4 Ways I Prevent Canning Season from Ruining My Life (and my Kitchen)
Canning season is the world’s longest sustained assault on any kitchen. It makes every food-centered holiday look like an itty-bitty baby 5k; it's the ultra of ultramarathons, battering the body of my kitchen for hours and hours and hours and hours. For us, nestled in the Northeast, it lasts from early August to the end of October and involves some sort of prep, cooking, or cleaning almost every day.
You should totally do it.
Needless to say, I have learned a LOT about how to handle this full-frontal assault, and each year, I’m learning about 5% more. In today’s post: some of the systems I’ve put in place to make it all jell (get it? Jell… instead of gel… like JELL-Y… you know, because it’s canning season… you know…)
Start with a clean kitchen, and keep cleaning as you go.
This includes having an empty sink and an empty dishwasher. I often reuse things during the processing cycle that I will hand wash pretty quickly, but for things that I'm not going to reuse (or that I've used as much as I'm going to) being able to rinse them off and put them right in the dishwasher helps keeps counters free of unnecessary things. This ensures that I don't have any sort of massive cleanup at the end of the processing day, and ensures that all of my tools are ready when I need them.
Always double-check your ingredients and the tools you need–before you get started.
I can not tell you how many times I have had to stop in the middle of canning because I didn’t have what I needed, my fiancé couldn’t find it when I made him frantically run to the store, and I realized I had to order it online (praise to the gods of next day delivery–a wasteful AF concept that has saved my ass on countless occasions despite my absolute disdain for it).
It’s worth being clear here: getting started and having to stop sucks on so many levels. Most pertinent to us: it has caused us to waste food on more than one occasion, something we find to be quite unacceptable. We learned to always do a quick double-check of all of the ingredients and tools we needed, and if we didn’t have it, we made a plan to get it–before we got started.
Have some kind of stove system.
I don’t know about your stove situation but mine is this: I have one regular-sized propane stove/oven combo that is in our kitchen. We do not have some massive set-up or second canning kitchen, outdoor kitchen, or anything like that (though, outdoor kitchen–OMG, the dream!). We do have some pretty great counter space, so I’m not complaining, but limited stove space means you have to think pretty smartly about how to simultaneously sanitize jars, run the canner, and keep your jam/broth/other culinary creation hot so that you can hot pack it.
Here is what I do, which I love: I have one burner dedicated to boiling hot water for sanitization, I have one burner for the canner, and I have one burner for the culinary creation that I am canning; sometimes I have two for this, if I’m canning a LOT.
First, I cook (or re-heat) whatever I’m canning while the water is boiling for the other two burners. If I’m canning stock or broth, I’m reheating, as I cook those overnight, but if I’m making jams or canning fruit, I am likely cooking them for the first time at this point.
Then, when the food is getting close, I’ll start my sanitization process by adding whatever to the boiling sanitizer bath. I’ll keep the canner on a low boil because I’m getting close to using it.
Once the sanitization is done, I’ll fill the sanitized cans with food, get them into the canner, and start the next round of sanitization. At this point, I’m just keeping the food warm.
And I rotate like this. The timing is never perfect, but keeping everything going in a round robin has helped me minimize the delays caused by trying to reheat water or trying to get the canner or sanitization bath back up to a boil. I’ll have this going on until all food is canned for the day.
Leverage nighttime and workdays for passive work.
Two things you should know about me if you don’t already: 1) I have a full time job that I am very passionate about and 2) I need my sleep… for EVERYONE’s sake. That said, I’ve learned how to leverage both my work days and my nights for cooking in a few different ways:
I thaw bones, berries, and other things for using the next day or that night.
I cook in a crockpot for to make stock and broth, and to cook down sauces or other liquids.
I let stock and other stuff set in the fridge to cool down and make it easier to filter out the fats and solids.
Both of these allow me to make sure that when I’m ready to cook or can, I have stuff ready to use. And like my stove method, I just keep this on rotation throughout the season. I’ll have bones thawing for broth, while another set is in the crockpot finishing up, and another set is in the canner being canned.
Well, as they say–that’s all folks! I hope some of these may be helpful for you, and if you have questions, hit me up on Instagram or via the site! I’d love to chat!