All In A Jar is delighted to host a “Private Party” for you and your guests for any occasion. Our classes are perfect for Birthdays, Bridal or Baby Showers, Father’s Day, Office Parties… and any other reason you have to celebrate with loved ones. For Private Parties, guests will enjoy all of the amenities of regular All In A Jar classes, but with the privacy of celebrating with guests of your choice on a day of your choice.

“Use Your Own Fruit” classes are for those of you have a large quantity of your own fruits or vegetables that you would like to use for a class. Please contact All In A Jar to set up a private session! You provide the ingredients and the jars. The class will cost $70.00 per person, and you will leave with all of the jars that you produce and the accompanying recipes. This class requires two or more people. All In A Jar will provide all of the necessary tools and knowledge for the class.

All In A Jar is pleased to offer “Gift Certificates” so that you can spread the love of canning to your friends and family members! Visit this page to fill out the form and have the certificate mailed directly to you or your guest.

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Fathers Day is right around the corner and All In A Jar has your back for a great gift: two students for only $100.00! This deal will last until Sunday, June 16th but if you would like a Gift Certificate mailed directly to you or your Dad, please contact us by Tuesday, June 11th. All In A Jar’s class calendar is scheduled through the end of November, so Dad has plenty of choices for classes.

He will love coming to a class that features Hot Sauce, Mustard or Pickles, but there are countless, delicious option to choose from. Get the whole family here to have fun in the kitchen together! Come and have a memorable experience with Dad. You can use the online form and have the gift certificate mailed to you or your Dad. (To purchase a gift certificate, fill out the form online and mail a check to All In A Jar.)

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See you in class

With Mother’s Day right around the corner,
 All In A Jar has the perfect gift: two students for only $100.00! This gift will save you $40.00.  All In A Jar class calendar goes to the end of November . Set a date for you and your mom. It will be just like when you were a kid, in the kitchen with mom,
 having fun making treats and smiles.
 Come make a memorable experience for you and your mother.
 You can use the online form and have the gift certificate mailed to you or your mother.
 (For gift certificates, fill out the form online and mail a check to All In A Jar.)
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If you haven’t looked at All in A Jar’s Calendar lately, you should go check it out! We have added a new class day and time that we are excited to test out. The calendar offers classes through the end of November.
With this new class day and time, we are hoping to appeal to specific communities like stay at home parents and people that are retired. The newly added day and time is Thursday 10:30am to 1:30pm. The test run for this date will be from May 23 to June 27.
If we have low attendance on Thursdays from 10:30am to 1:30pm, we will try another day and time. Please feel free to suggest a day and time that works for you. Visit our calendar soon; summer classes are filling up quickly!

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All In A Jar needs your help.
The class calendar is getting very full.
We think we need to add one more day of class during the week.

(By the way, if you haven’t looked at the calendar lately – all of the classes are posted through  November.)
This is where we need your help: should the class be Thursday 11:00am to 2:00pm or Thursday 6:00pm to 9:00pm.

Please share your thoughts with us to make the best choice that best suits you – the students.

Thank you for your help.

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Home preserving, whether it’s an exotic or an indigenous product, gives the home cook ultimate control over ingredients, flavors, and cost. In my kitchen I don’t need to compromise on quality. I can make jams with less sugar, pickles with less salt, and preserve roasted peppers with NO additives or artificial colors. My own imagination and the RULES OF CHEMISTRY are the only limits. I can do what commercial manufacturers can’t: make small batches so that quality is never sacrificed (although, remember to never double a recipe in one batch). I constantly look for ways to improve upon common flavors, such as strawberry, and create new products. I recently created Strawberry Chocolate Jam with only one cup of sugar. Home preserving can mean bringing taste you never knew existed to the table. Preserving at home is a natural progression of America’s renewed passion for homemade favorites. We want less complicated dishes and high quality ingredients at reasonable costs. In the past, canning and preserving were tasks our grandmothers had to do; I feel that we should look at these not as tiresome chores but as pleasurable chores. Home preserving is for the cooks today that want to eat healthy (less sugar, less salt and less fat) and have a lot of wonderful taste.

