Tart and Sweet: 101 Canning and Pickling Recipes for th… (2024)

My mother canned, mostly the bounty of tomatoes and cucumbers from our vegetable garden and apple sauce from our Golden Delicious apple tree. My first wife was a state 4-H champion canner and put up the most amazing peaches in the fall. I've canned a bit but not with great confidence. Kelly Geary and Jessie Knadler have written a book to instill confidence in the newer canner. Oddly, the text feels like it is written by women to women. The scope of the book is limited to high-acid foods thus there are no recipes for canning meat, seafood, poultry or dairy. All of the expected topics are covered; some unusual offerings are cinnamon blood-orange marmalade, Moroccan preserved lemons, five-spice chili soy pickled garlic, pickled fiddlehead fern, orange-tomato ketchup, and horseradish beer mustard. This book is another example of Rodale Press branching out from books which channeled Euell Gibbons to instruct the reader on how to eat sticks, twigs and fallen leaves. Readers/canners with a low tolerance for cuteness may skip the chapters on how to decorate jars and how to host(ess) a themed canning party.

an interesting book with interesting recipes. although i was hard pressed to find pickling recipes that didnt include chili powder or peppercorns in it, since i cant eat those. that made me sad. i mean, i can leave peppercorns out, but the recipes with chili powder or peppers, if you leave that out, then i've found that the recipe ends up not tasting like much at all. so i'm damned if i do and damned if i dont.

recipes i liked: sweet apple cider baby beets, and pickled cauliflower. there was a recipe for canning herby tomatoes that looked interesting. the tomato sauce recipe even had peppers in it. this gal must really love her spicy food. another interesting recipe was for banana butter, banana vanilla rum butter, and pear butter. i'd never heard of banana butter before.

This cookbook has a wide variety of recipes, some with ingredients that are easier to find than others (even considering seasonality). Kumquats, endive, fiddlehead ferns, red currants, celeriac... well, maybe this stuff grows near you (or is readily available in stores near you), but I don't see them too often.

On the other hand, there's a useful amount of advice on water-bath canning for absolute beginners, and I'm looking forward to trying some of the recipes: kimchi, mango-chili butter, wasabi green beans, pickled cauliflower, ginger-garlic (cucumber) pickles, soy-garlic (cucumber) pickles, and pickled eggplant.

Going through the seasons for when produce is easily available, this book goes way beyond the usual recipes for making jam, pickles, etc. You have some easy and some not so easy to make things but they all sound fabulous and a wonderful addition to your pantry.

This book will be added to my collection just as soon as I can find a copy and buy it.

Checked it out from the library but it looks worthy of purchase. I like that it's broken up into seasonal chapters with an emphasis on small batches 1-3 jars, though you could easily double or triple depending on your haul. Our city no longer recycles glass so I'm interested in further reducing our glass purchasing and instead can the few things we would normally buy like pasta sauce.

I may need to have this book at home. My freezer was so crammed after last summer's berry picking and the fall intake of zucchini and pumpkin that I need a better plan for this year. This book is understandable and clear. It makes it not seems so crazy or scary. Highly recommended.

loved the recipes in this book of canning and pickling

Love the recipes in this book. I will definitely purchase this one. The recipes are original and easy to do. This is a fun canning book.

Can't wait to try out some of the cool recipes in this cookbook!

I will definitely be purchasing a copy of this excellent book for my own references - having gotten really into canning lately, this book is a fantastic resource.

I loved this book! The author organizes the recipes into seasons based on when the produce is in season. All of the fruit spread recipes use almost half-75% less sugar than my traditional recipe. I learned that sugar is purely to add sweetness to recipes, not necessarily essential in order for the jars to seal during processing. My "traditional" recipe of blackberry jam uses a cup-to-cup fruit-to-sugar ratio. To compare, my traditional blackberry jam uses 4 cups of berries and 4 cups of sugar. The blackberry jam in the book calls for 16 cups of berries to 1 cup of sugar and 1/3 cup of honey. See the difference?!

