I am a 70 y/o retired nurse who lives in Florida, USA. I have never heard of this method of preserving food & l am so excited to try it! It's amazing the things one can learn even at my age!
Thank-you so very much for sharing this valuable information with your subscribers! God bless you dear one.
Thank you, you’re very welcome. Water bath canning is normal and traditional here in Europe, both West and East. There’s lots of information online about it. I just wanted to reassure Americans in particular because I notice the American government has put a fair bit of fear into trying anything like this. Yet people in America who came to that country from Europe brought also their food preservation techniques with them, and that includes water bath canning. It’s ever bit as safe as pressure canning.
I actually own an english book from the tail end of the second world war about food preserving, the section on water bath canning is amazing.
Imo, anything that gives us that little bit of self reliance back can only be a good thing. Please folks, don’t be scared of it, even the meat wb canning. I eat my own wb canned meat dishes regularly, and I’m not dead yet! :)
This is sooooo amazing...!!!! Thank you so much for posting and linking. Just fantastic. I always wondered why I had hoarded all of my glass containers. I was going to use them for my paining, but who has time to be creative these days...
Again, thank you, for this amazing life-saving information!!!
Another great way of preserving fruit and veggies is through fermentation. Sauerkraut and Kimchi are two easy ways to learn. You can preserve food and eat like a gourmet during hard times!
Yes. :) I make my sauerkraut, have never made kimchi though. I also ferment onions and carrots as well as garlic in raw honey for medicinal use (antibacterial and the garlic is an anticoagulant. It helps replace the big pharma blood thinners I no longer use).
Thank you so much for this gift - I love learning new things! I had often wondered about preserving meat and eggs. Already thinking it might be fun and helpful to do with a couple of friends. Excited to get started.
Hope you enjoy doing it. :) Usually I preserve my eggs by pickling, fermenting or waterglassing them. You can also bury them in lime or boxes of salt. Pickled eggs are best though. You can add spices, herbs, whatever you like to the pickle.
Just ate a pickled egg for the first time recently - and it was good. Have you tried preserving raw eggs in a bucket of lime or salt? I was thinking about giving it a try.
I haven’t used salt yet but will as I have a good stock of salt in my pantry and folks should probably look at storing it. It never goes bad, even if it gets damp, and it’s so useful for so many things. But most of all, Gates recently announced he’d be getting into salt production, so that should ring alarm bells. I usually preserve my glut eggs in waterglass which is a fish’s swim bladder. Sounds awful but it’s not, lol. It comes in a tin as a clear liquid, a little viscous. You add it to water in a bucket and gently stack the eggs. They remain stored for up to a year and you can use them in all the ways you’d use a fresh egg. But you can also coat the shell of eggs with mineral oil (such as baby oil) to seal it and keep eggs in that way too. The point is just to keep anything from permeating the shell. I’ve seen others preserve eggs in salt and it works eggxcellently. Har!
ok..sorry. Had to get at least one bad egg joke in there, lol…
Vinegar stores very well. I remember reading somewhere that vinegar was hard to come by during WW1 and 2. Citric acid is also used in canning in the US. Vitamin C can be used as an acidifier in home canning. People who fear canning are missing out on having the highest quality food because frozen foods continues to deteriorate, just at a slower rate. Canning done correctly nearly stops all deterioration. The best thing is that you will have picked the food that is at its highest point of nutritional value when you can it!
Absolutely! Another reason to WB can over freezing is because if the power goes out, if you can’t preserve or eat everything in your freezer asap, that’s a lot of expensive food lost.
That is a lovely link (I do like wartime info) but I have to disagree about not WB canning meat! Here in Europe people have WB’d meat for generations without any issues. The reason is we add that vinegar to it which increases the acidity in the jars and prevents botulism. I did a quick search on water bath canning meat and found so much conflicting info. American sites always seem to say to never WB meat, except for prepping sites where preppers and hunters have been WB canning their venison etc for generations also.
The thing I read about not WBing meat as it cannot reach a high enough temperature to kill bacteria etc is wrong, plain and simple. In water bathing, a soft rolling boil is kept going throughout the entire time. That is more than enough to kill bacteria and any parasites people are worried about in meat.
