I decided to go a bit out there this season, and instead of giving away wine, spirits, or confections, I figured I would give out some homemade, signature BBQ sauces.

I realized that I needed a safe and practical method of distributing the sauces, something perhaps a little bit more hygienic, classy and long-lasting than some tupperware. Something in glass perhaps. I needed to learn about the art/science of “canning”. I really knew nothing about canning, but after reading some stuff on the Internet I was at least familiar with the theory.

Come to find out that due to the acid content of the tomato-based sauce I probably could get away with a method called “boiling water bath”, but it would be safer and quicker to use “pressure canning” where water is super-heated to 240 degrees, killing dangerous bacteria. Sounds good, headed to the store and found out that because it isn’t “canning season”, they didn’t have many supplies. The good news is that they had a fancy Presto 23 Quart Pressure Cooker/Canner on clearance, and then it was also 40% off. So I ended up getting a nice/new pressure canner for basically nothing. Score.

I normally make a pretty good Apple-Habanero BBQ sauce, but decided that I would branch out and try to come up with a couple of new flavors. After making a base sauce, I tried a few different concoctions until I settled on Guinness-Chipotle and Mandarin-Honey flavors. I proceeded to make several quarts of each, and a double-batch of Apple-Habanero.

I decided on half-quart jars, figuring it would be a good gift size, easy to fill and generally would be the ideal way to go. Frankly though, it just isn’t enough sauce and cleaning, pre-heating, filling, wiping, pressure canning and cooling 24 or 36 little jars sucks. Going to go with bigger jars next time–if you’re going to go through the hassle of canning the stuff, you as well make gallons of it and do it proper.

I then designed up some labels, printed them out, and applied them to the jars.

Only after giving out a dozen of them did I realize that I may have made a small mistake. While I tested the sauces repeatedly during the cooking process, I didn’t actually test the flavor of them AFTER the were pressure steamed at 240 degrees for 15 minutes. I hope that the canning process didn’t mess with the flavor.

Overall the canning was about as hard as I thought it would be–its not easy, but it is totally achievable even by a total rookie.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 12:04 am and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.