Seeing as yesterday was the perfect day to stay inside and do something worthwhile, I decided to finish preserving, in this case home-canning 6 lbs of carrots I recently bought for a good price at Warehouse Market.

A lot of people shy away from home-canning as it involves a lot of time and work.  Indeed, it does, but the savings in preserving your own food can be significant, especially when your dad gives you half the bounty of his green bean crop every year. 

I’ve done this home-canning thing for several years now and have come up with a system that takes out the headache of getting your food inside that jar where it will be preserved for years and come out as fresh as when you cooked it.

Here are the steps I had to go through to get these 6 lbs of carrots into 4 1-quart jars.

WARNING:  Use directions at your own risk.  Low-acid vegetables MUST be canned with a pressure cooker at 10-psi.  Otherwise you run the risk of growing your own canned version of botulism, which can easily kill you.  While the risk is remote, you should still be careful.  If you are interested in home-canning, go get the Ball Blue Book of Preserving.  Read it, understand it, use proper cooking and preparation methods.  Don’t just blindly jump into something like this without first learning how to do it.  I’m just writing this mostly to illustrate it doesn’t have to be hard and that it can be done over several days or even weeks.

First Day
Peeled the carrots. Put them into a gallon sized bag and placed in fridge.

Second Day
Cut the carrots up.  Put them back into the same gallon bag.  Put in fridge.

Third Day
After three days of sitting in the fridge, I realize it will be about a week before I can get to the carrots.  Place gallon bag into freezer to keep them fresh.

Fourth Day
Ok, have time to complete the process seeing as there’s about 6 inches of snow outside, kids aren’t here and I’m bored out of my mind.

Preparation time: about 20 minutes.

I place the carrots into a large pot to defrost and heat them up at the same time.  I also place about 2 inches of water into my giant pressure cooker and get it warming up.

Wash your quart jars, lids, and rings.  For the amount of carrots I have, I estimate about 5 jars.

Place 1 tsp salt into each jar.  Don’t have to, but I think it gives a much better flavor right out of the jar.

Carrots are defrosted and ready to rumble.  Use a canning funnel and ladle to get the carrots into their jars:

Fill jars with cooking water from the large pot you used to boil the carrots up to 1 inch from the top.  I save the remaining carrot “water” for another project I have tomorrow.  Wipe the glass rims and put on the lids and rings.

I always have the jar rack that goes into the pressure cooker set on the top of the cooker using the special grooves in the rack handles.  Makes it easier to get them into the pressure cooker.  Notice I only got 4 full 1-quart jars this go-around.  I used the rest for dinner that same evening.  About a pint was left over.

Set jars into water of pressure cooker, which should be near-boiling by now.

Put on your pressure cooker’s lid and use whatever mechanism it provides to lock it down good and tight.  My particular pressure cooker has a small weight that sits on top of a nipple in the locking lid.  I leave this weight off of the lid and let the cooker come to a boil until steam comes steadily streaming out of the small hole.

Soon the cooker boils sending steam streaming out of the weight holder thingee.  I set the weight on top of the nipple.  Pressure begins to build.

After about 4 minutes the weight lifts up enough from the built up pressure and begins to vent steam.  I turn the heat down to low and allow the weight to “bubble” for thirty minutes, thereby cooking the vegetables inside and setting the stage for sealing the jars.

I go read a book, do some vacuuming, read some email, smoke some crack, you know.. that sort of thing.

Buzzer goes off, telling me I need to turn off the fire.  I do so.

I allow the pressure cooker to sit for about two hours, then remove the weight. You might be able to barely see in the picture below that even after two hours, the jar on the left is still slightly boiling.  Amazing how much heat sits inside of these things.

Remove the jars with a jar holder grasper thing, and put them on towel on a table to cool down.

Allow to cool overnight.

I remove the rings and check the seals in the morning.  If all is well, I wash the jars with warm soap and water at the same time I do dishes.  I suppose this is optional, but I’m anal like that.

And there you go.  A gallon of carrots for about half the price (probably more) than if I bought them in commercial tin cans from the store.  Really not that hard.  And they last forever.

Remember the carrot “water” I saved?  I’m using that water tomorrow as the water in a crock pot that will be cooking 10 lbs of chicken to be canned.    Waste not, want not.