Episode #4: Home Canning and Food Preservation With Anna Sakawsky
In this episode of the HobbyScool podcast, I chat with Anna Sakawsky all about home canning & food preservation. Anna is a former city girl turned modern homesteader who lives with her family (human, furry and feathered) on ¼-acre property on Vancouver Island where they produce and preserve hundreds of pounds of their own food each year and strive to live a more self-reliant lifestyle through all that they do.
Anna is the creator of the blog The House & Homestead, as well as the editor and publisher of Modern Homesteading Magazine, a digital magazine dedicated to all things homesteading, sustainability, self-sufficiency and simple, seasonal living. Anna also teaches organic gardening and home canning courses online, and runs the Society of Self-Reliance: membership program that teaches people how to become more self-reliant in all areas of life.
In the episode, we discussed how home canning works, what can be canned at home, the basic safety rules, and what equipment is needed to get started canning and preserving food for your family.
Links mentioned in this episode:
Anna's website
Anna's canning course (affiliate link)
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Transcript: Home Canning and Food Preservation With Anna Sakawsky
00:00:02 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And today my special guest is Anna with thehouseandhomestead.com and modern homesteading magazine. I am super excited to chat with Aunt Anna today, and we're going to be talking about home canning and food preservation for beginners. And I'm and I'm super interested to learn more about this. I know when I was younger, I remember my mom canning tomatoes and green beans and tomato sauce and all that good stuff and quite she never taught me how to do it.
00:00:32 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
So I don't. I don't know anything about this or you know anything about what to do, so I am very excited to jump in with the with you on this. But before we get started, can you tell the good audience a little bit more about you, your background and how you help people?
00:00:51 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Yeah, absolutely. So it's funny that you mentioned that your mom used to do some of this as well, but you never learned because that was really me too like my mom did a little bit right growing up. I first of all I grew up in the city. I'm from Vancouver, BC and really was never exposed to a lot of this. Like you know, you mentioned my website, the House in Homestead, right? So I do a lot of homesteading which is growing food and preserving food and cooking from scratch and like and teaching other people how to do this as well, but I didn't.
00:01:21 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Didn't, was not exposed to any of this really growing up. So my mom, I do remember, would like get her dill cukes every summer and she would do her Pickles. And my grandpa remember, you know, he grew a small backyard garden and always had green beans and stuff like that in the summer. But that was really the extent of it right now. My great grandparents, which I was lucky enough to have in my life when I was quite young, they still did some of this stuff right. They still did some of the canning and the preserving stuff, but it wasn't. Yeah, I was never taught any of this, right. So.
00:01:51 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
I had some idea that this sort of thing existed, but I certainly wasn't raised like this and it was never really on my radar until I was really in my 20s I guess. And so it was, you know, like most things kind of a snowball effect of how I got here. But the kind of gist of it was that my husband and I before we were even married actually, and we're still living in the city and.
00:02:20 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
I mean, for for starters, I had always kind of just felt off where we lived. Like, I just didn't feel like living in the city and that kind of rat race, working downtown, like that lifestyle jived with me very well and I always felt more at ease when we were like out in the country somewhere or just in nature. And I just, I, I think I knew always deep down that I wanted to live like a lifestyle that was somehow closer to nature and living seasonally. And like, I didn't know at that time that it would involve like growing a garden and doing all these things.
00:02:51 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Doing now, but I think there was something in me that always knew like this isn't right. I I want something else.
00:02:56 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
And so while we were living there doing our thing and working and going to school and everything, we started actually getting into watching a lot of documentaries about like food and how our food is processed and where it comes from. And, you know, like those food Inc. And documentaries like that that were really big a few years ago and it was just a real eye opener for us that like Oh my God like these are kind of the realities of how our food is produced and we really don't have a lot of control over it and it's really destructive.
00:03:26 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
The environment. And that was something that I always cared about. And it's destructive in a lot of cases to our health. And so it just, it was something that I just remember becoming really passionate about and getting really interested in. But on one hand, there was kind of all this doom and gloom about like, Oh my God, the horrors of this, like, industrialized food industry and everything. But then on the other hand, these documentaries were showing people who were doing things differently and living alternative lifestyles and, you know, growing their own food and cooking and preserving for themselves and that kind of thing. And.
