Canning/Preserving
So, I thought..."gee, the fresh growing season is right around the corner. Wouldn't it be nice to dine on local fruits and veggies all the time....Hell, wouldn't it be cool to have a community garden and my whole neighborhood could eat fresh local produce all year round!" So I clicked around the web a little to find out how to reserve my own food and....HOLY CRAP!
http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/can_home.html a national website about home preservation has guidelines for home canning and the first thing they say is if you can it wrong you could get botulism and they went into serious detail about the risks of canning and how if you suspect a jar has infected spores you have to like sanitize your whole kitchen and handle it like hazardous waste.
Freaking scary! How did people not wipe out the population when they were all home canning...how are the Amish who still home can remain alive?! I don't know if the goal of this website was to discourage people from home canning but thats basically what it has done. Sweet, I love the idea of buying food from commercial vendors for the rest of my government-induced-fearful life. ;)b I'm seriously freaking scared to eat anything thats been canned now... :-\
Dang it!
I teach people how to can. It's really easy to do right. You store canned food without the ring on, so you can tell if somethings gone bad. I've never had anything go bad. Following the directions by having the jars exposed to a certain amount of heat for a certain amount of time does the trick. The important thing to remember is to not just take any old recipe from online. You want to use something like Ball Blue Book that has scientifically tested recipes.
hummm....thats comforting. Are you able to use any jar that has been sterilized...like can you use jars from your groceries? Maybe just buy a new lid for them? I like the idea of not putting the ring on. Seems to make sense. If you don't need the ring, why do they have it in the first place?
You're safest bet is to buy canning jars. The rings keep the lid in place when you screw down the ring. You need to wash the jars in hot soapy water and pour boiling water over them. Then fill your jars with hot food and put on the lids and rings. Then you place your jars in a boiling water bath for the specified time in the recipe. After the jars cool and the lids have sunk down you can take the rings off. The lids are kept on by suction and the vacuum created when the food is heated in the jar. Fruits are the easiest to can as vegetables need to be pressure processed. Get a good book with all the recipes, directions and times for processing. I "put up" jams, apple sauce and pickled beets (which have enough acid to be processed without pressure). I've never canned vegetables. I usually freeze those.
What Isabella said. You use the rings when processing the jars, but you take the rings off for storage. It's best to use canning jars. You can reuse the jars and rings, but you need new lids each time because you need the fresh seal.