Beginner's Guide to Presto Pressure Canners

hi the mud broker here today I'm gonna do a canning video it's not really a video about canning anything in particular I'm making maple beans in case you're wondering it's really a tutorial about how to run a 23 quart pressed oil pressure canner a lot of beginning canners starting off in pressure canning will end up with one of these they're inexpensive they're about 80 bucks apiece depending on where you get them as opposed to over 200 for an all-american canner they're commonly available pretty much anywhere that sells housewares has one of them and they are fairly easy to use but the first couple of times you can use them can be a nerve-wracking experience if you don't know what's going to happen there's also an important thing that is not mentioned in the instructions that really comes in handy even if you're running an all-american canner and we'll explain that later when you open up the box what you're gonna find inside is a rubber gasket a gauge you'll have to put the gauge on the lid and oh wait you'll also find and set this aside do you'll also find one canning rack you have to have a rack in the bottom to keep your jars off the bottom otherwise it'll break your jars now the 23 quart you can put two layers of pint jars in there and to do that you'll need two racks but it only comes with one so you'll have to order another one it ain't fair but new there's the rest of life looking around the inside they're real hard to see but down the side are separate little marks for various purposes you could use this as a pressure cooker and as in open bath water bath canner the very bottom mark down here is the fill line for water when your pressure canning it takes three quarts of water to reach that line okay I got interrupted by my dog so I'm back anyway that little line in the bottom if you can see it that's how much water you want for pressure canning also on the inside you'll notice this little hook that is a safety lock so you can't open the lid under pressure I'm gonna put one of my rack in and get my other one set aside here a lot of people I'll grab the rubber a lot of people like to lubricate the gasket a little bit they'll use either a thin film of Vaseline or vegetable oil I don't Vaseline can soften rubber and break it down over time and vegetable oil a lot of times will become sticky if your gasket is good you shouldn't have any problem getting the lid on and off and the gasket is an easily replaceable part they're inexpensive and you should probably change them every few years anyway if your gasket starts getting sticky in your lid doesn't open easy get yourself a new gasket and that'll probably cure it also where to go also in there is your weight that goes on that little nert there and you'll see how that works later and I'll explain that I'm going to put some water in the canner I'm going to put the gasket in the lid get things set up and I'm going to get my beans in there and we'll get underway and I'll show you how this thing runs okay I have loaded up in the canner with three quarts of warm water you should try and match the water you put in your canner with the temperature of the stuff that's in your jars if you're hot packing something pouring boiling water into the jar with meat or something like that you want to use hot water if it's called you cold water these are warm so I'm using warm water this little arrow on the handle will align with not sure how well that's going to show them the light an arrow on the lid there's only one way this lid can go on so we don't have to worry about getting it wrong I put the gasket in that simply fits in a groove in the bottom make sure it's in nice and even all the way around and you're not hanging out somewhere you know you don't have it pinched or something like that just make sure it's sitting in there flat there's the pressure gage next to that is petcock most people call the petcock vegetables that's what it is and this little dingus here is the thing that I see a lot of people get wrong it serves two purposes first it will pop up when you're using the canner and it will engage this little angle on the canner in a locked lid you won't be able to take the lid off well this is under pressure but the second purpose of that is your air purge vent it's a little light aluminum thing and there's a seal on the bottom that's also another replaceable part eventually you'll have to replace that seal but it'll be a few years and on the new current model production Kanner's and a ways back although it does change eventually this type of air vents that different Kanner's have but on this particular model of presto canner this will pop up without putting any pressure on the canner it does that because steam is much more dense than air as the air is pushed out it'll allow it past but when the canner is full of steam this will literally fall on the steam and it will pop up lock the lid and sitting there on the counter is the weight I'm going to put the lid on there's an arrow on the handle there's also an arrow on the lid yeah it's showing up good and you simply align those two preferably with two hands but there's only one way that the lid can go on to the canner you close the down until the handles are lined up and we are ready to go this is all armed I'm going to move around put the camera on the tripod and we'll show you how this thing actually works I have my lid on and I had this set on a fairly high setting on the burner I took one of my knobs off just like I showed you this will vary depending on your stove exactly where you want to set things but right now I have this set on eight I'm just showing this give you some idea of what I'm talking about the way you control the pressure on a presto cane or like this is by how much heat you put into it the canner is trying to cool off at the same time you're putting heat in through the burner on this canner the weight does not control the pressure on an all-american canner it does you can also get replacement weights kind of look like this only they have a couple of rings on them that you can adjust your pressure and the weight will maintain the pressure but what you get right out of the box if you buy one of these is just a solid weight this will start to wiggle and relieve pressure once you hit about 15 pounds of pressure most canners are gonna be using less than that you'll have to find out what altitude you're at and look on a chart and it'll tell you exactly what sort of pressure you need to run for your altitude where I'm at I need about 11 psi now like I said these can be kind of nerve-wracking to run the first time a few times you work one of these because it can be tricky to figure out exactly what you need for heat going in as opposed