More people take can-do attitude toward food

About eight years ago, Mary A. Keith advertised a class on home canning and preserving methods.

The food and nutrition specialist at Hillsborough County's Extension Service got zero takers.

Last fall, she tried again. She filled seven classes of 30 students each, from teen girls completing a home-schooling project to guys who wanted to preserve the venison they bring back from hunting.

"I have five more classes on the books that are maxed out, too," Keith says "I don't have the time to add any more. They won't fit in my calendar."

It's safe to say the centuries-old technique, once referred to as "putting up," has found new popularity.

GET ON THE CAN

Want to try canning at home? Here are a few online resources to start your education:

National Center for Home Preservation

www.uga.edu/nchfp

The University of Georgia operates a definitive Web site for the hobby.

Food In Jars

www.foodinjars.com

Recipes, photos, tips and instructions are available here.

FreshPreserving

www.freshpreserving.com

Jarden Brands, maker of Bell Jars, offers recipes, preserving guides and products for sale.

Recipes from Food In Jars

Strawberry jam

10-11 cups of chopped strawberries (preferably macerated with a split vanilla bean and two cups of sugar overnight)

5 cups of sugar (this makes 7 cups total)

2 lemons, zested and juiced

2 packets of liquid pectin (that's one box total)

Fill your canning pot 2/3 with water and put on the stove to bring to a boil (a large stock pot works for this much jam).

Put berries, sugar and lemon zest/juice in a large pot and cook over medium-high heat for about 15 minutes. Really boil the fruit down so it starts to look syrupy. If you have an immersion blender, use it at this point to puree some of the fruit. If you don't, use a blender to puree about half the jam (working in batches; you don't want hot jam to splash you). Add the blended jam back to the whole fruit jam. Bring to a boil and squeeze in the pectin. At this point, there will be a bunch of foam on top of the jam. Skim the foam with a large spoon. Let boil for approximately 10 minutes more, until the jam looks very syrupy (when boiling, it should resemble boiling candy).

Lay out about 7 pint-size or 14 half-pint clean jars. Put the lids in a saucepan of hot water to soften the sealing compound. Bring a kettle to a boil, too, in case you need a bit more boiling water for your canning pot.

Fill the jars. Wipe the rims with the edge of a towel dipped in boiling water. Top with lids and screw on rings. Put a rack or folded towel into the bottom of your canning pot (you don't want the jars to be in direct contact with the bottom of your pot). Carefully lower the jars into the boiling water. You can stack them one on top of the other if need be.

Process for 10 minutes in the boiling water. When time is up, remove the jars from the water and put them on a towel on the counter. They should begin to ping fairly quickly, indicating they're sealed. If any of your jars don't seal, make sure to refrigerate them.

Asian-Inspired Refrigerator Pickles

5-6 kirby (pickling) cucumbers, each cut into six spears

1 chili pepper

1 cup seasoned rice wine vinegar (look for a brand that uses sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. Trader Joe's makes a good one)

2 limes, juiced

3-4 scallions, chopped (greens and whites)

2 garlic cloves, sliced

4 sprigs of mint, chopped

1/2 teaspoon salt

Pack the cucumber spears into a quart jar. Slide the chili pepper down in among the cucumber spears. In a 2-cup measuring cup, combine the rice wine vinegar, lime juice, scallions, garlic cloves, mint and salt. Pour over the cucumbers. Using your fingers, poke some of the garlic slivers, mint and scallion down amid the cucumbers. Screw a lid on the jar, and holding it over the sink (in case of leaks) invert the jar and give it a good shake, in order to distribute all the delicious bits.

Let your pickles sit in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours before eating.

Economic woes, a return to eating local foods and an emphasis on home growing for the table are pushing people toward canning as a way of keeping their harvest.

Statistics on canning are dated - the last major analysis came from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration almost a decade ago. But anecdotal evidence suggests the hobby is exploding nationwide. Jarden Home Brands, maker of Kerr and Ball brand jars, reported sales of canning equipment up 30 percent in 2009 over the same period in 2008, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Locally, one driving force was the hurricane power outages of recent years, Keith says. A lot of people lost pounds of frozen and refrigerated foods.

Some choose to can so they can better regulate their own salt or sugar intake.

"There's also the pride of being able to say, 'I made it myself,'" Keith says.

Regional preserved food contests, usually held at local fairs and festivals, remain popular. This year's contests at the Florida Strawberry Festival in Plant City had plenty of entries. Among the grand champion ribbons: Bread-and-Butter Pickles made by James Block of Tampa.

Improving on Grandma

While preserving sounds like a carefree hobby, canners must carefully follow federal safety guidelines to avoid contamination that can lead to botulism. A food-filled jar with no air and low acid levels can be a haven for food poisoning if it is incorrectly processed.

One way to prevent problems is to use a pressure cooker to heat food to a high temperature. The other is to add vinegar or lemon juice to the food during canning, before boiling the jars in a large pot of water.

Low-acid foods such as meat or seafood must be done in a pressure canner because there are not enough acids to keep botulism from growing.

Most boiling water canners must be deep enough so that at least one inch of water covers the tops of the jars during processing. The jars should be left in the canning pot for 10 minutes after pressure has dropped to wipe out the potential for botulism.

Many people new to the hobby will start with jelly or jam or pickles in a boiling water bath, Keith says. Once they're comfortable with the process, they move on to pressure canning.

What you're canning often will determine how you can. Fruit requires only the hot water bath method, but the only way vegetables, seafood and poultry can be safely processed is in a pressure canner.

"A lot of people say, 'I remember Grandma did such and such,'" Keith says. "Well, Grandma did it that way, but there are a lot of people who died. They have to follow the modern methods."

Canned foods will keep for varying lengths of time, depending on the recipe, but the National Center for Home Food Preservation advises preserving only what you plan to eat within a year.

Food tastes better

Marisa McClellan learned how to can foods from her mom while growing up in Portland, Ore. From the time she was about 12 years old, McClellan and her family would pick blueberries and blackberries on nearby Sauvie Island and take them home to make jam.

She remembers washing the berries when they got home, squishing them with their hands to make pulp, adding sugar, and cooking the mixture with lemon, cinnamon or other spices.

When she was in her late 20s, McClellan moved to Philadelphia and edited the popular blog Slashfood, continuing to can seasonal foods in her high-rise apartment.

She left Slashfood in 2009 and started a food blog of her own based on her favorite hobby. The Web site FoodInJars.com was born.

The blog has become a hit with food lovers. This month, it earned a Best Food Blog nomination from Saveur magazine.

"I decided there was a void in canning, and I knew how to do it and had been doing it for years," she says. Along with canning recipes, McClellan also writes about using jars as storage and about all types of food kept in jars.

A cruise through the site reveals a recipe to make strawberry jam for glazing baked chicken or as an ingredient for cookies for the Jewish observance of Purim. Her Asian-Inspired Refrigerator Pickles earned rave reviews from commenters on the site.

"I made these and they are fantastic!" one wrote. "A perfect way to use the loads of cukes already bursting forth from our wee community garden plot."

"Those pickles are a revelation," McClellan says. "Homemade pickles versus what you get at the store? It's an entirely different set of flavors. You'll never buy pickles after you make your own."

And that's the bottom line, she says.

"People are tired of just having their food preprogrammed," she says. "It's time for food to taste good."