00:03:57 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
A lot of them, called themselves homesteaders, and that was really the first time that I had heard that term. And I know a lot of people if they're not familiar with it, right? Kind of are maybe a little bit confused about what home setting means, especially in the 21st century, because people might have heard of like the Homestead Act of the 1800s or whatever where you were able to claim land and like it's different now, right? That the the term means something different in our modern day, and that was the first time I was really exposed to it, and this idea that what and This is why I like to call it modern home setting. So my digital magazine.
00:04:30 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Mention is called modern homesteading magazine is because what it is now is really people just opting out of kind of these.
00:04:37 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Systems that we are have, you know, are all kind of dependent on or have become accustomed to relying on these big food. You know, industrial agriculture, like all that kind of stuff and they are just finding ways to opt out and do things differently. Now in many cases that involves growing their own food right? If you have some land often that will involve producing some of your own food, but it can also include. Well it usually does also include then preserving some of that food right? For to put up for the winter or.
00:05:09 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
You know just to put away for later, so you're not so dependent on the grocery store and on you know, processed foods that you don't really have any control over what's in them, and that kind of thing. But what I really like specifically about preserving food is that even if you're not growing it yourself like, even if you live in an apartment, which is, that's how we started. We lived in the city we lived in a N facing condo where we could barely grow herbs on our balcony, but we could. We did have a kitchen, right?
00:05:39 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
So we were able to kind of start getting into preserving food, and that's really where it started with us was for us was in the kitchen and it, I mean before preserving you. And it really did start with cooking, right source? Starting to source some of our local ingredients like find local farmers in our area, buying things in season, trying to source out better organic foods, that kind of stuff. And then at first I wasn't doing any canning or anything. It was just like freezing, right? That's a really good entry point for anybody.
00:06:10 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
It's just like almost all of us have freezers now, right? Just, you know, buy some blueberries while they're in season right now or whatever, and put them in the freezer. And then you don't have to buy blueberries out of season or from another country or whatever. All year long, right? You've got them put away, and so that's how we kind of started, right? Just putting stuff in the freezer. And then of course, then I wanted to learn how to.
00:06:30 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Make food shelf stable, right? Because as as you learn more and I always say home setting is such a slippery slope, because as you learn more, you want to learn more. There's always something else you can learn and so of course, then I started learning about like canning. And like all these other ways of preserving food that can make them shelf stable. And you know, and so I wanted to. I wanted to get into canning now. I didn't do that when we were in the city, still because during that time we had decided to move out of the city and we found.
00:07:00 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
A community that we really liked and that's where we are now. So it's on Vancouver Island. We live in a place called the Comox Valley.
00:07:07 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
And it's a wonderful place because it is a huge kind of farming community out here. Lots of sustainable agriculture, people you know, doing small farms growing organically. That kind of stuff. A lot of people who even even just, you know, everyday people who have backyard gardens here and have chickens. And canning. Is it kind of a way of life out here. Whereas in the city it was very foreign to us and very foreign to like everybody around us. Most of my friends and family, they're think like we're still the weird ones in the family that they don't really know what we're doing.
00:07:38 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Or why we're doing it but but we found this community and and kind of the stars aligned and we were able to make the move out here. And for the first few years we rented a place. But luckily it was on enough land that the owners let us put in a little garden. So we had our first little raised bed garden and started dipping our toe into that world of like starting seeds and growing things. But they also had this huge like 100 year old.
00:08:09 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Apple tree.
00:08:10 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
And the first fall when all those apples were ready, like we had to figure out something to do with them, right? We could have just tossed them all or fed them all to the deer. But that was a great opportunity to learn how to can, and so that was my very first canning project. Was making applesauce that year, and that's a really great one. It's actually one that I always recommend. People get started with because it's a really simple one to do. But that was like the very first thing that I did and I remember it took me hours.
00:08:40 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
It was like back and forth. I double checked the instructions a million times and I was nervous and like didn't know what I was doing and you know, but once I did that and had that satisfaction and had all those jars sitting on our shelves. Of these, you know organic, you know home canned applesauce like that, just it gave me such a rush and I was like now I want to do the next thing right and then I think you know maybe it was strawberry jam or something and then it was like pickled beans and one thing leads to another and here we are now. A few years later.
