Why Canning Food Doesn’t Work: A Better Way to Preserve for the Working Mom

When Preserving the Past Doesn’t Fit the Present…

For years now, we, as working and home-making mommas, have been hearing that bulk canning and food storage is the best, maybe even the ONLY way to a well-stocked food supply or pantry. Days in the kitchen, hours spent in food prep, washing jars and monitoring pressure cookers all hours of the night. I just heard yet another podcast with the same message, selling the same pitch. And since everyone seems to be saying it, it must be true. Right? 

Uhh… no. 

I think most of this advice is coming from a place of good intentions. But it’s easy, regurgitated advice. And not only does one specific method or strategy not work for everyone, bulk canning definitely isn’t the best or only option out there, especially for a working mom.

Also, how do you know that the “experts” are following their own advice? Or that they’re getting great results from their yearly garden or amounts of food preserved at the end of the season?

It seems to me that you can spend a lot of time feeling frustrated or like a failure because canning and food preservation didn’t work for you. I have a newsflash for you: you’re not the problem! 

Home Canning As It Used To Be

I know because back when I was starting canning and preserving food long-term, I tried doing it in large batches, and I just didn’t get great results. I either dealt with not having enough time to finish the whole amount of food to be preserved, so some of it went bad, or some went bad before I had enough time to deal with the amount all at once. Fresh fruits and vegetables, even unwashed, have an ideal window that make them perfect for long-term preservation and after that, the quality of the final product suffers.

In fact, I was finding that I was avoiding doing food preservation, which I actually love to do, because I felt if I didn’t have the time to devote to completing large batches of fruits and vegetables at once, I couldn’t do food preservation properly. What I’ve found is that I couldn’t be more wrong. I have a couple farmhouse kitchen cookbooks from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s as well as some old farm wife magazines that I absolutely love.

What I gleaned from those publications is completely liberating; I’m not sure why I didn’t make this connection before.

Small Batch Garden Preservation

The farm wives that pioneered home food preservation mastered the art of small batch canning. When you have a garden (or orchard), unless the garden is absolutely huge, you don’t wind up with 1-2 bushels of either fruits or vegetables ready all at once. You get enough fruit per picking for maybe 3-4 pints of jam; you pick your first summer harvest of green beans, resulting in enough for 6-7 quarts in the pressure cooker. This creates a trickle effect of preserving the summer’s harvest either from your small garden or obtained from local farm markets, but in much more doable amounts.

I also didn’t feel like I was being authentic when I talked about mass amounts of food preservation, when I knew that I wasn’t able to attain the goal I had set for myself.

Always remember: the goal is to always learn to do new skills and life rhythms that work in your life and with your family. If you don’t have the time or energy to do gallons and bushels of food preservation, whether it be freezing, dehydrating, or canning, stop stressing about it. It’s really ok. Let’s talk some strategies on how I incorporate long-term food preservation into a busy working mom’s schedule.

A Better Way For Stocking Food

Here’s what I did to increase my efficiency in food preservation instead of trying to fit a certain strategy into my life that just wasn’t working.

Step #1: Get Transparent About What You Actually Need 

I got clear about my ultimate goals: what kinds of foods and how much of each kind do I want sitting at my house for six to twelve months. What will we, as a family, actually eat and use before the next gardening/farm market season? What fruits, vegetables or food combinations does my family actually like to eat and what are some that I keep around but use as a last resource.

Let me give an example. One year, I thought it would be fun to make pickled apples; for those who don’t know what they are, they are apples that are stored in a cinnamon, allspice and vinegar mix instead of a water-based seasoned sugar syrup. Those apples have been sitting on the shelf, taking up space and jars for the last 3-5 years…lesson learned. If we aren’t going to eat them, I don’t can them.