Best thing I can suggest is that folks watch the videos I shared. One is an East European with plenty videos on canning meat, be it beef, pork or chicken. The other is an American girl who also has water bathed meat and shown it in videos. The Amish people in America have been water bath canning both veg and meat for generations too. :)
I totally agree with you on Water Bath canning. It has been done safely for generations! The propaganda on food is endless as it is with all health. It is helpful to know that salt and sugar also makes food safe. You can have great fun Water Bath canning outdoors on a propane fueled camp stove in the summertime. Easy and simple. Your chicken friends will love it too! Nothing is wasted.
This is true. :) I’m about to butcher one of my excess roosters next week and WB can him with rice and veg for future meals, I can always take pics of that and share on here. Can’t remember who it was who famously said “Control the food and control the people” but the fearmongering around preserving food at home was surely part of that.
Our power was out for four days, just last week, after a huge storm. And it stormed yesterday and was out for a few hours...I had to give all of our food in the fridge away last week...
The heat was unbearable - was in the mid 90's...we did order a small generator - we have power outages all the time here in TX. - and the ghoulz hate TX - always getting hit here...it was time to get something.
I hate relying upon electricity. We’re having our “hot month” here, where they give us blistering and dry temperatures followed usually by rain, cold and grey misery rest of the summer. Oddly enough we just had a power cut today! We have a pantry here, it’s below ground so is always cool even in the extreme heat we’re having (temps hit forty plus celsius) It’s brick lined too with a wood ceiling, both of which help. I have been following as much American news as I can, and it honestly seems as if they’re gearing up for huge power outages there (and will blame it on “cyber attacks” or some such nonsense) so, having some extra supplies to hand doesn’t hurt. :) We’re looking for a small generator too because I want desperately to get off grid. Even if we never used any electricity here, the standing charges and two taxes (one a carbon tax) which keep rising mean at some point we simply won’t be able to afford it at all.
We are pretty sure they will cut our power...they've been announcing that the grid is being attacked/hacked and is not secure and it's vulnerable, so of course they are planning to do it...they are setting the stage. And they have been hammering TX - fires in the panhandle (cattle country) - killed tens of thousands of cows - it was devastating - and and faking the H1N1 and taking out the poultry farms...it is so sad - and huge tornados and storms...two this week alone - blew out windows in high rise buildings in downtown Houston...just had another round of tornadoes, hail and 100+ MPH winds just yesterday - over a dozen people died...I feel like a sitting duck...tornados are their new thing? A deflection from fires?
The generator we got was @ $800 on Amazon...it will do the trick. We hated to spend the money...things are always tight around here - many mouths to feed and my husband is closing his shop after 30 years, from so many machine repairs, we just could not get in front of it... - he is throwing in the towel and selling the business for so much less than it is worth...a bit unnerving...but here is the link for the generator.
I live in NZ. The American fear of water bathing has seeped into our culture over recent years. I gently point out it's pretty specifically an American concern, but once the fear of water bathing sets in, it's tricky to shift. Good on you for preserving your food :)
Thank you! This is a very welcome post. 52 years ago, 3 months after our wedding, I bought a pressure canner with wedding present money. 10 years later I snapped up one on sale, so have both a dial pressure gauge and a weight canner. I have been canning and freezing from my gardens ever since (actually, began as a teen-ager). I still have some of my grandmother's blue glass Ball jars. Summer of '22, getting a bit nervous about all the food-fear porn, I canned about 100 lb of chicken and pork. The young woman ( link you provide to the Amish canning) is a good source--she's on Gab, which is where I found both her and a lot of other really good canning ideas. E.g., I had never tried to can milk (and doesn't the USDA try to scare the pants off us on that topic---which probably means its something we really should be doing), but after listening to these canners on Gab, I did, And used one quart of it this winter--and husband and I are still alive. I take your point on adding vinegar (very grateful, in fact) A, and do have access to higher-acetic-acid type. I am apt to can something in every month of the year--raspberry jam in January from our raspberries in the freezer--because I didn't have time for that when they had to be picked, or marmelade in winter, our orange season.
Oh my gosh that looks so good! The beautiful colors and darn the tasty looking meat. For the first time I’m growing veggies from seeds so I will save this method.
This is so spot on! Dehydrating is also an age old way for preserving foods. We need to take steps backwards in history to go forward and survive in the future. Thanks for this post V.