00:09:11 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
And we've now owned. We bought our place that we're in now back in 2018. So almost four years ago now and and we have a pretty big garden here and we now can and preserve like hundreds of jars of food every year. And we've gone way beyond just the jams and the Pickles and the applesauce and stuff like that. And now I'm into pressure canning, which we can get into. But that opens a whole new world of like things that you're able to actually preserve. You can preserve meats and vegetables and whole meals like.
00:09:42 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Soups and stews and all sorts of stuff and and. And we do all sorts of other types of stuff and preserving and things like that too. But you know, I did. I came from nothing, came from not knowing any of the stuff, having really no exposure and just one step at a time. Learned one thing and then that led to another. And yeah, I'd say All in all, it's been about a 10 year journey now. And so now here we are doing all this. And yeah, with my blog and through the magazine and I've got a few online courses.
00:10:13 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
I have taken the that passion for home setting and learning how to do some of this myself and I that's what I know. I teach other people how to do it too.
00:10:22 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
So you gave me a lot to unpack there, but I do. I do want to go back to a point that you made and you know this is going to show you my ignorance on the subject, but that's OK. You mentioned that you can start just by freezing, preserving your food by you know, just freezing it and you mentioned the blueberries. And and maybe it was blackberries and you know you know I've never even thought about that. I know I freeze meat and I freeze like what comes from the grocery store that's already in the frozen section at the grocery store.
00:10:53 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
But I've never thought about freezing strawberries or blueberries or blackberries or anything like that.
00:10:59 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Well, that's the thing. It's like now that we're doing all this right. It's easy to forget like where we did come from, but like I was the same. I'd never even considered it. It seems so simple once you start doing it, but you know, if you don't know you don't know kind of thing, right? If you've never been exposed to that or you're used to just going and getting what you need from the grocery store or whatever, right? But yeah, it is a really easy entry point, and it's something that everybody can do, and it's really.
00:11:23 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Non threatening, like I know with canning, for example, if you've never done it before, it can be intimidating, right? Like people are worried about it. How do I know if my food is safe to eat, like all these things. But with freezing, like, we're all pretty familiar with how to freeze foods in general and it's pretty safe. So it's a really easy kind of. And like I say, each one of those things, like whether it's freezing some blueberries or eventually getting some jars of applesauce, you get you, you get a bit of a high off of it, right. It's like got this rush of like, oh, I just did that right. Like and it's empowering and that's what I love.
00:11:54 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
So much about this whole lifestyle is you're taking control over some of your food security over. You know some of your health, even right, like the the foods that you're choosing and and preserving, and even just like I love to support my local farmers and local community and stuff like that, right? Like that's a way that I can do that and not necessarily be giving my money to these entities that I don't necessarily want to support, right? So it's so empowering in so many ways to be able to take control over that.
00:12:24 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
Well, let me ask you this, can you go into a little bit more detail? And for those of us who aren't really familiar with Canning, can you talk about how home Canning works? You mentioned pressure canning a few minutes ago, and I think that's what my mom used to do I. I remember this like pressure pot or something being there, but I'm not really sure. Can you go into a little bit more detail about how it actually works?
00:12:50 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Absolutely, yeah. So there's two main types of canning. There's water bath.
00:12:54 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Planning and then there's pressure canning, and there's a new one that's kind of just hit the market called Steam canning. It's only recently been kind of approved as a safe method of canning, but I have never done it before so we won't go there. The kind of the two main safe methods of canning, because there are some outdated things that people used to do 100 years ago, right that some people will still go? Well, my great grandma used to do it this way and nobody died and I'm like just stick to the couple safe ones, right? But is that's water bath canning and pressure canning so water bath canning?
00:13:25 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Is kind of the one that the easy entry route that most of us are familiar with now that is where you're basically taking a big stock pot. Or you can get an actual water bath canner, right? But you don't even technically need one as long as you have a pot that's large enough and some sort of a rack to put in the bottom because you don't want your jars directly touching the heat so all your water bath counters if you purchase one which they're not very expensive, they're like 30 bucks or something. On average they come with a little rack that you put your jars in. You're using Mason jars.
