Carol,

If you want a good, basic no-frills canner but aren't sure how much you'll use it, I'd recommend a Preston 23-quart. It is highly recommended by the avid canners at the Harvest Forum.

If you want to invest a lot of money in a very well-made, very heavy and substantial canner that will last a lifetime, I'd suggest an All-American.

I'd avoid the Mirro brand because the word on the Harvest Forum is that there are concerns about the company's stability and you don't want to purchase a canner from a company that might not be around to sell parts for it in the future.

Also, avoid pressure cookers. Sometimes people buy a pressure cooker by mistake when they intended to buy a pressure canner. They are not the same thing.

With any canning you do, only use recipes approved by the USDA and National Center For Home Food Preservation, or from one of the handful of cookbooks deemed safe by the canning experts. Approved presssure-canning (and BWB canning) recipes and procedures have changed over the years, so you have to be sure you're using the latest approved technique for safety's sake.

If you want to read what oodles of folks who use canners say about the various pressure canners that are available, go to the Harvest Forum and do a search using that forum's search box. You'll like get 100 or 200 or more old threads to read through.

I think a Presto 23-qt. is adequate for most of us---except for Diane. She needs the All-American because it will take a whole lot of canning to put up food for her large family. (Diane, I'm still expecting you'll get an All-American one of these days!)

Finally, you need to read a LOT of the backthreads on the Harvest Forum before you buy a canner. Some stoves (mostly those with the flat ceramic tops) cannot handle the weight of a full pressure canner, and using one on those kinds of stoves can void your stove warranty and can wreck your stove. If you have that kind of stove, do your research carefully to ensure your stove can be used with a pressure canner. There also are issues involved in using a ceramic-top stove with BWB canners too. (sigh)

If you have an electric stove, its' burners may break under the weight of a full pressure canner. You can prevent that by purchasing a heavy duty canning burner to replace the one that came with the stove.

There are lots of other workarounds, including the use of propane burners, stoves, heavy-duty counter-top burners (sort of fancy hot plates), the 'extra' burner that is on the side of some propane grills, even the use of a turkey fryer as your heat source for canning. You can read about all these interesting solutions in old threads at the Harvest Forum.

Take your time and do all your research first to ensure you get the kind of canner or alternate burner setup that will work best for you.

Dawn

Hubby said Santa almost got me a canner for Christmas but he got confused at the store. LOL I'm pretty sure the Presto is in my near future, too, because the All American won't happen until I rob a bank.

Diane

Diane,

I understand the feeling. Every time I look at an All-American canner online, I want two of them.....one for you and one for me.

Santa Tim probably would have brought me an All-American canner if I insisted I absolutely, positively had to have it. However, I have a Presto that is perfectly fine although it is old (not that there's anything wrong with being old....I'm getting older myself every day, LOL), so I cannot justify getting another one. Well, that is unless my Presto falls off a truck and is damaged. "Say, how did it get up there on that truck, honey, and why did it fall off the truck?" Santa Tim would say.

I'd also love to have a "summer kitchen" separate and apart from the house just for canning and processing produce so that my normal kitchen in the house wouldn't have to spend the whole summer overloaded with produce and about 110 degrees and spilling excess heat into the rest of the house. That's not going to happen either unless we win the lottery, and we don't even play the lottery.

Dawn

Dawn, you only have ONE canner? LOL

I don't can anything, but would like to have a pressure cooker. I hear they are great for cooking quickly and retaining the vitamins and minerals, especially in veggies.

Carol, good luck in your search for a canner?

Would it be wise to look for one on ebay?

Susan

Thanks Dawn, you've given me a lot to think about. I do have a ceramic top, and use a heavy SS pot for my BWB canning. I like the idea of the outdoor kitchen, but don't see that happening anytime soon. I'll check out the harvest forum.

Thanks!

Oh, don't they recommend against the use a canner of any sort on a ceramic cooktop?

