Canning...

So this past weekend we did a little canning. We made salsa and pizza sauce. I thought I'd take you through the process...

First thing to do is to sterilize your jars. Our dishwasher has a sanitizing cycle, so that really makes it easy. This may look like a lot of jars but we ran two cycles that day...

Then it is time to prep the tomatoes. First, you blanch them by tossing them in boiling water for a minute or so and then in ice water. The skins should come right off...

After that you need to core them.

We ended up cooking a full bushel (actually a bit more) that day, so I was very glad of our new toy... You just throw tomatoes (skins and all) in the top and it skins and seeds them. We did about 75% of the tomatoes this way, doing 25% the old fashioned way so our salsa would have some tomato chunks.Then there is a LOT of seeding and chopping. With hubby and I working together it went quicker, but was still a couple good hours of work. Here is hubby chopping the five cups of diced jalapenos I needed for one of the three recipes we made...

When all that is done comes the easier part of the job, cooking the salsa. But when you are doing 15 pint batches...
That is a lot of salsa, and a lot of stirring. This is where our high BTU gas stove shines, when cooking 15 pints of salsa (which started as 20 some, as we reduced it by about 1/3rd.)

Then all you have to do is stick it in the jars (which we do to quickly to get photos, ensuring hot and clean jars) and put it in the not water bath. Our new one will hold 9 quarts (or nine pints) at a time, so each batch of salsa and the pizza sauce required 2 runs of the bath. To make it quicker, we do it outside on a turkey fryer burner, which will boil the water in 10 minutes, and keep the water roiling even after adding the jars.
In the end we worked from about 2 until about 10 and we ended up with quite a few jars!

Although to be honest, a couple dozen of these were previously canned pepper rings and jam, but over 50 pints of salsa and pizza sauce. Not bad for a day's work... The sad thing is we need not only do we need to do another 36 or so pints of salsa but also need to do 48 or more QUARTS of sauce, a project for another weekend (or two.)