00:13:55 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
So those like ball jars are typically the jars that you're using for canning.
00:13:59 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
And when your water bath canning, you can water bath can and preserve high acid foods, so those include things like most of your fruits, right? And so when I say high acid, we're talking about the pH scale here, right? And this is where people can get a little bit intimidated. Like how do I know? And but there's kind of some general guidelines, so most fruits fall into the high acid category. And that just means that basically they are safe to water back and we'll get into a little bit more of that when we get into pressure canning and why that is.
00:14:30 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
But most fruits jams right? Because we're using fruits to do that. Pickles because even if you're doing something that's low acid like vegetables like cucumbers or beans, which again we'll talk more about in a SEC, you're adding vinegar, which makes them highly acidic, which makes them safe to water. Bath can. So yeah, you know, pie fillings and all that kind of stuff you can water, bath can. And so that's how I started applesauce, right? And that's a really easy way to kind of get served, because you're basically just boiling a pot of water.
00:15:02 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
And you're processing your jars in that boiling water, right? And so of course, you want to follow the instructions. Whatever your you know, whatever your recipe is, and you know, make sure that you're doing it for the recommended amount of time and all that kind of stuff. Those are all important factors, but that's really all. Water bath canning is. You're taking your jars, sterilizing them right, which just means you're cleaning them out, making sure that they're you know, nice and clean. You put them in the the hot water, like on to simmer while you're preparing whatever you're going to put in them, and then you.
00:15:32 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Dump the water of the stars, fill the jars with your jam or your Pickles or whatever, pop the lid on and then you're putting them in the hot water bath and then you're, you know, setting it on to boil, basically for the recommended amount of time. Once that's done, you can remove your jars and put them on the counter and you just kind of let them sit until you'll hear usually the the lids, right? They'll make that pop sound and that means that they've sealed. Now, that's half the battle. Of course we want our lids to seal, but you know, again, you want to make sure that you're doing it for the correct amount of time.
00:16:03 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Following all the instructions, everything too because there is a misconception with some people that just because the lids of sealed that it's safe, right? But of course like there's other factors as well. But as long as you're following the instructions then that kind of that ping at the end with the lids. Then your your lids have sealed and your jars are essentially they're they're sealed, they're safe, they're they can be put on the shelf and they can be stored for quite a long time.
00:16:26 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
So that's kind of the gist of water bath canning, right? So that's what a lot of people like. I say we'll start with if you you know a lot of people that do like jams and Pickles and stuff, they never get into pressure canning. They never go that far, and that's fine. You don't have to, right, but it is. It is kind of an easy way to get started because you don't need a ton of equipment and it is pretty non intimidating I guess right? Whereas pressure canning is kind of usually the thing that people go, I'm a little bit nervous about that because I've heard horror stories of like pressure counters.
00:16:57 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Blowing up in the kitchen or people getting sick from improperly canned food and stuff like that, but.
00:17:04 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Pressure canning once you start doing it, is actually really simple. It's actually my favorite way to can now you do. There is a bit of an investment because the canner itself can cost a bit more than water bath canning. It can cost a bit more, or it can actually cost a lot more. Like I have the kind of Cadillac of pressure canners which is called the all American pressure canner. And The thing is like a tank it is like but it elastic. You can pass it on through generations right? And it was a few $100 but I mean for the amount of.
00:17:34 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Food that we get out of it. It's definitely worth the investment, but the new ones like if you're investing in a new counter, they have so many safety features and everything that you don't have to worry about, you know you'd have to try to blow to blow the thing up, right? So a lot of these kind of legends of these things blowing up or whatever. They're from a long time ago when when we didn't do things so safe, right? And things were not manufactured as safe as they are today. So just to kind of quell those fears. But once you're kind of ready to take the next step into pressure canning
00:18:05 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
that's where you can do a whole bunch more stuff. So with you must pressure can, you're low acid foods, so in general these are things like meats, vegetables, you know soups, stocks, that kind of thing, and.
