Canning sounds complicated, but it isn’t; it’s just another way of cooking your food, but instead of cooking each meal as you need to eat it, you simply cook foods you can store for the long term.

Why would you want to do that?

For several reasons. First, it’s a great way to ensure you have food available in an emergency, such as long-term power blackouts. Second, it’s a great way of ensuring that you have food to hand when you don’t feel like cooking a meal from scratch or don’t have the time. And third, it lets you preserve foods when they are at their best flavor, especially if you grow your own fruit and vegetables or get great seasonal deals at farmer’s markets or grocery stores. Imagine having homemade jams and jellies for breakfast, crunchy pickles, sauces, relishes, and even meat and fish, all prepared and stored by you.

Canning is one of the most common techniques for preserving fresh food in jars and killing bacteria and microorganisms using heat. That heat also stops certain enzymes that can make the food go bad, ensuring you can store your food for months.

When you heat the jars, the air is pushed out of the jar; as the jars cool, the lids seal, creating a vacuum that helps preserve the food. Because there is no air in the jars, yeast, microbes, and mold cannot form, thus ensuring the food doesn’t go bad