Please don’t be scared. I really urge watching Tanja’s videos as she shows so clearly how to WB meat, even chicken, on her channel. :) Yes, I’ve WB’d meat many times. We have our own flock of hens here and the spare rooster go for food, so chicken gets WB’d too. Never had a single issue. The vinegar goes into pretty much everything (with some naturally acidic fruits and things like tomatoes excepted). If you add the vinegar (9%) it is pretty foolproof. Always add it to meat of any kind. That’s the only real caveat. The rest is common sense, like cleanliness and making sure the jar lid seals are ok. I also reuse the pasta sauce and other jars which previously held shop produce. Here in Europe those kind of lids are called “lug lids” and you can buy replacements for them online, but other kinds of jars can be used. So long as they seal ok.
Meat WB canning scares a lot of folks who haven’t done it before. I can reassure you how safe it is so long as you follow the instructions given by the likes of Tanja and others who share videos on WB canning it. In fact we’re having one of my jars of beef stew today for dinner. :) Hope this helps.
The government has also made us afraid of mushrooms. One must research first, but some valuable medicinal ones like Turkey Tail are easy to identify if you know mushroom 🍄🟫 physiology (e.g. what is a polypore), and how to make a spore print.
Certain groups should be shunned. Even seasoned mycologists have made mortal mistakes.
Turkey Tail has been demonstrated by Japanese researchers to mitigate a variety of
Cancers, and is prolifically available in deciduous forests. Ostensibly free to the poor.
I do a lot of fruit canning, and am interested in trying meat/or a stew. Thank you for this post!!
Swedes are avid mushroom collectors in autumn. :) The forest is full of them, thankfully. There are many handy guides to help folks ID them but tbh, I believe the best way is to go out there with an experienced collector and be shown what to pick and what to avoid.
I’ll be wb canning fruit and salad veg later in the season, I hope you give meat canning a go. :)
I am a 70 y/o retired nurse who lives in Florida, USA. I have never heard of this method of preserving food & l am so excited to try it! It's amazing the things one can learn even at my age!
Thank-you so very much for sharing this valuable information with your subscribers! God bless you dear one.
Thank you, you’re very welcome. Water bath canning is normal and traditional here in Europe, both West and East. There’s lots of information online about it. I just wanted to reassure Americans in particular because I notice the American government has put a fair bit of fear into trying anything like this. Yet people in America who came to that country from Europe brought also their food preservation techniques with them, and that includes water bath canning. It’s ever bit as safe as pressure canning.
I actually own an english book from the tail end of the second world war about food preserving, the section on water bath canning is amazing.
Imo, anything that gives us that little bit of self reliance back can only be a good thing. Please folks, don’t be scared of it, even the meat wb canning. I eat my own wb canned meat dishes regularly, and I’m not dead yet! :)
This is sooooo amazing...!!!! Thank you so much for posting and linking. Just fantastic. I always wondered why I had hoarded all of my glass containers. I was going to use them for my paining, but who has time to be creative these days...
Again, thank you, for this amazing life-saving information!!!
You’re welcome. :) No fear, everyone. Europeans water bath can everything, and have done so for generations.
With all the poisons we are facing down - not even a concern! Thanks again...great posts, really appreciate all the info!!!
Another great way of preserving fruit and veggies is through fermentation. Sauerkraut and Kimchi are two easy ways to learn. You can preserve food and eat like a gourmet during hard times!
Yes. :) I make my sauerkraut, have never made kimchi though. I also ferment onions and carrots as well as garlic in raw honey for medicinal use (antibacterial and the garlic is an anticoagulant. It helps replace the big pharma blood thinners I no longer use).
Thank you so much for this gift - I love learning new things! I had often wondered about preserving meat and eggs. Already thinking it might be fun and helpful to do with a couple of friends. Excited to get started.
Hope you enjoy doing it. :) Usually I preserve my eggs by pickling, fermenting or waterglassing them. You can also bury them in lime or boxes of salt. Pickled eggs are best though. You can add spices, herbs, whatever you like to the pickle.
Just ate a pickled egg for the first time recently - and it was good. Have you tried preserving raw eggs in a bucket of lime or salt? I was thinking about giving it a try.