I did a lot of research before buying the stainless steel pot that's large enough to do quarts. The blue-speckled BWB canner that my mother (and probably everyone else's mom) used won't work on ceramic, because the pot bottom has to be smooth and flat. I've used this particular canner for three years, and it works great. If I could, I'd buy a gas stove today; ceramic looks nice, but it's sure not practical for anyone who cooks and cans on a regular basis.
Carol

Susan,

One canner is all I can use at one time because there also are pots of other things on the stove at the same time....like one pot that contains whatever food is about to go into the jars, and then another pot that holds the lids and rings at a hot but non-boiling temperature.

Technically, though, (grinning) I have two canners....a boiling water bath canner and a pressure canner.

Carol, There's tons of useful info on the Harvest Forum there and there are some really serious canners who know everything there is to know about pressure canners.

Moni, It varies from stove to stove and there are several issues. There's the weight issue---some ceramic stovetops are not sturdy enough to hold a heavy canner full of filled jars. There's the heat issue---some pressure canning recipes require a long period of boiling and keeping the ceramic top that hot that long can cause it to crack. There's the issue, too, of maintaining the heat at a constant temperature. Most ceramic top stoves have some sort of thermostat for each burner and the burner can cycle on and off as you simmer or boil something. In canning, that can be dangerous because you need to keep your food inside the cans at a steady temperature the whole time they're on that burner. With the way the burner cycles on and off, you are not guaranteed your food in the cans will stay at the required temperature so your food safety is not guaranteed.

Some ceramictop stoves can handle BWB canning with a flat-bottomed boiling-water-bath canner (not a ridged bottom one) but others can't.

Some people who do pressure canning or BWB canning on a ceramic top stove stay right there by the stove and watch to make sure that the water never drops below boiling if the burner is cycling on or off.

Some people have canned using ceramic top stoves for years, and others wouldn't dare use their stove for fear they'd break it and void their warranty, so they use the alternate heating methods I listed above.

I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. I love my ceramic top stove for many reasons, with one of the main reasons being that the convection oven has a dehydrate feature. I will do boiling water bath canning on my ceramic top stove using a flat-bottom pan. However, when doing multiple batches in one day, I let the stovetop cool down completely in between batches and let it sit there cool for about an hour again. I don't want to run the risk of keeping it too hot for too long and cracking the top.

For pressure canning, I have an electric turkey fryer I can use and I have a side burner on our gas grill. I also have the old electric stove in the garage that I could hook up and use. The cooktop works fine--it was the oven that went out and that was when we placed it with the ceramictop stove.

All things being equal, for most veggies I'd rather freeze them than can them, so I do't use a pressure canner a lot. I do use a boiling water bath canner constantly during the harvest months.

Dawn

Has anyone pressure canned much on a wood cook stove?

I ask because hubby's setting up one of our wood cook stoves in the wellhouse this week. (It also holds our workout equipment and neither one of us want to workout with the current temps until there's some heat out there! We figured we could also use it as a summer kitchen and possibly for occasional canning. There's a garage door to open and let the heat out so it shouldn't be too much worse than normal summer torture. It will be hot, of course, but I'm thinking of keeping the heat out of the (normal) house so we can sleep at night.

Anyway, we won't know how it plays out in practice until summer but I wondered if you could even do proper pressure canning on a wood stove. I assume people do it but it probably takes a lot of tending,

Diane

Diane, Do you have a propane stove or a burner for a turkey deep fryer. I think it would be much easier to regulate propane that to use a wood stove. I know the old timers did it, but they used that stove every day and understood how it functioned.

I have a two burner propane stove with folding legs that makes it just the right height to use. I have a one burner turkey fryer. I have a propane burner on the grill. I rarely can but have everything I need to do so. If the garden is good this year then I will can.

Speaking of propane burners....I even have a cooking pan, like a slow cooker, that runs off one of those small propane bottles. It's a "tailgaters" dream. LOL However, if I cook outside, I usually use the propane grill or one of my four camping dutch ovens.

No, we don't have any of those but a separate double burner is on my dream list for out there one of these years. You know, right after I rob that bank to buy the All-American canner, there might be enough change left to buy the double burner. I'd better get to knitting up a robber's mask!

Diane