Customer Reviews

Ball Blue Book: A Guide to Home Canning, Freezing and Dehydration

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We have had our copy since it was published. It is a never-fail guide with well-written, detailed instructions and good illustrations. Every one of the processes we used have been fool-proof. We hit the local farmers' markets every season to get the fresh fruits for dehydration & veggies for canning & freezing. At first we had to invest in a good dehydrator and it was well worth the money - the dried apple slices, apricot halves, tomatoes, and all berries & grapes are incredibly delicious. You will also need an anti-oxidant like Fruit Fresh to treat some things such as the apples to prevent discoloring.
If you follow the instructions to the letter, and work with FRESH foods, everything works perfectly. We suffered from mushy frozen corn-on-the-cob for too darned long, mostly because we followed other peoples' advice about how to do it. The best process is the one found in this guide: about 50% of the good result is in the very exact preparation, the other 50% is in the packaging of the cobs. There are also "raw-pack" instructions for some vegetables, which result in somewhat more crunchy and less processed-tasting veggies.
We use a lot of dried beans and the prep in this guide is our regular method. The "Boston Baked Beans" recipe is great, 10 times better than any canned baked beans. You can add/subtract other seasonings to you own taste - we just like the batch as it's written.
A last important thing we learned was that Ball jars & seals are the best for this work. We have tried every single canning jar on the market, including some rather expensive ones, and some gave less dependable seals, and some were downright fragile. If you're putting up tomatoes or tomato sauces, use only Ball products. THIS IS NOT A PAID ADVERTISEMENT - it's just advice from decades of experience. Have fun, eat healthy!

informative and helpful, great price, fast delivery, just what I was looking for, I would recommend it to anyone interested in canning

My opinion is not for the shipper. Mine is for Amazon. I don't like to do these because you require way too much typed information!!!!!!!!!!!!!!