. The cost will be $20 per person and since this will be mostly people that we know, there will be wine consumed so you’ve been warned.

For the pressure canning class, we’ll step it up a notch so think of this as canning 201. Pressure canning is used mainly for canning something with meat in it. It requires a higher temperature and specialized equipment. Likely we’ll have the same folks back and similar environment however this time we’ll be making tomato sauce with meat, hopefully beef if we have a cow in the freezer by then. Each summer we make dozens of jars of our own sauce and this is more of a scheduled production because it’s our main garden product each year. Basically once the tomatoes start coming in, we’ll be ready to can. Tomato sauce is something used in our kitchen once or twice a week all year. No sense buying Prego when you can have home cooked easily enough. The cost of this class will be $20 as well and you’ll get a jar of sauce to take home.

Like our hog class, we are not expert canners. This is an experience class for anybody wanting to learn how to can and have the chance to participate with someone who’s already doing it and learn the ropes. When you leave, you’ll have the experience to can your own product. In each class we will wash, chop, and prep all the veggies. We will clean the jars, fill, seal, and can. We’ll discuss our storage options (canning, dehydrating, freezing, etc), what resources I reference for my canning questions, what’s possible with canning and what’s not, how to tell if the canning worked, how to tell if something has gone bad and should be tossed, and as always answer any questions you may have.

These classes will be limited to 10 people but if there is enough interest we can teach multiple classes since we can all summer.

If you are interested in taking a canning class, contact me at dan@ninjacowfarm.com and I’ll make sure you get an invite when we schedule the classes.