Oven Canning

I think that just about everyone has had the unpleasant experience of opening a box of cereal, cake mixes, flour, pasta, potato flakes, that they have had for awhile and finding “little critters” crawling around. As you know, bugs and eggs that are not visible to the naked eye, live in our dry food goods. One way to stop this is to put the food in the freezer. However, that takes up a lot of room in your freezer.

Another way to preserve dry food goods, is through oven canning. This is a very simple and easy well to prolong the life of your food. Any dry food good that contains oil (such as nuts) cannot be oven canned. 

 

What you will need: thoroughly cleaned and dried canning jars, lids, hot pads, towel, rings, funnel, cookie tray, oven, whatever you are wanting to can. Shown here is macaroni. I also oven canned some oatmeal which you will see pictured later on.

 Preheat oven to 200° F.

Place jars onto cookie sheet which helps to keep the jars from tipping over in the oven. Fill jars. Place jars into preheated oven for one (1) hour.

 Remove jars from oven, one at a time. The jars will be very hot so make sure to use a hot pad. Place jar on a towel and carefully wipe the rim of the jar. Place canning lid and ring on jar and tighten ring. Allow to cool. Repeat with each jar.

 

As the jars cool, you will hear a “popping” or “clicking” sound which means the jar has sealed. Once cooled, label jars. Storage life is 15-20 years.

 

I “skirt” my jar lids using paper muffin cups. It does help to prevent dust building up on the jars and it looks pretty when they are on the shelf. I suppose if one was really organized they could use the different colored muffin cup for each food product. (i.e. flour would have one color muffin cup, cake mixes another color and so on) That way a person would know exactly what they had by just glancing at the shelf.

Tip: We use a wire coat hanger to store our canning rings when they are not in use. Simple unwind the hanger and slip the rings onto the hanger. Rewind the wire to hold the rings in place.

Thanks for reading. :-)