Sammy,

To answer your questions (and I am not a canning expert, but I'll try):

1. You add water if the directions tell you to do so because for safety reasons you must followed approved, safety-tested recipes explicitly and with no variation except for those specifically stated as being "allowed" in the recipe. Usually, you add water to the jars if you are canning meatier tomatoes that do not have enough naturally-occurring juice to completely cover the jarred tomatoes up to the 1/2" head space area.

2. Yes, for most foods, pressure-canning is preferred for safety reasons.

When you use a boiling water bath canner, the food inside the jars will go to the boiling point of 212 degrees, which is fine for high-acid foods, but which is not high enough to kill certain bacteria that thrive in low-acid foods. So, for low-acid foods, you pressure can because that takes the temperature inside the jars higher (to 240 degrees) and that kills the bactera that cause certain illnesses that can be deadly, like botulism.

3. Very little can go wrong with today's pressure canners as long as you follow the manufacturer's directions explicitly. The design of today's canners has made them safer to use than they were decades ago when a canner occasionally blew its lid off.

4. I cannot answer this question because taste is a very subjective thing and all our taste buds perceive flavor differently. However, because of the temperatures to which processed tomatoes are exposed, there naturally will be changes in flavor and texture. Having said that, home-canned tomatoes taste better to me than canned tomatoes from the grocery store.

5. Properly canned tomatoes will not sour. However, the seeds in the tomatoes can give you a slightly bitter flavor. I strain seeds out of sauces I'm preparing, whether I'm canning them or cooking fresh sauce for dinner. I leave seeds in salsa because the tomatoes are just the base flavor for the salsa and the more dominant flavor comes from the peppers.

6. Any tomato can be preserved by canning. Often, the tomato you choose to grow for canning purposes will depend on what canned products you want to make.

If you are wanting to can either plain tomato sauce to use later in pasta sauce, pizza sauce, soups, etc. or salsa, you might choose to use the meatier Roma-type tomatoes that have more meat and less juice, because they will cook down more quickly and give you a more dense sauce. I especially prefer paste types when making fresh, uncanned sauce in the afternoon to serve for dinner that night. Paste tomatoes will cook down a lot more quickly so I don't have to stand in the kitchen, stirring the cooking tomatoes, for a longer time frame.

If you are wanting to can tomato juice, you'd obviously choose tomatoes that are less meaty and naturally have a lot of juice.

If flavor is your number one goal, grow the tomatoes you like best for fresh eating and use them for canning. By far, the best salsas and sauces I make are made from a wide variety of different tomatoes, mostly heirlooms, and especially dark tomatoes like Black Krim, True Black Brandywine, Black Plum, Cherokee Purple and Indian Stripe. It isn't surprising I think the best-flavored tomatoes are those made from a blend of heirlooms because they are are the ones I like best when eaten raw.

7. I grow many kinds of paste tomatoes because they are easier to boil down to make sauce. Sometimes I make batches of spaghetti sauce that consist only of paste-type tomatoes. However, I can and freeze all tomato varieties. I choose tomato varieties for a complex set of reasons. Some are chosen for their superior flavor, some for their high production per plant, some for their disease-tolerance, and some for their ability to flower and set fruit in heat. When it is canning time, I can all of the excess tomatoes that we aren't eating fresh, dehydrating or freezing.

The problem with a lot of the Roma-type paste tomatoes is that their flavor is only so-so and by that I don't mean it is poorly-flavored, but rather that it just isn't "special" in any way. That's why most of my batches are a blend of many types....to get the meatiness of the paste types and superior flavor of beefsteaks or slicers.

There's nothing wrong with Celebrity or Early Girl. Both produce all season long in my garden and they end up in salsas or sauces, but they are in the mix of all the tomatoes, and not in batches that are nothing but Celebrity and Early Girl.

8. I can all tomatoes, be they heirlooms, OPs or hybrids. I even can cherry tomatoes sometimes. There is no more waste involved in canning heirlooms than in canning hybrids.

I have been watching all the school closures and wondering how much later everyone will have to go in order to make up the missed days. Our kids are back in school here because the roads are fine and I think they'll have school tomorrow too because the Tues-Wed storm will arrive here late, if the forecast is correct.

What worries me is that there's the potential for a lot more snow in February and even March if the jet stream keeps dipping way down south and bringing us cold and snowy weather.

Dawn

I am glad you ladies posted, I to would like to can food, but DW is afraid of pressure cookers. She may go to walmart and walk past a dozen cars with radiators with 15 PSI pressure in them and never think anything about it. A pressure cooker in made much heavier and safer than a car radiator.

It will be cheaper for me to buy another freezer than to build an outdoor kitchen to can in.

I will approach her again this year but I expect she will still be too afraid to have a pressure cooker in the house.

