I've been wanting to try my hand at canning for a very long time, but was always so intimidated. Now that I've gotten my feet wet in the kitchen, I was thinking it might be time to just go for it. I decided to start out with water bath canning, I pretty much want to stick with jams, jellies and salsas, so this method is fine for that, plus it's less expensive to get started. My water bath pot was less than half the cost of what I would have paid for a good sized pressure cooker, plus the cost of the basic canning kit.
I bought the jars themselves at Kroger, so at least I saved on some shipping there, plus I was able to 'see' it first hand, which gave me a better feel for sizing, which is extremely important. If the jars were too small, they would fall through the wire wrack in the canning pot. Turns out though that a pint sized jar of jam is huge! I couldn't go with the standard half pint because they are too thin and wouldn't fit well on the wrack, so I ordered some wide mouth half-pint jars for next time. I plan to make some hot pepper jelly and apple butter, feel free to send your favorite recipes of either along, I haven't decided exactly how I want to go about them yet.
We picked up a bag of beautiful white peaches at the orchard this past Saturday, so peach jam was an obvious choice. I searched and searched and finally came across a jam recipe that sounded solid, then jazzed it up.
