I’ve been using a pressure canner for years. Although some foods can be canned in a water bath canner, other foods NEED to be canned using a pressure canner. Food safety is so important to me and it should be important to you too.

I never want to open a jar of home canned food and wonder if it is good to eat. Sometimes you can see signs of spoilage, but sometimes you cannot. I don’t want to feed anyone food that has been unsafely canned.

This makes me pretty ANAL about how I go about storing food. I take ZERO shortcuts, I make sure my equipment is clean and my lids and seals are in good shape. If there is rust on a ring, I toss it. Even though the ring is never in direct contact with the food, I still throw it out.

When I look at my stocked pantry, filled with homecanned foods like lamb stew, green beans, carrots, beets, pickles, jams, jellies and a lot of other items, I get such a sense of pleasure. Pleasure because I know exactly what is (and what isn’t) in my homecanned food. Pleasure because I love the look of all those pretty jars on the shelf. Pleasure because I can feed my family good healthy food that is safe to eat.

Are you as anal as I am when it comes to putting your food by? If not, you should be! Never take a chance – it is not worth it if someone you love gets sick, or even worse, dies from incorrectly canned food.

Read about how I home can salmon to learn the process I use for using the pressure canner.  If you want to learn how to can food using a water bath canner, check out my post on canning cherries. After reading these posts, think seriously about buying a canning book. The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving is a really good resource.

I’ve had my pressure canner for over 10 years and it still works great. I’m replacing the gasket this year and ordered it through Amazon.

So, if you’re new to the idea of preserving your own food, don’t be afraid. If I can do it, you can too. Just remember to always think of Safety First and by the end of this year’s harvest, you will be able to put your own home canned jars of great food in your pantry. If you have questions, please ask away in the Comment section.

This weekend, we canned most of the Salmon we had in the freezer, leaving only 4 bags with filleted fish to eat with meals. Canning Salmon is not hard – you definitely need to use a Pressure Canner. Here’s how we did it:

We thawed the frozen fish overnight and then rinsed each piece well. Graham then used his filleting knife to cut the meat off the skin.

Meanwhile, I got all the canning equipment organized that we would need. I washed 24 half pint jars. If you are pressure canning, you don’t need to sterilize the jars, like you do when you water bath can. The jars however do need to be clean and I always wash them out in soapy water before reusing them.

I got the canning lids soaking in hot water and set all the lid rings aside.

Here are the jars all cleaned and ready for fish. Graham cut each piece into smaller ones that will fit in the small jars. We like to place the first pieces of fish in the jar so that they are along the sides, then start stacking pieces in the middle of the jar. Make sure the pieces are not so long that they can interfere with the seals.

Once filled, I added 1/2 teaspoon of coarse salt and 1 teaspoon of lemon juice to each jar.

I cleaned off around the rim of each jar. Then I put on the seals, which have been soaking in hot water and finally, adding a ring to each seal.

Once we had enough water in the pressure canner (we added 4 quarts) we put a layer of jars inside. Since we have a rack to separate levels of jars, we put that in and with two levels of jars, we were able to process 14 jars at a time. If you want to process a lot of jars at once, you need to use a rack to keep the tops of the jars from hitting the bottom of the others.

Close the canner and turn up the heat on the stove. Once it started steaming, we timed it to vent like this for 10 minutes. After that, we added the weight (15 lbs, because of our elevation) and waited for the canner to again start steaming.

Once the ball weight starts to jiggle and let out steam, we can slowly start to turn down the heat under the canner. Set the timer for 90 minutes and let the canner do its thing. After 90 minutes, I turned off the stove and let the canner sit there to start cooling down. This takes awhile, but it’s really important to not open the canner too soon.

Once it cooled down, I removed all the jars and set them off to the side where they can sit undisturbed for 24 hours. By then, I can give the jars a good wiping and store them in the pantry.

In the end, we ended up with 22 half pints of salmon. We’ll enjoy this all Winter long!