I haven’t used salt yet but will as I have a good stock of salt in my pantry and folks should probably look at storing it. It never goes bad, even if it gets damp, and it’s so useful for so many things. But most of all, Gates recently announced he’d be getting into salt production, so that should ring alarm bells. I usually preserve my glut eggs in waterglass which is a fish’s swim bladder. Sounds awful but it’s not, lol. It comes in a tin as a clear liquid, a little viscous. You add it to water in a bucket and gently stack the eggs. They remain stored for up to a year and you can use them in all the ways you’d use a fresh egg. But you can also coat the shell of eggs with mineral oil (such as baby oil) to seal it and keep eggs in that way too. The point is just to keep anything from permeating the shell. I’ve seen others preserve eggs in salt and it works eggxcellently. Har!
ok..sorry. Had to get at least one bad egg joke in there, lol…
Vinegar stores very well. I remember reading somewhere that vinegar was hard to come by during WW1 and 2. Citric acid is also used in canning in the US. Vitamin C can be used as an acidifier in home canning. People who fear canning are missing out on having the highest quality food because frozen foods continues to deteriorate, just at a slower rate. Canning done correctly nearly stops all deterioration. The best thing is that you will have picked the food that is at its highest point of nutritional value when you can it!
Absolutely! Another reason to WB can over freezing is because if the power goes out, if you can’t preserve or eat everything in your freezer asap, that’s a lot of expensive food lost.
🎯🎯🎯 Canning is a creative culinary activity that is easy once you understand the basic techniques. Here is a link to a site where you can read about food history: https://www.thefoodhistorian.com/blog/world-war-wednesday-home-canning-donts-1942
That is a lovely link (I do like wartime info) but I have to disagree about not WB canning meat! Here in Europe people have WB’d meat for generations without any issues. The reason is we add that vinegar to it which increases the acidity in the jars and prevents botulism. I did a quick search on water bath canning meat and found so much conflicting info. American sites always seem to say to never WB meat, except for prepping sites where preppers and hunters have been WB canning their venison etc for generations also.
The thing I read about not WBing meat as it cannot reach a high enough temperature to kill bacteria etc is wrong, plain and simple. In water bathing, a soft rolling boil is kept going throughout the entire time. That is more than enough to kill bacteria and any parasites people are worried about in meat.
Best thing I can suggest is that folks watch the videos I shared. One is an East European with plenty videos on canning meat, be it beef, pork or chicken. The other is an American girl who also has water bathed meat and shown it in videos. The Amish people in America have been water bath canning both veg and meat for generations too. :)
I totally agree with you on Water Bath canning. It has been done safely for generations! The propaganda on food is endless as it is with all health. It is helpful to know that salt and sugar also makes food safe. You can have great fun Water Bath canning outdoors on a propane fueled camp stove in the summertime. Easy and simple. Your chicken friends will love it too! Nothing is wasted.
This is true. :) I’m about to butcher one of my excess roosters next week and WB can him with rice and veg for future meals, I can always take pics of that and share on here. Can’t remember who it was who famously said “Control the food and control the people” but the fearmongering around preserving food at home was surely part of that.
That was kiss-my-ass Kissinger...
TY
Our power was out for four days, just last week, after a huge storm. And it stormed yesterday and was out for a few hours...I had to give all of our food in the fridge away last week...
The heat was unbearable - was in the mid 90's...we did order a small generator - we have power outages all the time here in TX. - and the ghoulz hate TX - always getting hit here...it was time to get something.
I hate relying upon electricity. We’re having our “hot month” here, where they give us blistering and dry temperatures followed usually by rain, cold and grey misery rest of the summer. Oddly enough we just had a power cut today! We have a pantry here, it’s below ground so is always cool even in the extreme heat we’re having (temps hit forty plus celsius) It’s brick lined too with a wood ceiling, both of which help. I have been following as much American news as I can, and it honestly seems as if they’re gearing up for huge power outages there (and will blame it on “cyber attacks” or some such nonsense) so, having some extra supplies to hand doesn’t hurt. :) We’re looking for a small generator too because I want desperately to get off grid. Even if we never used any electricity here, the standing charges and two taxes (one a carbon tax) which keep rising mean at some point we simply won’t be able to afford it at all.
We are pretty sure they will cut our power...they've been announcing that the grid is being attacked/hacked and is not secure and it's vulnerable, so of course they are planning to do it...they are setting the stage. And they have been hammering TX - fires in the panhandle (cattle country) - killed tens of thousands of cows - it was devastating - and and faking the H1N1 and taking out the poultry farms...it is so sad - and huge tornados and storms...two this week alone - blew out windows in high rise buildings in downtown Houston...just had another round of tornadoes, hail and 100+ MPH winds just yesterday - over a dozen people died...I feel like a sitting duck...tornados are their new thing? A deflection from fires?