00:18:19 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Tomatoes, although tomatoes are a weird one. They kind of. You can water bath, can them, or you can pressure can them, but it's it's kind of a tricky 1. They're kind of like in in the garden or on in the kitchen, right? They're like, are they a fruit? Are they a vegetable? Are they should do pressure on them? Should you water bath? Can them? They're kind of. They can kind of go both ways so, but a lot of times with tomato products, it's recommended that you pressure can them just because the tomatoes over the last 100 years or so have changed a lot, right? And so they used to be.
00:18:49 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Considered a high acid food, but their genetic makeup in a lot of cases has changed over the past few decades and it's hard to know for sure which tomatoes are high acid, which ones are low acid now. So if your water bath canning them, you can acidify them with some lemon juice, or you can pressure canned them or whatever, but in general your vegetables, your meats if you're doing combination meals like chicken soup or you know beef Stew or chili or stuff like that, you can can those, but that all needs to be.
00:19:20 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Pressure can and the reason for that is because.
00:19:24 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
There are Botulism spores in just about everything, like it's they're in the air that we breathe, and in the soil and on the vegetables and everything. But they're harmless. They're only harmful if they are allowed to produce a toxin under the right conditions. Now, unfortunately, the right conditions are the conditions inside a canning jar because they thrive under basically moist room temperature and anaerobic.
00:19:55 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Conditions so basically in in a in an environment where there's like little to no oxygen where it's moist and it's about it's about room temperature kind of thing, which is the conditions inside of furniture, so you need to make sure that you kill off the Botulism spores so that it doesn't produce the toxin, because that's when you can get into serious trouble with canning, right? That's when it can become dangerous if you're if you're canning things improperly, like if your water bath canning, something that should be pressure canned.
00:20:25 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
And those spores haven't been killed because the Heat's not high enough or something. That's when you could make your yourself or your family quite sick, and it can't even be deadly, so.
00:20:35 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
But again, you know, as long as I don't want to scare anybody off of this, because as long as you're following the correct procedures then it's no problem. So the deal is with high acid foods, Botulism spores can't survive in an acidic environment, which is why they can't survive in like Pickles. Or, you know, in a in an environment that is, that is. I think it's 4.6 or lower on the pH scale, but they can survive and thrive in a low acid environment so.
00:21:04 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
That's your meats and vegetables and stuff that you have not been acidified that have not been pickled. That kind of thing, right? And so in that case, the way that you have to kill them is by getting the temperature up high enough to kill off those spores, which you can totally do in a pressure canner. But you can't do that in a water bath, canner, water bath canning. You just can't get. You can't get the water higher than a boiling point, right? Whereas Botulism spores, Botulism spores will still survive it at the boiling point. You need to get the temperature higher than that, which only a pressure canner.
00:21:35 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
And do so. That's kind of the long way. That's a lot of kind of information. I know that I've thrown out there, but that's kind of the the gist of like the science and safety behind home canning and how it works and why you need to do certain things one way and certain things are OK another way. But at the end of the day, you know, again, like as long as you're following the the correct recipe, and you know procedures and everything and you're not taking any shortcuts and going like like I heard one story about.
00:22:05 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
A gentleman who was canning some meat. He was pressure canning it, but he said that he heard the Lids Ping in the canner. So he just figured, Oh well, they're sealed. So I'm not going to process them for the rest of the time and he took them out early, like 20 minutes early or something. Well, you need to do it for the full time, right? And he did get Botulism and he was very sick. He survived luckily, but as long as you're doing things you know kind of by the book and just remembering that science is or sorry, canning is a science and not an art at least.
00:22:35 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
When you're getting started right so there are certain steps that like it's not like cooking where you can just like oh I'm going to throw in a little bit of this and throw a little bit of that and like, oh I'm going to, you know, like kind of wing it you do kind of need to know the basics of this like the scientific basics of how it works and the rules that you need to follow before you can start getting creative with it. It's a little bit more like baking that way, right? You can't just go. Oh, I'm just going to have the amount of baking soda and like you know change the amount of flour and stuff you're not going to get the right results.
00:23:07 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
So you do need to kind of follow the science behind it, but then once you know that, then there are ways that you can get creative with it. Once you kind of understand the science behind it.
