Working through a freezer full of food

Preserving on a fairly large scale and a short history of canning using Weck jars.

This is the second article in an ongoing mini-series on food preservation.

When I moved from Belgium to the UK, I had an entire freezer full of food. And I do mean a big freezer, not just a couple of drawers. I had to stand on the tips of my toes to be able to see inside the top drawer.

It was full of frozen fruit from the garden, organic meat…

I knew I could take a certain amount of it with me frozen, ask me how I did that for another post, but not bags and bags of frozen raspberries and strawberries. Those would have defrosted long before I reached my destination.

Turning them into jam would have taken forever and really limited how we’d be able to use all the fruit later.

Jam making was basically the only way I had preserved fruit for years, other than by freezing it. I had started dehydrating raspberries, figs and strawberries but that didn’t work for previously frozen fruits from the freezer, of course.

The main way people preserve things in Europe is by using Weck jars. Those don’t have screw lids like a regular jar but a glass one that’s held in place by a rubber ring and the whole thing is secured by a set of clamps. Afterwards you remove the metal clips so the process is similar to the two-piece lid by Ball in that way.

Weck-style jar

They’re beautiful to look at but I felt like they were a bit cumbersome and there isn’t as much tested information on how to preserve fruit without extra added sugar. That’s what I wanted to do to make sure the fruit could be used for as many things as possible. I also needed a way to preserve all that meat which wasn’t really recommended with the Weck method.

Canning seems to be this whole thing that people get really invested in. Their way never made anyone ill, so it’s the way to do things despite, you know, science.

I will say I grew up with the stories of ‘wecked’ everything. Vegetables in water!

Weck is a brand of preserve jar from Germany as well as synonymous with a way of preserving that basically involves a lot of boiling, either in a pan of water or an electric Weck kettle with a temperature dial.

You’d preserve anything you could and store it in the cellar. That might sound fancy, conjuring up images of grand chateaus, but most homes built before a certain date would have had a cellar for food storage, often a coal chute too.

It was a way of being able to eat in Winter and make ends meet, every scrap you grew was one that you didn’t have to buy and helped balance the books.

These days, stating the obvious, it’s much cheaper to buy tins and jars of food but even jam could cost enough to justify buying wholesale fruit and preserving it yourself.

I don’t know, it’s all such a fuss! All this fiddling about.

Ball-style jars

And still no way to process all that meat! Since I already had some Ball jars I read up on how they work and what exactly you can preserve in them. I ended up ordering a pressure canner for all the meat and a steam canner for all the fruit online. Both came from the US and were back-ordered.

Then came the stress of finding the right jars. A bit of a challenge because Ball jars are much more costly than Weck ones outside of the US and most of the ones that are sold are the wide-mouth ones which were difficult to find lids for and I wouldn’t be able to use the bands I already had from my old set of Ball jars.

Jam jars and all kinds of canners

I did a ton of reading and researching, I didn’t want the jars cracking and a lot of standard jam jars didn’t have the right screw thread to use with the Ball system. The only suitable jars I ended up finding that had the right thread to match the ball jar one and would be probably suitable for pressure canning were Quattro Stagioni ones from Italy, at the time they were cost-effective too. Yes, success.

I didn’t use the lids that came with the jars to can everything but I did keep them to close the jars again once I’d opened one and needed to store it in the fridge.

While I was waiting for my canners to arrive from the US and the deadline for my move inched closer, I figured I’d try and water bath can some jars but that was super stressful.

You basically take a very large pan, fill it with a lot water and jars and bring it to the right temperature. Making sure it kept simmering but not too much and measuring to make I had enough water in the pan was slightly intense. I got some jars sealed but wow. Good thing the steam and pressure canners arrived! Now I only needed a bit of water heated at a time compared to a huge tall pan filled with glass jars and boiling water.

So yay for steam canners¹ and the ease of canning with Ball lids because I steadily worked my way through all those drawers and processed all that meat and all that fruit and took all those jars with me on my move!

I used the instructions and processing times for how to actually can everything in the UDSA’S Complete Guide to Home Canning². It’s very thorough!

One thing I learned that wasn’t super clear in the manual was to make sure that all the currants; white, red or black, that I was canning were cooked through, not mushy but enough for the skins to burst, otherwise they end up bursting in the jar while processing and the whole thing overflows, there’s juice in the canning water and the jar doesn’t seal.

The strawberries had that a little less but it was way easier to pre-cook them a little rather than letting them thaw. You need enough juice for all berries either way so this made the whole process easier and helped to follow the guidelines in the book on what needs to be hot to process. It’s all explained really well and super easy to do if you follow the directions.

I was also looking forward to now having all this equipment and being able to can all the things myself. The guidebook has recipes for everything, from fruit to pickled vegetables to ketchup. I couldn’t wait for even more self-sustaining life after my move making all the yummy things from my own produce, expanding on what I had built over the years. That didn’t end up happening but maybe that’s a story for another time.

This is the second part of my mini-series on food preserving. If you’d like to read the first part on freezing fruit, you can find that here. It’s a guest post I did for Lynn Hill’s Foodstack, a curated list of articles by food writers on the Substack platform.

1. You do need to calibrate your steam canner once you get it but I wasn’t able to find a resource for how to do that online. The VKP canner does have a guide on how to do that in its product manuals at https://vkpbrands.com/manuals.php , they call it the ‘temperature indicator test’.

2. All chapters of this guide can be found here, the page links to all the chapters of the guide as individual PDF documents by introduction, basics and then by produce/meat. All the information in the guide is also available on the website but I found it clearer to be able to read through the guide. https://nchfp.uga.edu/resources/entry/about-the-usda-guide-to-home-canning-2015-revision

This website also gives you a ton of information to get started https://www.healthycanning.com/ .

I’m joining in with

Claire Venus

’s Essay Club if anyone else wants to join in too.