The generator we got was @ $800 on Amazon...it will do the trick. We hated to spend the money...things are always tight around here - many mouths to feed and my husband is closing his shop after 30 years, from so many machine repairs, we just could not get in front of it... - he is throwing in the towel and selling the business for so much less than it is worth...a bit unnerving...but here is the link for the generator.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MMZZSHC/?coliid=I15OK0SNMC9ZF8&colid=R139OB35UA07&ref_=list_c_wl_lv_ov_lig_dp_it&th=1
Congrats on the generator ,brilliant idea ,now you don't have to worry about food spoiling in your fridge or freezer.
I live in NZ. The American fear of water bathing has seeped into our culture over recent years. I gently point out it's pretty specifically an American concern, but once the fear of water bathing sets in, it's tricky to shift. Good on you for preserving your food :)
Thank you! This is a very welcome post. 52 years ago, 3 months after our wedding, I bought a pressure canner with wedding present money. 10 years later I snapped up one on sale, so have both a dial pressure gauge and a weight canner. I have been canning and freezing from my gardens ever since (actually, began as a teen-ager). I still have some of my grandmother's blue glass Ball jars. Summer of '22, getting a bit nervous about all the food-fear porn, I canned about 100 lb of chicken and pork. The young woman ( link you provide to the Amish canning) is a good source--she's on Gab, which is where I found both her and a lot of other really good canning ideas. E.g., I had never tried to can milk (and doesn't the USDA try to scare the pants off us on that topic---which probably means its something we really should be doing), but after listening to these canners on Gab, I did, And used one quart of it this winter--and husband and I are still alive. I take your point on adding vinegar (very grateful, in fact) A, and do have access to higher-acetic-acid type. I am apt to can something in every month of the year--raspberry jam in January from our raspberries in the freezer--because I didn't have time for that when they had to be picked, or marmelade in winter, our orange season.
Thanks! Will definitely be giving it a go.
Regards from way out here New Mexico. Thank you for posting g, we are going to try it! Remember it from my boyhood but it has fallen out of use.
Oh my gosh that looks so good! The beautiful colors and darn the tasty looking meat. For the first time I’m growing veggies from seeds so I will save this method.
My grandmother used to salt and dry fish to preserve them.
Thank you!! I am going to give it a try. I worry about my freezer going out so this would be a great alternative. Thanks for the links..
This is so spot on! Dehydrating is also an age old way for preserving foods. We need to take steps backwards in history to go forward and survive in the future. Thanks for this post V.
Excellent information, thank you & enjoy your day.
Valkrie, you’re AMAZING! Because of you, I’m going to hit up my gorgeous local farmer’s market and get water bathing!
The meat part wigs me out a bit. Is it the 9% like for veggies? Have you ever done chicken? Or turkey?
Please don’t be scared. I really urge watching Tanja’s videos as she shows so clearly how to WB meat, even chicken, on her channel. :) Yes, I’ve WB’d meat many times. We have our own flock of hens here and the spare rooster go for food, so chicken gets WB’d too. Never had a single issue. The vinegar goes into pretty much everything (with some naturally acidic fruits and things like tomatoes excepted). If you add the vinegar (9%) it is pretty foolproof. Always add it to meat of any kind. That’s the only real caveat. The rest is common sense, like cleanliness and making sure the jar lid seals are ok. I also reuse the pasta sauce and other jars which previously held shop produce. Here in Europe those kind of lids are called “lug lids” and you can buy replacements for them online, but other kinds of jars can be used. So long as they seal ok.
Meat WB canning scares a lot of folks who haven’t done it before. I can reassure you how safe it is so long as you follow the instructions given by the likes of Tanja and others who share videos on WB canning it. In fact we’re having one of my jars of beef stew today for dinner. :) Hope this helps.
The government has also made us afraid of mushrooms. One must research first, but some valuable medicinal ones like Turkey Tail are easy to identify if you know mushroom 🍄🟫 physiology (e.g. what is a polypore), and how to make a spore print.
Certain groups should be shunned. Even seasoned mycologists have made mortal mistakes.
Turkey Tail has been demonstrated by Japanese researchers to mitigate a variety of
Cancers, and is prolifically available in deciduous forests. Ostensibly free to the poor.
I do a lot of fruit canning, and am interested in trying meat/or a stew. Thank you for this post!!
Swedes are avid mushroom collectors in autumn. :) The forest is full of them, thankfully. There are many handy guides to help folks ID them but tbh, I believe the best way is to go out there with an experienced collector and be shown what to pick and what to avoid.
I’ll be wb canning fruit and salad veg later in the season, I hope you give meat canning a go. :)