00:23:18 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
So as you were going through all that, I think my mom was actually doing both the pressure canning and the water bath canning. I I need to go back and ask her after our conversation, I'm going to have to make that phone call and ask her, but I I really think that she was doing both depending on what type of food she was canning and I like a lot of the stuff you said in terms of, you know we need to make sure that we're following the basic safety rules and and following the guidelines here to make sure that we're doing everything that's safe.
00:23:48 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
For our family. So let let me ask you this.
00:23:52 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
You know we're the country here, here in the US, and I'm sure in and where you are too. We're definitely have. We have a lot of inflation that's going on. There has been some food shortages, you know, like over you know over code of COVID we've seen a lot of supply chain issues. Are you really noticing an uptick in the amount of people who are wanting to kind of kind of do? This can and preserve their food?
00:24:21 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Yeah, I've definitely noticed more people just taking an interest in all things related to home setting and kind of self-sufficiency in general. So from like we all remember the the kind of sourdough craze right at the beginning of COVID and that was really in response to first of all, it was everybody was home and wanted something to do right. But second of all, there was no yeast in the stores at that time, right? And no bread in a lot of cases and so people kind of discovered that actually you don't need yeast to make your own bread and you can make a sourdough starter and that's got natural yeast in it.
00:24:54 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
And so that took off, right? And then backyard gardening and even like chicken keeping even us. We built our we always wanted chickens, but we built our chicken coop in 2020 when COVID first hit because we thought, well, we're home. My husband can build that kind of stuff. Like now. We've got the time. May as well do it. So all of that stuff sort of took off and I saw an uptick for sure. And people searching these kind of things. My blog started to see more traffic all that but preserving food.
00:25:23 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
I I wouldn't say that I noticed it as much as the other things at first, but I certainly have noticed an uptick in people, especially now. I think it's almost more shifting that way now that we're seeing like, OK, so these food shortages and supply chain issues, inflation and stuff, like, it's not going away and in some cases it's getting worse. And the other thing is that not everybody can grow a garden, right? Not everybody can keep chickens, not everybody wants to maintain a sourdough starter, but everybody can preserve food. Almost everybody has a kitchen.
00:25:54 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Umm. And so you can still take that step, right? And it's like even even like it's even if you're not growing your own, you can find local farmers in your area or you can even just go to the grocery store and take advantage of things that are on sale or in season and that kind of thing and and buy in bulk or buy extra now and then preserve it and put it up for later. And then that's a bit of a buffer then against rising costs of things, right? Buy it at a good price or if you can grow it or whatever.
00:26:25 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Might do that and then preserve just you know, buy more and preserve for later on. So I I definitely have noticed that there are more and more people wanting to learn all these skills, but it's just been interesting over the past couple of years. The way that it shifted and the way that it's like what people have been into at different times. And I definitely would say that right now where we're at, food preservation and and food security in general, growing and and preserving food.
00:26:56 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Is like top of mind for a lot of people.
00:26:59 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
So Anna I know some people in the audience who are listening to this. They're going to want to get started and and learning more about it. What resources would you recommend for them?
00:27:09 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Yeah, so there's. I mean there's so much information on the Internet obviously, and this is a good thing, but it can also be a little bit overwhelming. And there's also like not so great information too, which I learned all of that when I was learning myself, because that's really how I learned. So some that I would.
00:27:26 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Really highly recommend if you're going to go online. There are lots of great like you know I'm a Blogger online that I I I can tell you that like my stuff is all very. It's all you know based on recipes from trusted resources and stuff like that. So I'm very confident in what I can offer you. So obviously thehouseandhomestead.com, I've got a lot of great canning information and recipes on there, and there are lots of other bloggers like me as well that I would say have fantastic information.
00:27:56 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Other, but again, it's kind of hard to know for sure. So one great resource online is the National Center for Home Food Preservation, so you can just Google them or go to their website, but that is basically like those are the guys that set the stage the safety standards for canning, so they have a ton of great information on their website. They've got lots of recipes and that sort of thing, so whether you're just dipping your toe in or whether you're already kind of a seasoned canner and are wanting to get you know specific information on something or more information.
