Canning Season

It's been a week jammed with canning and no time for blogging, but the majority of my canning is finished, so hopefully I can catch up on other things this week! 

Pressure canned green beans: 

I learned that if it's boiling too rapidly, siphoning can happen and you loose the internal liquid from the jars. If over half of the liquid is left, it's fine. If less, use right away. My pressure canner only holds four pints at a time. The first batch, I read the processing instructions incorrectly and left them in for half the required time. 😣

I hated to do it, but I popped the lids off and recanned that batch. You can definitely see a difference in color of the beans/liquid. 

A boatload of apples was next to process. This is maybe half of them: 

Our favorite snack is dried apples, so I made about seven dehydrator loads of them (translates to 3.5 ice cream pails). I think they'll last the year. 😉

Still more apples left, so I made applesauce cooked in a roaster: 

Still more apples... So, juice! Official instructions said to let the juice rest in the fridge for 24-48 hours before canning so the sediment will settle. Here's batch number one resting. Lots of pulpy foam on top.

Day two of apple juice, still lots of foam. I scooped as much out as I could, then filtered the rest through a double layer of cheese cloth. 

Heat to boiling and can. All the jars sealed!

Last was tomatoes. Boy, those gave me trouble this year. I had purchased some 24oz jars with lids and bands from Amazon months ago, planning to use them for something I changed my mind about. We debated sending them back, but thought they'd be handy for canning, so we kept them. I wish we had sent them back. 

The bands wouldn't hold the lids on tight! I'd screw them on and try to tighten them, and off the band would pop. Unfortunately, I had already mixed the new bands with my old ones. 🤦‍♀️ I had to test each band in the container. 

Even more unfortunately, some of the bands I thought were on tight didn't stay that way in the canner. One lid came off completely! Thankfully I noticed right away and pulled it out. The rest of the jars seemed okay. Key word, seemed. After they were cooling on the counter, I found the bands on five jars had gone cockeyed. Because of that, the lids weren't held on tightly and didn't seal. 😐 Only two out of that whole batch sealed successfully. 

I think I found all of the faulty bands now; those are getting recycled. My working theory is that the 24oz jar screw tracks are slightly different from traditional regular mouth pints/quarts. I'm not taking any more chances with my canned goods. The rest of the jars are going to be used for dry storage or I'll get rid of them.