There's nothing wrong with the Small Batch book but the recipes are not the basics. I love that book, but it's an adjunct, not the foundation for any canner.

I can't figure out what the problem is with scaling canning recipes. I do that all the time. Do it once, enter the amounts for future use and there you go. Do double-check all amounts. You don't want to make a mistake.

There are also recipe software programs that allow imports from the web and will scale for you.

Carol

When you don't know what you're doing, and the only rule you're confident in is "Don't change anything", it's easy to second guess yourself. I just wasn't sure there wasn't some reason why doing the amount they specified of tomatoes would yield some kind of a difference from cutting the amount into thirds that would result in something unsafe. I want to second guess myself before I divy up my meager harvest, not by throwing away the jars because I just can't bring myself to trust my work in the winter! I was really expecting to find a simple statement about how to scale recipes, but all I found was the kind of throw away comment about other recipes having a determined yield that must not be changed, and couldn't find clear guidance on how to tell which kind of recipe is which, except that the tomato sauce recipe seemed to be marked for yielding 7 quarts, which I thought was more than I'd need at any given canning session.

If you have more than 2 tomato plants, they should produce the 45# over their season.

I usually just can what it's available, then use the jars in my cooking, instead of making a certain recipe while I can.

You will be amazed how much your garden will produce.

The pickle mixes (I use Mrs. Wages) only asks for about 9-12 lbs. and if you weigh a single good sized cuke, it could weigh close to a pound.

Also, if it suits your needs, can in pints. If a processing time isn't provided, just use the quart time.

A lot of people can on a two-year cycle and rotate, so it may be you'll use all your tomatoes if the jars are right-size for your home.

Carol

I usually can in a 2-3 year rotation. That way if something doesn't grow well 1 year, I've still got plenty. I've also found that pints work well for the 2 of us, except tomato juice for chili. I use qts for that and 1 1/2 pts for spaghetti sauce.

I'm late to this discussion so just ignore me if I am misunderstanding your questions, ok?

By "scaling" you mean cutting a recipe in half, correct? If so that is easy to do and frequently done. True They make mention of the importance of following instructions, but that refers to the importance of keeping the ingredients proportions intact. If you use 1/2 the tomatoes you must also use half the onions or whatever too. No arbitrary scaling of the ingredients. It's all or not at all.

Foe example: Some people would like to increase or decrease the amount of one of the ingredients to change the taste so they figure if they leave out 1/2 of one ingredient they should be able to double another. That is a big NO because it can drastically change the pH or the density of the food. Change either screws the processing time needed for safety.

and clearly mark some recipes as yielding a total amount while others are for "per quart". What I'm not really getting is why.

Part of that "why" I explained. As to the yield statements, that is simply because some recipes are more commonly made by the quart and some by the batch. Some ingredients (like salt) is only added to the jar in some cases but to the whole mix in other cases. That is no different than with cooking recipes.

Specifically, for me 45 lbs of tomatoes sounds like an awful lot to be the minimum tomato sauce recipe.

It does sound like a lot but it really isn't once the peels and cores and any bad spots are removed, run through the mill, and then cooked down into sauce, 45 lbs of tomatoes doesn't fill that many jars. Since most canners don't want to spend hours making only 4 jars of sauce when we can spend the same amount of time and end up with 8 jars we prefer to work with large amounts.

But no, you don't have to. You can make one jar at a time if you want. It just wastes the energy used when it takes as much time and power to make 8 jars as it does to make 1 jar. But it is your choice.

If you don't think you'll have 45 lbs at one time then do what many do. Freeze them whole until you do have enough for one big batch.

However, if I'd rather can as I go along and can't get that much at once, would it be officially "safer" to just use the "tomato in it's own juice" recipe rather than mess with scaling the recipe?

Use whichever recipe you wish. If tomato sauce is the goal then make tomato sauce. If you canned tomatoes in its own juice when sauce is what you want then it just means doubling your work later to turn them into sauce.

So if canning plain tomato sauce is your goal and you want to do it in pints or even 1/2 pints then all you need is 28-30 lbs for a thick sauce.

Does this help any?

Dave

Here is a link that might be useful: Canning tomato sauce - NCHFP

I a lot of the same questions. Thanks for the very thorough answers?

