Hello everyone. I hope this night finds you with peace and contentment. As I was sitting here on this nice cool Florida night, I was thinking about sharing this post about pressure canning safely. I know that there are very many people out there that are scared to death to even begin to try out a pressure canner or pressure cooker for that matter.
You are really missing out if you don’t have one of these. You can take a roast right out of the freezer and pressure cook it in 25-30 minutes. No defrosting time at all. As for the pressure canner(it is way bigger). You have the world open up to you on canning just about anything that you can buy in the store in a can and that saying a whole lot of stuff and if you follow directions to a T. Then your food will be safe for years.
Here in this post, I talk about problems and how to fix them for your maximum safety. And all will always be safe if you keep watch for these problems and correct it by following directions’ step by step.
The biggest mistake that you could ever make is to open the cooker while it is hot! It will explode. So be sure it is cooled down to zero and that there is no steam left. Only then can you open the pot and aim it away from you as there will be steam coming off the water in the pot. And you don’t want that to burn you.
I am going to talk about my hard day yesterday with all of you as it is a subject that needs to be discussed for safety. Pressure canning is an awesome knowledge to have as you can do boundless canning with one.
As I was trying to can my jars of homemade chili yesterday I had a lot of trouble with the number dial not moving off zero and going up to the 10 pounds of pressure. If you have been following my blog then you already know that it takes a lot of time just for the canner to begin letting out steam on medium temperature setting’ so that you are slowly building up pressure. If too fast and higher dial setting then you will lose all the liquid from your jars.
So you wait and watch for the steam to build up so that you can now put the weighted jiggly thing on top of the canner. Then you wait some more and wait again. When the number dial gets up to 10 lbs of pressure(or the recommended pressure) for what you are canning then you turn on your timer. And lower the stove dial to 3. But you have to keep adjusting if the pressure gets too low or too high. My chili was 90 minutes at 10 lbs of pressure.
Wouldn’t you know it’ my dial never moved off zero in 15 minutes of time with me constantly checking on it. So I had to turn it off and walk away for an hour before I could open it safely. I flipped the rubber sealing band around the other way and stuck a toothpick in the holes of every pressure release dial and started out again.
Well I went through a whole lot of time again and went through each step to get to the steam coming out the vent. And putting the jiggy thing on. Well after 15 minutes’ the number dial gauge still sat on zero again. So I turned it off again and left it for an hour to cool down so that I could open it again.
This time I used quite a few toothpicks on every vent hole again. I noticed that there was a calcium build up on most of them and a few had black gunk(nasty) in the tiny vents. When you can some liquid always escapes from the jars. I startred running toothpicks through all vents. And I began the whole routine again but I also added more water to the pot that matched the temperature of hot water in the pot’ as my canning jars of chili have been in there this whole time.
So here I go for the third time and not to say that I was a little bit aggravated. Everything went as planned and worked like a charm!
Most people are scared to death of a pressure canner because years ago if used incorrectly and opened while still steaming hot then they have exploded I have heard of a very few times. But If you follow safety rules like I have described here then you will always be safe and open to a world of canning adventures! Keep viewing my blog for my chili how to canning and photos.
PS. My very favorite thing to can is chili in quart jars! No more chili from the store from me. It has to taste like the best pot of chili that you have ever had. That’s good chili and more meaty than a drive through.
Thanks for visiting and do please come back soon or stay awhile and read some more posts if you will.
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