Foods That We Preserve: We Save What We Like

In my family, there are certain things that we love to have around for the fall and winter months in terms of canned goods. These canned items are soups, peaches, applesauce, pickled beets, bread and butter pickles, tomato sauce, jams and jellies and fruit pie filling. Because I’ve established over the years that my family enjoys having these items and actually eats them, these are the items I concentrate my efforts around to make sure that we have a good amount for the winter months. This is what I mean by getting transparent about what you and your family will actually use.

Having foods set by for extras in the winter months is not only a savvy cost-saving method; it’s an extremely healthy way to supplement sometimes boring winter fare. By being able to continually add fruits and vegetables that you have sourced yourself, you can continue to feed yourself and your family a well-rounded diet when favorites aren’t in season. The opposite side of that is that purchasing long-term food storage containers, whether they be glass or plastic, food store containers cost money. When said containers are sitting full of food that you or your family won’t eat, you have wasted time, space, food and energy.

Step #2: Do Some Research 

I spent time researching food storage and the different strategies people were using to effectively add to their long-term pantry without wasting space or energy.

I was looking for gaps in popular thinking, strategies my friends and family had tried, what seemed to work, as well as what didn’t work.

For example: A good friend of mine is a stay-at-home mom with multiple children. She doesn’t have a full-time job, she homeschools her children, and is quite dedicated to sourcing healthy food sources for both immediate eating and long-term use. This exact scenario is how gaggles of blogs are built, based on the quintessential stay-at-home mom who homeschools and has large blocks of time to devote to food preservation and storage.

Getting Realistic

It doesn’t take a genius to see that this mom’s schedule is not even remotely similar to a mom who works forty-fifty hours per week, has children in an external schooling situation as well as coordinating all of the home rhythms and meals. Seeing the glaring differences in my time availability is what led me to research the concept of small batch preserving.

I knew that if I was going to get serious about sourcing healthy foods and keeping them on hand for all seasons, I was going to have to get creative with. my time and what I chose to preserve. By researching canning journals and old farm wife cookbooks that specialized in recipes that used small amounts of fruits and vegetables, I created space in my days off of work to start and finish doable batches of the different items I was concentrating on that week. I recruited help (usually my husband) to make sure that we started and finished on the same day.

Step #3: Make a Plan and Get Going 

After keeping records of what worked and what didn’t, I came up with a better way to keep food around for a longer term benefit. Here are the three things that I found worked the best for our family:

• Pay attention to what your family likes. If you find that you’re buying multiple jars of cinnamon applesauce every week on your grocery run or maybe you find that your family has a liking for berry smoothies, but berry costs in the the off-season increase drastically in price. Either way, these are cues that storing up extra of these items would be beneficial.
• Do some experimentation. Buy a vacuum sealer for frozen fruits and vegetables. If you want to have fresh-frozen fruits and vegetables on hand through the off-season, washing and vacuuming sealing extra to use later will help you determine if you’ll use the extras before trying to put up a larger amount.
• Try dehydration. Dehydrating fruits, vegetables, soup mixes, fresh herbs or any other number of snacks is a great way to put extra healthy shelf-stable foods on your shelves. I am not the authority on dehydration but check out The Purposeful Pantry for some great ideas on the possibilities for dehydration.

Next Steps

Food preservation does not have to be intimidating or feel like an impossible undertaking. With the proper planning, researches and processes, you also can also benefit from long-term food storage.

Check out some of my other farmhouse living posts and keep challenging yourself to get results in a way that rings true for you. 

In them, you’ll find more tips on farmhouse living while surviving as a working mom, and more.

• The Essence of Farmhouse Living: A Guide to Simple Living for a Working Mom
• Quick and Easy Bread Recipe: A Working Mom’s Secret to Fresh, Homemade Comfort
• Autumn Enchantment: 10 Sweet Baking Adventures To Spark Joy With Your Little Chefs!

Current wisdom can be little more than fads that don’t stand the test of time. Many won’t even get you where you want to go. 

If you want more help here, check out my next blog post on a simple version of delicious homemade pickles just for you, to help you start your winter pantry. 

Questions? Comments? Drop them below. I can’t wait to hear what you think!