My step dad get hurt with a pressure cooker, but he is a very careless man.

Larry

Larry, thanks for asking the questions. I am planning on canning tomatoes this year for the first time myself. I have been growing them for several years but have never canned them. I too have been worried about "canning" due to what you hear about pressure cookers but have been assured by several people that it is perfectly safe to can. I have given away soooo many tomatoes over the last few years that its time I started keeping and canning some for myself. Anyways, I'm glad you asked the questions I had been thinking about myself. :) Happy growing!

And...just for another voice in the conversation...I can tomatoes and not with a pressure canner. I just don't own one. I follow Ball's method of boiling water canning and have NEVER had a problem. I can tomatoes and I can bread and butter pickles as well. I don't can for the masses as Dawn does, but put up about 30-40 jars in total each year.

Sharon

Dawn, wasn't one of your favorite canning tomatos San Marzano Redorta? I thought I recalled that on a thread sometime in the past?? I've also read that Opalka is a good paste/canner for the interior South. I haven't grown or canned any canners yet, so don't know anything about them. Hopefully, this year.....

I realize you don't have to limit yourself to canners in order to can, but it is nice to know what the better varieties are for that purpose specifically.

Susan

I have a pressure canner but rarely use it because I choose safety-approved canning recipes that use the boiling water bath method.

I canned right at 700 jars of food products in 2010 (this includes the big canning marathon a day after Christmas when I canned several dozen jars of salsa, peppers and jellies because we'd run out of some items during the busy gift-giving season). How many jars did I pressure can? None. Nada. Zilch. Zero.

I am able to freeze a lot of the veggies that require pressure canning because I have three freezers which means I don't "have to" can them and just freeze them instead. If I didn't have those freezers I'd have to pressure-can corn and green beans, for example, because they must be pressure-canned for safety reasons. In general, we like the flavor and texture of home-grown, frozen veggies best, so I freeze them.

If we preferred the taste and texture of canned vegetables to frozen ones, I'd drag out the old pressure canner and use it. In the past, I used the pressure canner a lot more than I use it now because we only had one freezer.

I have a fairly new pressure canner (it is about 15 years old), know how to use it and don't consider it a safety risk because modern-day canners have safety features that old pressure canners (like those used by my parents and grandparents) did not. However, I have a ceramic (glass) topped stove and my specific manufacturer's warranty is voided if a pressure canner is used on that stove. If I wanted to pressure can, I'd likely take all my supplies up to the fire station and pressure-can on the gas stove there.

Susan, I grow paste tomatoes like San Marzano Redorta and Opalka, but I only use them for a couple of specific purposes and I can just as many (or more) slicing types as paste types.

Paste tomatoes are good for making fresh pasta sauce, salsa or pico de gallo because they have a low water content compared to other tomato types, and the low water content means you don't spend hours cooking down your fresh pasta sauce to get the excess water out.

I use a mixture of paste and slicing types for canned salsa and it doesn't matter to me which ones I use because the tomato is the base or background flavor whereas the main flavor in salsa comes from the peppers, onions and spices.

Our favorite pasta sauces are those made from our favorite slicing tomatoes because their flavor is so superior to even the good paste tomatoes. I often use a blend of both paste and slicers when making pasta sauce. The best-flavored pasta sauces (at least according to my family's tastebuds) are those made from a blend of heirloom tomatoes like Black Krim, Black From Tula, True Black Brandywine, Indian Stripe and Cherokee Purple. Sungold tomatoes also make a splendid pasta sauce.

I don't can a lot of pasta sauce anymore. Since we bought the third freezer, I just make and freeze "stewed tomatoes" or "chopped tomatoes" in freezer containers, and when I want to make pasta sauce, I use the frozen tomatoes to make the pasta sauce on the day we're going to eat it. The last year I canned pasta sauce was in 2009, and that was the year we bought the third freezer late in the season. After buying that freezer which greatly increased our freezer capacity, I decided I could freeze tomatoes and make sauce from them later instead of canning pasta sauce during the busy harvest season. As it is, I often struggle to find time to can all the salsa, peppers, pickles, jams and jellies during the harvest season. Being able to freeze stewed tomatoes instead of canning them frees up more time for the things which must be canned.

Dawn

Last year was my first time canning anything but jam/jelly. We didn't pressure can, but we put up about 50 jars of Annie's Salsa and Annie's Peach Twist Salsa. On Dawn's advice, I just used the tomatoes that we had and liked the most, so most of the salsa was made with Black Russians and Black Plums. It turned out perfectly and made me a definite canning convert. This year, I'm dropping a lot of the larger beefsteaks that didn't produce well and adding several paste and plum tomatoes because I hope to put up all of our salsa, spaghetti sauce and tomatoes for the year. Don't be afraid of wasting your heirlooms--they'll taste great!

