Pressure Canning Instructions, Food Preservation at it's finest

These detailed pressure canning instructions will have you happily canning and saving money on your grocery bill. Frugal living is catching on!

Canning under pressure is heavy duty arm of food preservation. It is rightly used for all meats and all vegetables, because these foods are alkaline on the ph scale. So low acid foods including fish, poultry, seafood and beef all go in the pressure canner, not the water bath. The same goes for all vegetables and dairy products.

Unlike using a water bath canner for High Acid Foods such as tomatoes or fruits, canning under pressure is extremely important as it raises the temperature inside your jars of food to 240-250 degrees for a specific length of processing time.

You must have a pressure canner for meats and vegetables. There is a fancy name for Botulism, but the point is in understanding the nature of this beast. If you are Home Canning Meat or vegetables like Canning Green Beans you need to use a pressure canner.

Found in meat and vegetables, the bacteria is harmless until allowed to multiply rampantly in an environment that is moist, low in acid and oxygen free. The vacuum you worked so hard to achieve allows the toxins to grow to alarming levels.

You can effectively kill your family with Botulism spores if you use a water bath at 212 degrees instead of a pressure-type canner at 240-250 degrees for low acid foods.

Don't let anyone talk you out of it with old fashioned stories of how someones Grandma's family only had a pot of water to can their meats and vegetables, and nobody ever died of Botulism spores. They aren't around to actually verify that.

Not to worry, people have been Home Canning Foods forever and if you just follow directions closely you will have great success with canning your Local Harvest. You should be able to save at least 50% of your monthly food bill.

How Pressure Canners Work

There are two main types of modern pressurized home canners on the market today, the weighted gauge and the dial gauge.
The canners are lightweight aluminum or stainless large kettles. They usually have a twist on lid holding a seal with a gasket. Inside are jar racks, and the lid features both a weighted vent port (the Petcock) that the steam comes out from, and a safety vent.

You may get one that has either a dial gauge indicating the pressure, or a weighted one, which will also regulate the temperature but indicates this by rattling a few times each minute.

The idea is to add a certain amount of water, which the directions will indicate for you. The jars are not submerged completely as in a water bath canner. The directions will tell you how much water to add so it can build the right amount of pressure inside. After you fill the jars, and have placed them inside and closed the lid, you will need to vent, or allow the steam to blow out while the water is boiling inside.

When cooking, the steam pushes out all the air, leaving an environment of only water vapor under pressure, built to our target temperature of 240 degrees, which in turn evenly conducts intense heat to the sides and middle of the jars.