Thank you both, Carol and Dave. The way Dave explained it is the way I figured it SHOULD work, but I thought I would be able to find some kind of simple confirmation saying it's okay (even if time management wasteful) to do only one quart of a 7 quart yielding recipe as long as it's exactly 1/7th everything. Maybe it's the computer programmer in me, but I don't understand why everything isn't listed to quart, and just scaled up to common canning batch sizes, so I got paranoid there's a reason why doing less would matter.

My garden is definitely my therapy this year, and it's spiraling out of control, so I don't have any really good sense of what I'm capable of. Everything I grow seems to get killed by some pest I should have apparently been planning for two months before, so I'm bound and DETERMINED to get some pickles and tomatoes put down for the winter!

I'm just kind of doing mental math in my head and trying to guestimate how often we eat pasta, how much of each kind of processed tomato my family recipe takes, and then trying to back that down to the plants in my garden and I'm pretty sure I know how people spiral out of control with varieties...

I really appreciate all the help and advice here on these forums, it's given me a lot of confidence to just go for it with less than ideal gardening conditions.

Mister.guy, after a few years, you might figure it out. By that time, your family will change some of their eating.

Plus planting those little seeds is so easy, but keeping up with the weeding and picking isn't as much.

Keep in mind also that all you can doesn't have to be consumed within a year. So don't let the "how often do we eat______" throw you off track.

As mentioned, what usually happens is you can it all thinking you'll never use it all and lo and behold it all gets used up faster than you expected.

Maybe it's the computer programmer in me, but I don't understand why everything isn't listed to quart, and just scaled up to common canning batch sizes

It's a good question but as I said, with experience we all discover that big batches are easier and more efficient use of resources.

Plus philosophy (waste not, want not so preserve in the good times for use in the bad times) and history (pioneer history) plays a big role in canning, both methods and recipes. No way was pioneer grandma interested in just doing one jar at a time of anything. Took hours just to build that fire up under the cauldron out in the yard. :=)

Dave

Give yourself a pat on the back for making this significant move into a new path re food production and preservation.

Frankly, while it's disappointing to have such problems with your crops, it may not be a bad thing overall. First, if you take notes, next year you'll be much more prepared for those eventualities (i.e. common pests, diseases, watering issues, etc.). You'll also have a better sense of which varieties are generally most successful in your micro-climate.

I have to say also that if everything you planted produced bumper crops, you'd probably be overwhelmed with preservation. Gardening and canning present big learning curves for the novice and the process of canning, in particular, requires a lot of co-ordination. For the working person the crush of harvest season is exhausting.

I grew up in a farming/canning culture, so for me this whole food preservation thing is second nature. Same for my husband. But now we have a new generation, many of whom did not grow up learning this at grandma's knee. It just takes a while to get into the rhythm of the seasons and the routines of canning (i.e. how you arrange your kitchen, where you store the product, how you label).

A slow start is best. You're far less likely to make wasteful or risky errors. And a little paranoia in the interest of safety is definitely more to be desired than a cavalier indifference to the issues.

And thank you Dave for taking the time to explain so succinctly some critical points.

Carol

One more thing to consider that I didn't see mentioned might be based on how the recipe for the product batch is put together.

If you just had tomatoes and water in the batch part, and had to put salt and lemon juice in each jar before adding tomatoes, it's not such a big deal to scale the batch part of the product and just use what you needed as you need it to fill the next jar.

But if you're making something with multiple solid ingredients where everything goes in the pot to stew for a while, like three bean salad, then you wouldn't want to double or triple that batch all in the same big pot. There's less of a guarantee that you'll get even distribution of product across jars. I guess if you're OK with that last jar being full of garbanzo beans that settled to the bottom, then it doesn't matter so much. :-)

I made three bean salad last year, and I had enough beans to make three batches. So I made three separate batches and allowed them to pickle overnight in separate containers in the fridge before heating and canning each individually the next day. I tried to keep each mixed as I was filling jars so I had a mostly even distribution across jars. I was pretty happy with the result. By the time the first batch of jars was in the canner and back to a boil for 10 minutes, the second batch was hot and just about ready to start filling jars for the next load. It's kind of stressful, but it's fun at the same time.

If I had three batches of three bean salad in the same hot pot, it would be much more difficult to keep it all stirred up and I know I'd have some odd jars at the end.

Just something else to think about.