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Water bath canning is a simple process. It works like this: the high heat of the water drives out the air that is within the tissue of the foods as well as the air that was trapped during the packing process. This creates a vacuum within the jar, which makes the rubberized flange on the lid suck down onto the jar rim and creates a seal. The rim of the jar must be clean before placing the lid on. If you are making a recipe with oil in it you need to clean the rim with a paper towel  that has some vinegar on it to cut the oil. If you are making a recipe without oil you can clean the rim with paper towel that has hot water on it. Once the processing time is complete and the jars are ready to be removed from the canner, using a jar lifter, stand jars upright on a dry towel or cutting board. Space the jars 1 to 2 inches apart so they will cool at an even rate. Allow them to cool 12 to 24 hours. Prevent exposure to extreme drafts or temperature changes that could cause jar breakage.  After you remove jars from the water bath and allow them to cool, you will hear popping noises (this is like music to a canner’s ears)! That’s the sound of the suck and seal. The cooling part of the water bath process is important: the rubber seal will be soft coming out of the water bath and needs to stiffen up to complete the process. The seal process can take up to twenty four hours. If for some reason the jar does not seal, put it in the refrigerator and eat that jar’s contents first. If many jars have not sealed, you can open all of the jars and start over by washing and sterilizing the jars, re-heating the food and following the recipe process time in the water bath again.

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See you in class

Freezer Jars

Who doesn’t love warm pumpkin pie in the Fall and a hot bowl of squash stew in Winter? People ask me all the time, “Is it possible to can pumpkin and squash?” Of course, it is possible, but for the home-canner (and especially beginners) the simple answer is: No! The answer as to why lies in the parameters for food safety specifically laid out by the USDA. Simply put, pumpkin and squash are very low acid foods and because the consistency of pureed pumpkin and squash so often varies, officials have been unable to set forth safe canning procedures for this type of produce. Although, they explain, you may can it in a cooked, cubed form: see this page for instructions about how to can it in cubed form. You can always freeze it, too, in cubed or pureed or ready pie-filling form (see this page for those instructions). And while I do have a recipe for canning pumpkin butter, I still keep the jars in the back of the fridge until I use them. Below is the article that explains food safety regulations for canning/not canning pumpkin and other squash. Canning and Preserving are easy and fun but it is key to follow safety procedures at all time.

According to The National Center for Home Food Preservation (a land-grant university consortium sponsored by the USDA, and considered to be the leading authorities on food safety science and food preservation research) (and I am quoting them here):

“Home canning is not recommended for pumpkin butter or any mashed or pureed pumpkin or winter squash, but we do have directions for canning cubed pumpkin. Pumpkin puree can be frozen or made into a spicy pumpkin leather…

There are not sufficient data available to allow establishing safe processing times for any of these types of products. It is true that previous USDA recommendations had directions for canning mashed winter squash, but USDA withdrew those recommendations…

Some of the factors that are critical to the safety of canned pumpkin products are the viscosity (thickness), the acidity and the water activity. Studies conducted at the University of Minnesota in the 1970′s indicated that there was too much variation in viscosity among different batches of prepared pumpkin purees to permit calculation of a single processing recommendation that would cover the potential variation among products (Zottola et. al, 1978). Pumpkin and winter squash are also low-acid foods (pH > 4.6) capable of supporting the growth of Clostridium botulinum bacteria which can cause the very serious illness, botulism, under the right storage conditions. If the bacteria are present and survive processing, and the product has a high enough water activity, they can thrive and produce toxin in the product.

More recent research with pumpkin butter has been done at the University of Missouri. Pumpkin butter is mashed or pureed pumpkin that has had large quantities of sugar added to it, but not always enough to inhibit pathogens. Sometimes an ingredient such as vinegar or lemon juice is added to the formulation to increase the acidity (decrease the pH). However, pumpkin butters produced by home canners and small commercial processors in Missouri have had pH values as high as 5.4. In fact, the pH values seemed to be extremely variable between batches made by the same formulation (Holt, 1995).

It is not possible at this point to evaluate a recipe for pumpkin or mashed squash for canning potential by looking at it. At this point, research seems to indicate variability of the products is great, and in several ways that raise safety concerns. It is best to freeze pumpkin butters or mashed squash.” (emphasis added)

Obviously, pumpkin pie filling is essentially “pureed pumpkin” and similar to pumpkin butter. This means that neither the cooked pumpkin puree nor the pumpkin pie filling (puree plus sugar and spices) would be candidates for safe home canning.

The University of Illinois Extension also says: “Canning pumpkin butter not a good idea, but try pieces or freezing. “

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