Pressure Canner

Often when I am brewing I save a few jars of wort for use in making yeast starters for future batches. Some folks save it in the freezer, but I prefer canning it since I can then just store it indefinitely on the shelf. Technically speaking, beer wort is not a low enough pH to reliably can it with a boiling water canner, so you have to use a pressure canner.

Guerrilla Canning is the term I use for when I want to can something, but cannot find a recipe for it. I've done a lot of reading on canning in the 15 years I've been doing it, and one thing you read over and over again is to only use proven recipes that come from reliable sources. Which works great for a very wide range of foods - just about everything anyone will ever want to do, they will find a recipe for online. But by my nature, I like to push the limits a bit, and like to do things that are out of the ordinary. So I've found a number of different things I really wanted to can up, but could not find a recipe for. In these two videos I am doing up some organic brown rice - I like to have a large stock pile of it for lunches at work. Just open a jar, toss it in the microwave for 3 minutes, and fluff it out onto a plate. It is absolutely fantastic!

I also do meat pie filling this way, so I can just open a jar and put it into a pie shell. Also pea soup in-the-jar, and also an east indian lentils and rice recipe - the latter two of which I put the raw ingredients into the jar and cook it in the canner, much like the rice in this video.

I want to be very clear that most experts in canning would probably consider what I am doing to be unsafe, so it is not at all something I can recommend to others. But I am firmly of the belief that a lot of modern canning books are written half by the experts, and half by the lawyers. And that someone like me needs to push the limits so that one day there will be "known-safe" recipes of these sort out there for people to use. I do not recommend you try this unless you've done a lot of reading on canning, and really understand the ins and outs.

We got our first CSA basket this week, and as always early in the season it was a fairly small one.

• 398g beet greens
• 456g garlic scapes
• 400g bok choy
• 202g radish

So I figured I'd try an experiment with the garlic scapes, and can them up! Last year what I did with them was puree them in a food processor with a fair bit of oil, and then store the moosh in a jar in the fridge to use sort of as a flavoured oil for frying in a fry pan, or in place of garlic or onions in just about any recipes. This year I decided to can it up so that it would last longer on the shelf, and take up less room in the fridge.

Another trip to the Asian Superstore (the 168 Market here in Ottawa), and another great frugal find! Gawsh I'm so glad I rediscovered this place! 3 huge chicken carcasses for $1. One dollar! So I bought 3 bags (9 carcasses) and made a huge batch of chicken broth and canned it up.