On our trips to Tofino, we’ve fallen in love with the Mermaid Tales Book shop which has always lovely curated collection of books, and I always leave there with a little more debt racked up on my credit card (but knowledge is priceless, am I right?!)
This time, one of the books that was part of my every growing collection is “The Canning Kitchen”: 101 Simple Small Batch Recipes by Amy Bronee.
What drew me to this book is that S and I have been wanting to get into preserving food in different ways (dehydrating, canning, pickling, freezing, etc.) However, both of us are fairly amateur at this, and previous endeavours have left us with mixed results from triumph to overwhelm or disinterest.
For instance, we’ve had our hand at fermentation of sorts. S bough a a book called Ferment For Good. He had it recommended it to him by a guy who was making his own kimchi and other goods. He read the introduction and was stoked about it, but then eventually continued on and was a little disappointed. He says it essentially turned into a recipe book of different things you could ferment, but it didn’t excite him. S has been into brewing beer and fermenting hot sauce so having a basic overview didn’t really bring as much to him. I’ve been making kombucha on and off for almost a decade so I’m also starting to feel comfortable with fermentation basics. Together we also made about a dozen different fruit vinegars at home with a double fermentation process, and that was a win!
HOWEVER, canning and pickling are newer to us, so this book on canning is right up our alley.
Canned goods preserved in the home kitchen were familiar to both me and S. When S grew up, Papa would pick all the green beans and store them under the stairs. Meanwhile I grew up eating raclette as a family holiday meal. This entailed all the goodies that could be stored and savoured in the winter: including potatoes from the cellar, raclette cheese and all the jars that came out of the pantry and cellar – pickled pearl onions, cornichons, baby corn, zucchini relish and more. Whatever was in a glass jar was added to the mix of the family style meal. The acidic delights were the perfect complement to the rich, creamy cheese and hearty potatoes.
The largest extent of my own canning journey has been fairly minimal, as jams and jellies are about as much as I’ve dived into the realm of canning. I grew up putting on denim pants in the summer so Dad and I could trudge into the invasive thorny brambles of blackberry bushes and harvest buckets full the delicious August fruits. My childhood family dog Bubbles was the best at finding the ripest berries at canine-height and delicately pick them off to eat.
Last year, we made it an inter-generational family event by picking strawberries with my parents, sister & nieces our at Krause Berry Farms and then coming back to the house (during a heatwave no less) and making a strawberry preserve as wedding giveaways. Most recently, Dad came over and we used the many pounds of plums and apricots from Okanagan to make some jams for this year.
This, I hope, is the tip of the iceberg. Call it kismet or a keen eye, the Canning Kitchen popped out to me as S and I continued to have conversations about gardens, nourishment, preservation and having a pantry with home-grown food.
As the opening of the book says:
People can food for many different reasons. For some it’s about preserving connection to our past or preserving freshness that’s in season to enjoy another day. For some it’s about making a jam or salsa that isn’t in stores, or knowing exactly what goes into your food. For others it’s simply about spending time, apron on and knife in hand, crafting something beautiful to share. Most often for me, making jam with strawberries from my own garden or jelly with apples from my own tree, it is about slowing down to live in the past and the right now at the very same time. Every glossy jar cooling on the counter represents contentment for me; regardless of whatever is going on out there int eh world, everything is just as it should be in my kitchen.
Amy Bronee, The Canning Kitchen: 101 Simple Small Batch Recipes: A Cookbook
As S and I conclude our first season of growing a food garden and do our retrospective of all the many failures and exciting wins and all the learning in between, we also are eager to spend the hibernation season of winter to set ourself up for success with more bountiful harvests next year. And with those harvests, we want to also hone our skills in the kitchen with food preservation, sot hat the yummy nutrition coming from the garden last well past the hot summer days and carries us into the colder days with minimal daylight.
So, we soak in the last of the sun rays as the summer transitions into fall, and we say farewell to our beauty of Pacific Northwest summer, and I crack open the book, and dive into learning all about caning.
First learning about canning with boiling water bath method – only acid foods!
The only foods that should be boiling water bath canned are acid foods such as fruit jams, fruit jellies, marmalades, pickles, chutneys, relishes and other acid mixtures at or below 4.6 pH. Botulism, caused by the soil-based bacterium Clostridium botulinum, is serious. The spokes are heat—resistant and grow in moist low-acid, low-oxygen environments.
Amy Bronee, The Canning Kitchen: 101 Simple Small Batch Recipes: A Cookbook
Use pectin
Often mistaken for a preservative of an animal—based product (that’s gelatin), pectin is a naturally occurring fibre found in most plant cells. Pectin is activated when it’s combined with sugar in an acid mixture over high heat, producing a gel set for jams and jellies. Some fruits, such as strawberries and peaches, contain very little pectin, while other fruits, such as apples and citrus, have pectin concentrated in their seeds and skins.
Amy Bronee, The Canning Kitchen: 101 Simple Small Batch Recipes: A Cookbook