What does everyone use for freezer containers? I've found that ziplocks work best but I'd rather find something that I can reuse year to year. I hate throwing money away. I've tried the various "freezer" containers such as Gladware, etc, but they inevitably end up cracking & splitting in the hustle and bustle of the deep freeze.

Diane

Ball has a series of plastic containers designed for freezing. They are at Big Lots in the $1 to $4 ranges for different sizes. They have a nice rectangular shape that stacks more efficiently than round containers.

Diane, when I was at Walmart the other day, I "managed" to find myself in the canning section and I saw that they have a lot of plastic containers there for freezing purposes. Maybe those are better than the Glad containers for long-term use? I imagine that the Glad containers are less than viable for re-use because the original marketing purpose, when they were first introduced, was to offer a less expensive product and not one designed for long-term purposes. Just a guess.

....and guess what I use my Glad containers for....raising butterfly caterpillars! Knew you'd love that.

Susan

Diane, I buy the freezer containers like the ones Susan saw on the canning aisle. The ones at our Wal-Mart are sort of a transluscent white with red lids and I think 4 or 5 come in a package. I have accumulated quite a lot over the years, and have them in 1-quart and two-quart sizes. Mine last for years and years. I also use Ball Freezer jars in several sizes, especially when making freezer jam or freezer salsa.

Lehman's has some freezer containers very similar to the ones I buy, only they have blue lids. I've linked them below. (Anyway, it is a good reason to go look at the Lehman's website which is always full of useful stuff.)

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Freezer Containers At Lehman's

Thanks, seedmama, Dawn, and Susan.

I've tried all sorts of containers over the years, not just the Gladware specifically, but ones actually advertised as "freezer containers". I've never seen any of them on the canning aisles, though. Of course, I've never seen a canning aisle. LOL My old WalMart didn't have many canning supplies and they shared an aisle with other things. I'll have to take a closer look at these "big city" WalMarts now to see what they have now that you mentioned them. Same for Big Lots. I didn't have one in OK but there's one right by where I shop in Hannibal. Cool!

I'll look for the specific ones you all mentioned. Thanks!

Diane

Diane,

I cannot imagine a Wal-Mart without a canning aisle! What's wrong with those people? The Wal-Marts near me have greatly enlarged their canning aisles the last couple of years and this year, for the first year I can remember in a very, very long time (probably a couple of decades) they did not yank all the canning supplies off the shelves in August and, in fact, added lots more canning supplies as Christmas approached. I think maybe Wal-Mart realizes that canning's popularity is soaring again.

The Big Lots stores near us only have canning supplies sporadically and because of that I seldom go in there and look for any supplies, although I'll look for them if I'm in the store for another reason.

Don't forget Ace Hardware and other local hardware stores too. They often carry canning/freezing supplies, although that may be more common in more rural areas and not as common in urban ones. For the last couple of years, our local Lowe's stores have had big Ball canning supply displays, although usually not until about May or so.

In a pinch, if you need something that's hard to find in stores, you can order from Canningpantry.com or kitchenkrafts.com although if the item you're seeking is "sold out" in stores, it also may be back-ordered by the online suppliers. Last year, when our fruit trees overproduced so did everybody else's and you couldn't find pectin anywhere at any price, so I ordered a case online. It was so slow to arrive, I was through canning the fruit before it got here and I had to search constantly for pectin in order to get all that canning done. However, the case of pectin had a 2012 expiration date, so I have almost a case of Ball pectin still in the pantry and am in good shape for this year. I am picking up a box of liquid pectin every week when I do my grocery shopping, so that when Habanero Gold time rolls around, I'll have plenty of it in the pantry. I noticed last year that at the exact time my peppers were ready for jelly-making, all the liquid Certo was sold out constantly, so I think a lot more people are making jelly and especially pepper jelly.

I've learned the hard way to get all the canning/freezing supplies stockpiled way before harvest season begins because so many people are canning now that stores sell out of pectin, lids, rings, etc. fairly quickly. In 2010 they did not run out of jars as often as in the past few years, so I think the stores are making progress in understanding what food preservation supplies people want/need and when they need them.

At our Wal-Marts in this area, the freezer boxes sell out quickly once the harvest stores, so I'd suggest you buy them whenever you find them prior to needing them because the odds are the stores won't have them in stock by the time the harvest is in full swing.

As recently as only 3 or 4 years ago, when I went onto the canning aisle at Wal-Mart (in our local stores, it is near the cookware/kitchen supply area, although canning salt and pectin also are sold on the baking aisle) to buy canning supplies or freezer boxes, I was there alone or with women 30 years older than me. Now, the aisle is often crowded and often those purchasers of canning and freezing supplies are young enough to be my kids! (And I refuse to think about what that means in terms of the fact that I am getting older.....)

Dawn