Been getting into the idea of canning to save money. Like canning stews, veggies, ect that I can get cheap at a farmer market, then can it myself.
But then it hit me that electric and gas will eat into the savings…but then it hit me…old cast iron wood stove/oven. Wood is everywhere and nearly free.
Wondering if anyone uses one and what recommendations one would have for looking for one, price, features to look for, ect. I really want to get one sooner rather than later.
If something were to happen (prayers that nothing does) that would impact our electricity it would be awesome to have a wood stove/oven to cook with. Ignoring the current benefit of being able to warm my house, and cook with no power bill impact
solar panels to induction cooker with cast iron. ( no wood to gather, and solar can be stored in batteries )
Wood cooking in oven, Cob oven, wood stove ovens, I use a solo stove with my oven I made out of 55 gal barrels… Many ways to get the job done. Yes wood costs the time to gather and dry, but some of us have more time than money.
Propane/ butane / alcohol Long storage time, Best for those miserable cold rainy days when cooking outside is a pain. Combine this with a haybox cooker you have fuel economy and easy way to cook.
well with that in mind (coupled with the fact the these stoves can get CRAZY expensive) it may be better for me to just BUILD a stove. the idea is that im looking to have something fuel efficient (wood) and a surface to put pots, pan, skillet, ect to cook on. something i could put my pressure cooker on and be able to can my food for nearly no fuel cost
It can be done pretty cheaply to start with outside. Some cinderblocks or rocks with a fairly heavy metal plate over to put the canner on (so the handles doesn’t melt), if you are growing stuff to can the harvest is usually when you don’t want the added heat in the house so outside is a good option (depending on your climate zone). It also buys you time to get the stove you want for a better price or the time you need to build one. A fair exchange at the cost of some woodheat ’wasted’ in my opinion.
This of course if you do not have a burn ban or complainy neighbours.
we often make a large pot of food for dinner, then can the leftovers for the pantry. we bought an electric canner just for this rather than use the big canners on the stove.
kent
11 Likes
Marat_Lysenko
(Marat (East of Ukraine, 70 km from Donetsk))
#6
Another option is to make a wood gas generator and automatically maintain the preservation temperature using a gas burner.
Kristijan has built in wood cook stove that he fabricated and install in his new house. I think you can find it in his thread. I’m agreeing with Marat about using producer gas for canning rather than any kind of rocket stove. I can several hundred quarts a year and can’t imagine pressure canning meats while making sure I am maintaining a fairly constant temperature for close to an hour. Could be more easily done water bath canning fruits and acidic vegetables but not meat. Even with wood gas, you would want a stored buffer of gas. Not saying it can’t be done. My grandma canned everything on a wood cook stove but there was a lot of experience in play there.
You need to get jars. I would highly recommend reusable lids. Canning lids are in the 30-35 cents each range. You can get reusable lids for like a dollar each or less. like they have run black friday sales. I think I paid 50 cents each for mine.
you don’t have to pressure cook everything. you can use hot water bath canning for high acid foods ie pH < 4.6. Fruit, jams, pickled stuff. tomatoes are close to 4.6 so adding a touch of like citric acid makes it work.
And TBH our farmers market isn’t that cheap. Our old grocery store let you buy a crate at a discount. you had to pay cash up front and it was only slightly above their cost and because it is in a crate there is some bruising, damage, etc. A lot of farmer’s markets, they are buying crates of stuff to resell, so it might be an option there as well. It adds to their purchase volume which sometimes can get them discounts.
Lids are 10 cents each at amazon when you order 200. I have been told by a friend you can infact reuse regular lids in a pinch. I have never tried it myself. For me the 10 cents was money well spent to insure the jars seal the first time in the canner. Biggest issue is usually to check the jar for a good clean smooth lip with no crack or chips which can happen with age.
