• When buying produce, "a pint is a pound the world around". Buy too much bulk produce first; then figure out the recipe and pick up the odds and ends. Try to base dinners around excess.
• The ingredients for traditional recipes of any area are found together at the farmer’s market at the right time. In Michigan, our canning schedule started with pickled asparagus, spring onions, and radishes in mid-May. By early June, cucumbers, zucchini and summer squash are coming in, and it’s a good time to forage green apples for pectin stock. Field strawberries are available by mid-June. We couldn’t plan on finding much of anything else to preserve until after July 1. Our year ended in late September.
• Generally, the cheapest thing to make is applesauce, followed by pickles and other vegetable products, and then fruit. Canned berry products take far less time to prepare than other fruits. The cheapest vegetable by the pound is yellow onion.
• If you plan to do a lot of canning, especially fruit, buy a 25-50 lb bag of really good sugar in the Spring.
• Don’t stir jellies while they are evaporating. Stirring makes strings and produces a jelly that is too sticky, like candy.
• Buy decent vinegar or make your own. I do not use distilled vinegar for cooking under any circumstance. I personally prefer rice vinegar. Use a pH reader or test strips to verify that products have been properly acidified for peace of mind, no matter what vinegar is used or where the recipe is from.
• Put a little variation into the product when possible. Every jar in a batch of pickles doesn’t have to contain the same spices. Experiment.
• The FDA guidelines for commercial canners are easy to use and yield fresher products than the USDA recommendations. If a recipe calls for water bath canning, but the texture is smooth and pours, using the inversion method with sterilized jars and lids is fine. Chunky products like pickle spears can harbor air bubbles and must be water bath canned, but not nearly as long as the USDA says. (Stephen Palmer Dowdney's "Putting Up" is the only cookbook I know of based on modern canning science. We used it as reference for every project.)
• Everything you preserve doesn’t have to last forever. Everything doesn’t have to be shelf stable. Canning is labor intensive. It is very easy to blanch and freeze produce. Berries and bananas can be frozen whole with no processing required. People preserved food long before canning and freezers were invented in ways that were often more nutritious.
