Putting Food By - Janet Greene [25]
(Drawing by Norman Rogers)
The height of a quart jar (we’ll use jars here, as the manufacturer and the great majority of home-canners do) is 7 inches if it’s a modern mason with a two-piece screwband lid, or 7½ inches if it’s the old bailed type with a domed glass lid.
Add 4½ inches and 7 to 7½ inches and you get 11½ to 12 inches.
But the inside depth of our 33-quart Boiling–Water Bath canner is only a scant 10 inches. Therefore—though it’s OK for pints, which are 5 to 5½ inches tall, and of course for the even shorter ½-pint jars—we cannot use it for processing quart jars.
Most canners sold today are at least 13 inches deep and so will accommodate quart jars. But if an online supplier does not specify the depth of its canner, call before you order it. Just remember the rule: the depth of the canner must equal the height of your jars plus 4½ to 5 inches. Stick to your guns, and you’ll find the one that will do the job right.
Other B–W Bath Canner Possibilities
You can always sail right on past the inadequate B–W Bath canners and buy a stockpot. A heavy-duty aluminum stockpot will do a good job for safe processing of strong-acid foods; but it cannot double as a preserving kettle for brined or vinegared things because, being aluminum, the metal might react with the acid. Most glorious of all are the stainless steel stockpots. They’re relatively expensive, but they do come in many sizes; and they are impervious to acid. Invest in one—or two.
A third idea is to use a Pressure Canner for a B–W Bath (for how, see page 54.
How to Use the B–W Bath
Put your canning kettle on the stove and fill it halfway with water; put a rack in the bottom; turn on the heat. If the food you’re canning takes relatively little time to prepare for packing in the containers, start heating a large teakettle of extra water now too.
Prepare the food for canning according to the individual instructions, packing it in clean, scalded containers, and putting on lids as directed.
Jars of raw (cold) food must not be put in boiling water, lest they crack; you may need to add cool water to the canner. However, if the food in the jars is very hot, the filled jars may go into nearly boiling water without fear of breakage. (Cans will always be hot, because they’ve just been exhausted. See page 72.)
Process in each load only one type of food, in one size of container.
If you like your canner’s lift-out rack, fill it with capped containers, and lower the whole thing bodily into the hot water. If your batch does not have enough jars to fill the canner, use “dummy” jars of the same size, filled with hot water and capped. These prevent food-jars from knocking together.
Or use your jar-lifter to lower jars/cans individually onto the simple rack at the bottom of the kettle. Place them away from the sides of the canner and about 1 inch apart, so the boiling water will be able to circulate freely around them. Don’t jam them in or even let them touch: jars might break as they expand ever so slightly while processing. If your batch is too small to make a full canner-load, submerge mayonnaise jars, or whatever, in the empty spaces to keep your capped jars of food from shifting around as they boil.
If your canner is tall enough to let you process two tiers of small jars/ cans at a time, use a wire cake-cooling rack to hold the upper layer of containers. Ensure adequate circulation by staggering them as you do when baking on several racks in your oven.
Pour enough more hot water around the jars/cans to bring the level 2 inches above the tops of all containers; be careful not to dump boiling water smack on top of jars.
What to Do About Racks
The racks that come in many B–W Bath kettles can be infuriating. Made of heavy-gauge wire, they may resemble a flimsy wagon wheel or they look like the skeleton of a basket; at any rate the “spokes” or dividers are so wide apart that even pint jars sometimes fall between them, instead of resting on them. Some lack support strong enough to hold containers high enough off the bottom of the canner.