00:28:28 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
They are considered a very trusted, reliable source of information. So the National Center for Home Food Preservation, another thing and or another source that I really like, is ball, right? So we all know like the ball jars. So any of the ball books like the ball blue book or the my favorite is called the ball complete Book of home preserving. It's like a thick canning book that's got like 400 recipes or whatever I think is my very first canning book and I have a number of them since then, but it's still the one that I go to all the time.
00:28:59 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
And it walks you through like everything you need to know about both water bath and pressure canning, and then has a ton of recipes in there as well. So that's a really great resource. And then I actually also offer a full on canning course because that's kind of what I was looking for when I was first getting started, and these other resources are great, but it was kind of like OK, you know, back and forth, and picking and choosing and like. OK, now I want to learn this and what page is that on and where do I go to find it? And I wanted to create a really comprehensive.
00:29:30 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Resource that just walked people through like here's step one, right? Here's the first thing you know. OK, here's the second thing. Here's an easy recipe to start with. Now. Here's one that gets a little bit more challenging. And so on and so forth. So the way that I've lined my course so it's called the yes, you can home canning course and it walks you through like the basics, right? So we start off with like canning, safety basics. Then we go into like what equipment you need? Then we start with some easy canning recipes. We start off with applesauce because that's what I started with and we do jams and jellies and Pickles and pie fillings and fruits and syrups and that.
00:30:00 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Kind of thing and then the second-half of it is pressure canning and we got into. You know what you need to know about pressure canning equipment and then we do stock it like how to do your own chicken or beef or vegetable stock, which is one of my favorite things to can because it's so versatile and I'm always using it and it's actually quite easy as well. So stocks and we do vegetables and we talk more about like tomato sauce. I show you how to pressure canned tomato sauce and and we talk about kind of what the deal is with that because like I mentioned it can kind of go both ways.
00:30:31 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
There really is a a pretty comprehensive course that walks you through all of it, so if you're just getting started and not really sure where to start or what to do first or whatever, that's kind of the way that I've outlined that. So if you are interested in that, you can go to thehouseandhomestead.com/yes. You can or it's sorry thehouseandhomestead.com/yes dash U dash Cam.
00:30:54 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And and I will make sure that all of those links are in the show notes to your blog, to those other blogs that you recommended and.
00:31:01 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
Also to your course, in case anybody wants to go learn a little bit more about canning there, and you also have a free resource for the listeners here.
00:31:13 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Yeah, so I actually also offered through my website my free resource library, which has lots of just kind of.
00:31:20 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Downloads and freebies for all sorts of things like across the kind of spectrum of of home setting, right? So it kind of is a little bit of everything that I do, which is the kind of main pillars I would say are growing your own food, cooking and preserving your own food. And then I also do a lot of like natural living herbal medicine that kind of stuff. So it's got a lot of resources related to those kind of pillars in there. So if you want to grab or you want to sign up and gain access to the free resource.
00:31:50 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Library you can go to. I should just double check this because I haven't been there in.
00:31:55 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
You don't even have to say the link because we'll make sure that.
00:31:58 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
00:31:59 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
So they can go sign up for your free research.
00:32:01 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Library, so yeah, it's just thehouseandhomestead.com/resource Dash library, so there you go.
00:32:08 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Of the magazine as well. So in the magazine, the magazine as well. So that's that modern home saying magazine.com. But that was just a way for me to kind of go more in depth with a lot of these topics. And people seem to love it just because it is something that like you can download and keep and print out and whatever. And it's just got like, I mean we've covered every topic from canning and fermenting and backyard chickens and organic gardening and herbal medicine and sourdough bread and like you name it, we've basically done it in the magazine and.
00:32:38 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
They still produce an issue every quarter, so if you are interested in checking that out, that's a modern home setting magazine.com.
00:32:46 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
So Anna thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge today. I learned so much myself and definitely inspire to go to go test it out. I've haven't done it myself. I need to. I need to kind of circle back with my mom and see if that's something she'd love doing with me.
00:33:03 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Absolutely well, I hope that you do and just be forewarned that it is a slippery slope once you get into it, right? Like I say, you get that little rush the first time those lids will ping on the counter and you're just like, OK, I got to get on to the next thing.
00:33:17 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
Well, thanks so much, Anna.
00:33:19 Anna Sakawsky (guest)
Awesome, thank you.