to heat going out to maintain a nice steady pressure this is going to take a while to get heated up and purged so I'm gonna come back in a little bit and we'll talk a bit more I almost forgot to tell you about this little guy that little rubber plug is a blowout plug it's a safety device it'll blow out of the hole that it's in if for some reason the pressure should ever get above about 20 psi inside the canner I just had to mention that because that's an important safety device that you must be aware of and that also is a replaceable part after a few years that'll dry out and it'll leak or on there so you're gonna have to get a new one and plug it back in and as you can hear we're just starting to boil a few little wisps of steam but I'm gonna put you back on the tripod and we'll watch the action from this angle we're starting to boil now this is still on eight on my dial will probably be a little different on yours but we're running a pretty high temperature starting boil starting to get a little steam but we're nowhere near ready to start building pressure yet because the air vent / lid lock has not yet popped up on a new canner like this you know the brand new canner that you're likely to get do not put the weight on until that vent has popped up hopefully I'll be able to catch that on camera and not be wandering around doing something else and I'll be back in a minute [Applause] [Music] look there it went now from the time I started this till now has been about 20 minutes according to the instructions I could put my weight on now that the air-vent is popped up personally I let it go another five minutes ten minutes or so before I put the weight on just to be sure but all of your air should be out of the canner by now air in the canner will cause an inaccurate reading of your pressure gauge which means you will not be processing your food correctly and you don't want to do that so I'm gonna be back in about five minutes and put my weight on and we'll take things from there spit ball five minutes since the air vent popped up and as you can see there's a hole steady stream of steam coming out so I'm going to put the weight on now and now all the action begins I'm still running this on a pretty high setting I'm running this on about eight on my dial and I'm going to leave it like that until I reach five pounds of pressure and then I'm gonna start backing down the biggest problem that beginners tend to have with a pressure cooker like this is they'll overrun the pressure they'll bring the pressure up too fast and they'll go over pressure then they'll turn it down then they'll go under pressure then they'll turn it back up and you get big swings in your pressure that causes siphoning the siphoning is when the liquid in the jars gets drawn out and you end up with a big empty space in the jar that can cause a lot of problems if it's just a little bit it's fairly harmless sometimes the food will darken a little bit above the water line inside the jar but if you have a lot yet opens the door for bacteria to develop in the jar and your food will spoil as you can see this has already come up about a pound or so so I'll be back in a couple of minutes once this gets up to five psi and I'll show you the step-by-step way to get this up to the correct pressure okay we're just about up to five psi and that took about three three-and-a-half minutes what I'm going to do now is back my temperature on my stove down to five I'm on eight right now but I'm going to start slowing down so you reach over and get that turn known I'm going to turn the heat down to medium right in the middle until I get up to about seven and a half eight psi and then I'll be back again okay now we're up to about eight pounds and where it took about four minutes to go from zero to five since I turned it down it took about ten minutes to go from five to eight I'm going to turn this down again this time probably down to about three and a half on my dial so now you're getting down into the medium lower range and it'll take a few more minutes to get the rest of the way up to eleven like I said this will help prevent overshooting your pressure in getting big swings in your pressure and causing siphoning this kind of ease up on it don't worry if it takes a bit more time than you think it should because that'll give it more time for the food inside the canner to heat all the way through okay we're up to eleven pounds of pressure and that's the target pressure I'm looking for at my altitude so now I can start my timer and process these for 75 minutes because they're pints you'll notice there's a little bit of water dripping every once in a while out of the wait that's normal but you shouldn't have any leaking steam anywhere else we're up to eleven pounds I'm going to turn this down a little bit more again we're at three and a half I'm going to turn it down to just under three now I know from experience that that is a little bit too high yet what tends to happen is once you get it up to pressure it'll stay there for a while but then the pressure will start to slowly creep up if you leave it at the same temperature the reason it does that is because inside the canner the food is still heating through is still absorbing a lot more heat then the canner is losing to cooling to the air around it so even though you don't have to watch it like a hawk you do have to keep an eye on it they don't tell you that in the instructions so what will happen is like I said it'll be stable for a while and then the temperature will start to slowly creep up and you won't really understand why but that's why that's also handy to know for a all-american canner if you notice that you seem to have it dialed in where you want to be an all-american can or a can or where the weight controls the pressure you want your weight to jiggle maybe four or five times a minute it'll jiggle and let a little puff of steam oh well if you notice that your weight is kind of gain in speed and jiggling faster and faster that's what's happening now how long this will take and how long it takes the heat through will depend on how much is inside the canner I have a full load in there so it's going to take a little bit more to heat through and once I get down to my final heat setting it'll probably be lower than it would be if I had a canner that just had a couple of quarts in it because there's more mass inside to hold the heat it'll cool down slower and no I'm trying to think of what I wanted to say next if I come up with it I'll tell ya but anyway like I said this will once you get the temperature dialed in on these you don't really have to watch it like a hawk you do have to check out it every few minutes every 5-10 minutes but you don't have sit there staring at the gauge take your