Canning Resources

General Canning Resources and Recipes:

Many great canning resources are available free online. However, not all recipes are safe and reliable. Until you feel comfortable judging the safety of recipes yourself, use recipes from approved sources like the United States Department of Agriculture or Bernardin.


Photo by Robin Newman

Here are some links to reliable sources:

USDA Canning Guide
USDA Jam & Jelly recipes
USDA Pickle recipes
Bernardin
People Preserving Food

Many blogs can provide excellent inspiration, though the recipes themselves should be used with caution, especially by beginners:

http://backyardfarmsto.blogspot.com/
http://www.hungrytigress.com/
http://wellpreserved.ca/
http://www.foodinjars.com/

Community Canneries:

A Community Cannery is an organization or project that seeks to develop preserving expertise and infrastructure in order to enhance the lives of people in a given community. Community Canneries do this in different ways. Some focus primarily on processing for farmers, helping them to recieve better prices and access larger markets, others seek to provide skills and employment to local workers, and others focus on teaching people home food preservation to re-skill them, connect them to their cultural heritage, or introduce them to new ways of cooking and eating. Many canneries, like the Parkdale Community Cannery, combine multiple goals.

Here are some projects around North America:

People Preserving Food
Scoharie Co-op Cannery
Keezletown Community Cannery
List of US Canneries

All You Can: The West End Food Co-op Cannery Guide

In March of 2011 the West End Food Co-op released a guide to developing a Community Cannery, based on our experiences with the Parkdale Community Cannery in the 2010 season as well as extensive background research. If you are interested in starting a Cannery in your community please contact as us at katie(at)westendfood.coop for an electronic copy of the guidebook.