I tried some of those reusable lids with poor results the second year. In my experience the thick rubber they used for the seal is easily damaged when you break the seal to open the jar. I had enough failures the second year of using them to decide i wouldn’t bother with them again and wrote the entire thing off as a bad idea as much as i really liked the idea of not having to buy something to do my canning.
The one bit of advice to anyone new to canning is remove the retaining rings after the jars cool down. They will rust onto the jars in storage and the vacuum in the jar will hold the lid without them. If that seal doesn’t hold the lid the food will have spoiled.
I will admit i never figured out the cost in energy to can my food i just assumed it was a good investment given the quality of having food that is organic and pesticide free. I don’t view the garden as a profit center for the hours someone would pay me more than the food costs at a store. But it is a quality of life issue. Being in the garden is good living and knowing the food is safe to eat has value to me.
But that said if you want to lower cost you can have more crops like potatoes and winter squash that will keep simply by putting them in a root cellar or unheated basement for most of the winter.
You can build a solar dehumidifier as well that is actually on my to do list that never seems to reach high enough priority to get done.
I guess my point is for my money i would probably work on a plan for a garden next spring before worring about a wood stove to can on. We have the old family cook stove here and my grandmother decided she would much rather use the modern cook top gas or electric over trying to keep the wood cook stove temperature correct for long enough to can. I would say try to bake cookies or a cake in one before you try canning. They are an art from. Good for cooking a meal but things that need an accurate temperature for long periods is real skill.
I canned 220 quarts this year. Spent $58 dollars for Ball lids at $3.19 a dozen. Not crying about it. I bought that 200 stack of lids when the plandemic was on and nothing else was available. They seemed flimsier than ball lids and I scrounged up enough Ball lids to avoid testing the cheap ones out. I’ll use them for the vacuum sealer thingie I bought that Don M recommended. I figure that for 26 cents a jar I will use new and even then there will be some jars that will lose their seal if stored long term. Food for the Compost. Gardening and personal food production is laborious, time consuming and requires a fair amount of infrastructure to do well enough to make a dent in a person’s yearly food requirements. More than the average person is willing to commit to. Your two options to being dependent on nutritionally depleted, highly processed food are having enough money to buy it from trusted market gardeners or grow it yourself. Not one in a thousand has the ability to be 100 per cent food self sufficient. I am far from it but every thing I do grow is a blow against the empire.
Tom fair point. I have used the no name lids without any issue. I would guess we do about the same level of canning. I had to check what i have at the moment are Ball lids bought in the off season somewhere around Christmas time iirc. There was a deep discount sale i saw and got them for something less than half price. Might have been one of the prime day sales after the canning season was over and someone didn’t want the warehouse space filled with them. I tend to buy as much as i can that way. Things i will use over the next year can find a place to sit here if it saves me half the cost.
Well it is a gorgeous day and i have vegetables that are waiting for me the to blanch and freeze them at the moment. My stuff is about half canning half freezing depending on what it is. I froze my swish chard yesterday. Still have kale, rutabaga, and Kohlrabi to process. I should fermente the Kohlrabi but i will probably be lazy and freeze it.
You can reuse them if you don’t bend the lids and nothing happens to the rubber seal. The only way I have gotten lids that looked like they could work is when I pull them off with my fingers.
My grandma used to use the resealable lids, and she had issues with the gaskets but I think there was a trick to them. It was either how tight you put the rings on, or how you removed the lids. They are a little different. And she still used some of the ball lids because you could give the jars away. I got some resealable ones but gave them to my sister. because she belonged to like a coop or something where you paid upfront, and they grew it, and you picked up a box of whatever they had that week.
2 Likes
Marat_Lysenko
(Marat (East of Ukraine, 70 km from Donetsk))
#20
I only found pictures of these lids. I still haven’t solved the problem of reusable caps for preservation.
These glass reusable lids are offered for $5 per piece on the marketplace ozon.ru . Almost the same covers were in the Soviet Union. Now China makes them, but it is extremely difficult to find them. There are online stores where they are offered for $0.9–1 per piece, but many delivery services are not yet available to us.