time bring it up to pressure from the time I put the weight on until the time I started my timer was a little bit under half an hour on a pressure canner where the weight controls the pressure you can bring those up to a bit faster because you're not gonna overshoot it and that like I said that's the biggest problem that beginners have with this is they'll overrun their pressure much higher than they want it to be then they'll turn it down and try and get it to adjust you have to make adjustments slowly on this because you're not relieving the pressure you're simply changing the amount of heat inside the can and it takes a while to heat up and cool down and for the pressure to change so once I get this fully stabilized I'll come back and talk a little bit more all right this has been processing for just under an hour after about 10 minutes after I reached pressure it did start to creep up a little bit so I backed the heat down just a little bit where before it was just above 3 I turned it down to just below 3 and I know from experience that's pretty much where I want to be it'll vary a little bit depending on the conditions in the room if it's hot in the room they're cold you might need a little more or less heat but once you get a little bit of experience with these you can tell where you're gonna wind up on your dial on your burner the needle hasn't moved a bit sense but what I wanted you to do is to listen to this right now where when we were bringing it up to pressure it was boiling pretty rapidly you can hear now it's just a real slow gentle simmer kind of soothing to listen to actually and that's the sound that you want to hear while you're processing your food in a presto pressure canner once my timer is ready to go off I'll come back and we'll take the next step well we're almost done my timer's gonna go off in a few seconds if you run a pound or two over your target Tampa target pressure for your altitude don't worry if it's stable there and it's not climbing just leave it alone and you'll be okay if for some reason there's no tangler if for some reason you turn it down too far and your pressure drops below your target pressure don't panic and crank the heat way up trying to get it back up what you do then is you turn off your timer turn your heat up a little bit and bring it back up to pressure once you're back up to pressure start your timer again and carry on the trick is always keep your adjustments small now you're never supposed to leave a pressure canner unattended once you get used to this and you've run it a few times you get a little experience and confidence in it you only really have to check on it every 10-15 minutes take a glance at the gauge and make sure everything is where you want it you get good at this that needle will put little stay right where you put it but now it's time to turn this off and having told you to never ignore your canner I'm going to tell you right now is the time you must absolutely ignore your canner I turn the heat off and it's going to cool down now until the pressure drops and the the lid lock / air vent thing drops down on its own do not ever try to rush the cooling off process don't put a fan on it don't put a wet towel on it don't tap your weight and jiggle it trying to let some pressure off walk away leave it alone and ignore your canner until the little lock drops down on its own then it's okay to open and what it does that will come back and open her and see all my stuff turned out alright it has been 55 minutes since I turned off the heat and it has finally cooled off enough that the lid lock has fallen down all on its own you can't go by the gauge the gauge will drop to zero quite a while before that will fall down on its own but now that the lid is on lock we can open it up take your weight off and turn the handles here lift the lid and tip it away from you there's still quite a bit of steam in there and there you have it a lot of people like to leave lid just kind of sitting loose on there for a few minutes after they take it off and let it cool down a little slower on its own I usually don't and it doesn't cause me any problems but if you prefer you can certainly do that now we take the jars load the ones on top will be nice and clean on the outside because they were exposed to nothing but steam the ones on the bottom layer will have deposits on them because I have a lot of rust in my water it'll have to wipe them off later some people put a little vinegar in their water in their canner to help prevent stuff on their jars but that doesn't really work for me because I have so much rust if I use enough vinegar to prevent buildup on the jars it makes the rings of rust warm fish out your second layer and you see the line where the water was on the jar dumar I'm gonna stop this and take it off the tripod no these jars will carry on bubbling and boiling for quite a while I'll leave them sit overnight but looking at them I can see that there wasn't any siphoning I left an inch of head space which is right about look at the wrong jar which is right about to that ring on the jar and that's right where they all stayed so nothing siphoned because it managed to keep the pressure nice and steady so what you do now once everything is cooled off and cold scrub out the inside of your canner fog up the lens on your camera take the rubber ring out wash that in soapy water dry it put everything inside the canner and set the lid on top upside down that way your gauge won't get bummed when you clean the lid just wipe it down with a cloth you know a wet soapy cloth and then dry it you do not want to get water into your gauge that's not good for them other than that that's how you run a twenty three quart it's the same process for the new 16 cork new type of presto canner hopefully this has been informative like I said before the biggest mistakes that beginners make is bringing up the pressure too fast and making too big of adjustments you want to bring this this is not a fast process you want to bring the pressure up slowly and make your adjustments fairly small and you should do well with this when you get a new canner what you can do is just put water in it up to the line and put it on the stove and do a little test run you can practice with an empty canner except of course the water but you don't have to put any jars or anything in it and that'll give you a chance to get a feel for how it reacts to the adjustments in temperature and you can figure out how to do it once you get good at this it's really nothing to it so I'll see you next time

Channel: TheMudbrooker

Views: 114,494

Rating: 4.9525371 out of 5

Keywords: Presto pressure canner, canning, food preservation

Id: 6ewFSq7CnOs

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 23 2019