Canning Class: Going Old School

Eating locally and seasonally is usually pretty rewarding and delicious. But there are times, like the dead of winter when I’ve had enough beets to turn my pee pink, when all I want to do is buy that $8 box of imported strawberries from Argentina and call it a day. That’s why Christina and I decided to try canning – an old school method of preserving fruits and vegetables at their peak – so you can enjoy the bounty months later. We found several canning classes offered in SF, but decided to enroll in a quick course at Real Foods, an organic market in the Marina area. The class only lasted 90 minutes, but we managed to cook and can two large stockpots worth of tomato sauce and preserve 20 pounds of peaches. Pretty impressive for a group of 10 crammed in a tiny back kitchen of a market!

Here are some other helpful tips we learned:

• Always buy the freshest fruit available. This is not the time to preserve those bruised peaches on your counter that have fruit flies buzzing around them.
• If you buy bulk at a farmer’s market, ask for “kitchen” or cosmetically challenged fruit (i.e. the ugly stuff). You’ll often get a discount.
• Follow the recipe carefully, especially when canning tomato-based sauces. There’s a nasty bacteria called botulism that you really don’t want to mess with.
• Join or bring along a friend. It’s way more fun to peel pounds of fruit and vegetables when you have someone to help the time go by.

Tagged as: botulism, canning, class, In the Field, Real Foods, tomato