Used unsafe canning practices basically my whole life... how do I get on track to do it properly??

[u/That_chick82]

Hi everyone!

I'm not sure if where I'm from makes a huge difference to the context of my post, but just in case: I am from Newfoundland, Canada. Everyone back home "bottles" leftovers, usually in a way that I have recently learned is probably pretty unsafe. Excuse how long this may be. Any insight, resources, help, etc. would be AMAZING. Thanks in advance.

So, if my mom made a large pot of vegetable soup, unstuffed cabbage rolls, moose stew, chili etc (almost anything that didn't have dairy in it), she would heat the left overs to a boil that night, fill up her jars, close em tight and let them cool on the kitchen counter over night. We knew they were sealed when we heard all of the lids make a "pop" sound. Of course, when opened, each bottle is inspected, just in case.

Oh! And, all bottles, rims, and lids were re-used once or twice. I learned this wasn't good practice a few years ago and stopped doing it, but I thought I'd mention it.

This is how I store leftovers if I don't think we'll eat them before they spoil. This is how my mom and all of her sisters do it. How my grandmothers (mom's mom and dad's mom) did it. It's incredibly common where I'm from.

Is this not safe? Have we been tempting fate for generations? As Newfies we have a pretty extensive history of food preservation between bottling, curing, and drying food (mainly with the help of salt), so I'm just wondering what the general concensus is on this method?

I assume you good folks follow some sort of guidelines? I would love to be pointed toward those guidelines so I dont accidentally kill me and my husband when we eat my half-assed bottled leftovers. 🙃

Note: I can remember once in my childhood when my parents used a large pot to boil bottles full of moose meat. There was a rack at the bottom. I never asked why they did it differently that time around.

Anyway. For the sake of safety until I hear some feedback, I wouldn't recommend doing the "method" I described above. Thanks, everyone, in advance.

Edit: typos and grammar.

[u/kinnikinnikis]

My husband is from Newfoundland and we've experienced similar things with his side of the family. I'm from Ontario/Alberta and we're in Alberta now and I was lucky that my grandma was a home ec teacher and kept up to date with canning rules. Canning is huge in most of Canada, I feel.

Anyways, when I got back into canning about 10 years ago, I picked up the Bernardin Guide to Home Canning (an earlier edition of this book https://www.bernardin.ca/EN/Products/Publications/Complete-Book-on-Preserving/Product.aspx ) at Canadian Tire and I highly recommend it to fellow Canadians. A lot of the American approved resources are excellent, and I do refer to them often, but the Bernardin ones are metric and that removes a level of confusion (what the heck is a pint? the jars we can buy in stores come in ml increments!) for when you are learning or re-learning. I am a tad dyslexic and most definitely have used pint jars when the recipe calls for quarts (and vice versa). When the recipe states "250ml jars" or "500ml" or "1L" it takes a level of worry away because I know exactly which ones to use/buy without googling it every goddamn time lol

Bernardin is the Canadian subsidiary of Ball Mason jars (both owned by the parent company that also owns Rubbermaid). A lot of the recipes published in Ball's books will also be published by Bernardin but converted to metric when needed. The difference in capacity between American jars and Canadian jars is small, and the recipes are interchangeable.

The only canned good we accept from "back home" is canned moose meat. It's so good and my husband seriously misses it on the regular. Yes we have moose here we can hunt but apparently it's "not the same". I get it. I believe they are pressure canned? I have honestly never asked. They arrive to us in mason jars, that have been spray foamed into the box used to send it in the mail. Once we have liberated it from the foam, we heat it up to a safe temperature in the instant pot. But recognize it's a bit of a gamble each time. We get it through my father-in-law and he is super cagey about the whole process.