Canning with your kids

Canning with your kids involves boiling liquids, sharp knives and potential botulism. What could go wrong? While it might seem crazy to teach your children how to can, people have been doing it for years and lived to tell about it. Consider it a valuable life skill and and powerful way to pass along culinary traditions. And homemade preserves just taste better than store-bought.

If you know how to can, chances are you learned as a child. I have an early memory of my Mom asking for help in the kitchen. Next thing, I’m standing over a pot of boiling raspberry jam, stirring the lava-like berry mixture and inhaling the intoxicating aroma. Under my Aunt Eileen’s instruction, I later learned how to slip the skins off of perfectly ripe peaches, before placing them in sterilized jars. After college, I made my first batch of bread-and-butter pickles from my New York City studio apartment. Now, I’m unable to pass by a farmstand without stopping to scout out bargains to make relish, pickles or anything else I can think of.

Canning is a great way to teach your kids life skills and pass along family traditions.

I’m not alone. In Tembi Locke’s best-selling memoir “From Scratch,” she describes how on her annual visit to Sicily to visit her in-laws, she and her daughter take part in the village’s annual tomato sauce production. She details how the entire village comes together to transform freshly picked tomatoes into delicious sauce. It’s a laborious process, but a time-honored tradition that allows the villagers to bottle up the sauce to use for an entire year.

So, why do people bother with canning when they can just buy canned goods at the store? With gardens and farm stands overflowing with fresh produce, canning is an economical way to store up the best produce in peak season. If you ever pick up an old cookbook, you’ll notice entire chapters dedicated to preserving food. Our ancestors didn’t have freezers to store food. They also didn’t have out-of-season produce shipped in from all over the world.

Among my favorite childhood memories: Stirring and smelling a pot of raspberry jam.

Teaching kids how to can will also help them gain a new appreciation of all the work that goes into preserving food and the science behind it all. Will jam gel properly if you mess up the measurements? Maybe; maybe not. I taught my daughters how to make jam when they were in elementary school. Soon they were doing it on their own. I recently taught them how to preserve tomatoes and pickle cucumbers. Here’s a few tips to help you start canning with your kids.

Get the Tools

Before you start, line up your equipment. The Ball 3-Piece Canning Utensil Set costs $3.99 at Walmart and is worth every cent. It comes with: 1.) A jar funnel that fits wide and regular mouth jars. 2.) A jar lifter, which is helpful to safely remove your jars from boiling water without burning yourself. (Metal tongs do the trick, too.) 3.) And a handy plastic tool called a bubble remover/headspace tool. You use it to insert into preserves to remove air bubbles. Flip it around and there are tiered notches in the plastic so you can easily measure the headspace (aka air pocket at the top of the jar under the lid. The headspace varies per recipe, but if you don’t measure it correctly, your canned product might not seal properly. A Magnetic Lid Wand is also super helpful and inexpensive.

Making raspberry jam is an annual tradition.

Jars and lids

You’ll need jars with either regular or wide-mouth rims. Most grocery stores and big box stores sell cases of jars. You can reuse the jars and rims but the lids must be replaced when you make new canned products. You can buy boxes of lids or lids with rims separately. If you’re making jam, I recommend half pint jars. Pint and quart jars are recommended for pickles and tomatoes.

Canner

Most people start out with a water bath canner. You can pick one up from Walmart for about $25. It’s basically a big pot with a rack on the bottom to hold the jars. If you plan on canning meat or low-acid foods, like green beans in water, you’ll need a pressure canner. Boiling water isn’t enough to fill the bacteria spores on low-acid foods. So, if you’re a beginner canner or just want to err on the safety side working with kids, stick with the high acid foods like tomatoes and pickles, or making jam.

Select and wash your produce well

Select only the best fruit for your recipes. Then wash them to remove any dirt or insects. Divide your canning kitchen like an assembly line. The youngest kids can oversee washing and setting aside suspect produce. When my daughter was five she helped inspect organic raspberries we’d just harvested for little bugs that inhabited the raspberry patch. Who better than a kid with perfect eyesight? Once they were bug free, she mashed and then measured the fruit.

My daughter packs pickles into sterilized pint jars before pouring in the hot brine.

Read up first

Unlike cooking where you can ad-lib, canning is chemistry. To be successful, read some basic techniques in the  USDA’s Complete Guide to Canning. Botulism is rare but can be deadly. So, please follow the adage–“when in doubt, throw it out.” It’s usually apparent by discolored canned goods or smell. But if the seal has been broken (it clicks when you press down), or you have another reason to believe it’s bad, pitch it!

The “Bible” of canning is Ball Canning Guide. Check out its newest version: The All New Ball Book Of Canning And Preserving: Over 350 of the Best Canned, Jammed, Pickled, and Preserved Recipes. Also check out videos and tips on the Ball Mason Preserving Guides website. If you plan on making jam or jelly, check out A Beginner’s Guide to Making Low-Sugar Plum Jam from cookbook author Melissa McClellan who’s written several books on the topic.

The basis for future delicious meals: Crushed tomatoes, pickles and canned tomatoes

Canned Tomatoes

–Patty Yeager

Patty Yeager is the managing editor of Smart Lifebites. Her stories include: Ten Tips for Visiting a U-Pick Fruit Farm with the kids  and 5 Cool things you probably didn’t know about pecans.