I tried one recipe in the book so far, which was the Banana Vanilla Rum Butter. The banana butter turned out fantastic and is a great addition to oatmeal. Mmmm...The recipe calls for 4 lbs of bananas and 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar and 1/2 cup of dark rum.

Although I only tried one recipe so far, the rest of the recipes look promising. Ok. I'll give you a list of what I'm anxious to try in the future: Cinnamon Blood Orange Marmalade, Grapefruit Honey Jam, Citrus Overload Marmalade, Lemon Herb Pickled Garlic, Strawberry Bay Leaf Jam, Peach Lavender Jam, Mango Chili Butter, Savory Tart Cherry Preserves, Curry Carrot Coins, Blueberry Lemon Honey Jam, Wasabi Green Beans, Zucchini Relish, Carrot Habanero Hot Sauce, Horseradish Beer Mustard...yadda yadda yadda. SO many recipes, not enough jars!

Most of the recipes yield a much smaller amount of jars, which is great for people (like me) who don't need 14 pints of jams/salas/etc stored in their cabinets. It is also nice that I don't have to purchase bushels of produce to reap the benefits to canning. I came across 5# of bananas for $1 at a local grocery store and the next day I was able to make 7 pints of Banana Vanilla Rum Butter. Excellent! :)

This book feels like Geary wants her audience to become comfortable and creative canners, but she's not giving them the tools. The short chapters on the nitty-gritty of water bath canning don't go into enough detail about acidity and safety. It's like she wants to be the hip, likeable teacher, and sacrifices depth in order to do so.

I want to echo what some others have said, that she focuses on small-batch canning, which is not practical for many who can out of necessity; and that she includes some exotic ingredients that many won't have access to. I also found it odd that she doesn't specify in the recipes what size jars to use; you can infer what she is using from her stated yields, but there's no mention that different size jars will require different lengths of time in the water bath.

Some of her recipes do sound delicious and I'll be trying them. But I would encourage people to use this as a supplementary, idea-focused book and not as a reference.

I was really excited about this book. I've been canning tomatoes for years and was ready to branch out into new territory and I was also interested in giving gifts during the holidays that included food that I grew myself. Although a lot of the recipes call for ingredients that are unavailable in my rural location, there are many that are. The reason that I bumped this down to 3 stars in spite of the interesting recipes is that in every case my yields were approximately half what was listed for every recipe I tried (at least 8). Although small batch canning is less intimidating than processing lots of tomatoes, I often found that I didn't make enough to bother processing. So it turned out to be less a book of canning recipes and more like a fun recipe book with canning tips included.

The authors focus solely on boiling water canning, saving pressure canning for a future book. That allows them to include detailed instructions as well as numerous tasty seasonal recipes ranging from plums in vanilla syrup to herby tomatoes to spiced pear cardamom butter. Even better, these recipes reflect today's consumers' more sophisticated palates and the desire to get away from overly salted or sugared products, without ranging too far from the familiar in terms of ingredients. If you're thinking about canning and already have the Ball Blue Book, this is a great next step.

I used to make apricot or blackberry jam and preserve Meyer lemons for Moroccan Lemon Chicken dishes in my twenties. Recently I made blueberry syrup (not enough pectin in my venture!) I missed those days and picked up this book at the library when I also wanted to try pickling. This is an awesome guide for the beginning canner who's limited on space and equipment but long on gourmet adventures. A couple evenings ago I pickled green beans with jalapeño and habanero peppers and also made the Wine Vinegar Red Onions to accompany this book's braised short ribs recipe.

I tried something new with this blackberry jam recipe which was turned out to be kind of ridiculous. I heated the jam for hours and it never reached 220F and reduced significantly during that time leaving me with a meager 5 half pints of jam that never jelled completely instead of the 7 pints it claimed I would have. super bummer.

I love the way this book is made, colourful, well organized with lots of pretty pictures.

I have no clue what Pomona pectin is, so I just ignored it. The book is borrowed from the library to give me a chance to try things out. So far I have made one thing: mango chili butter, it turned out very delicious indeed.

So far so good.

A good overview of hot water bath canning. This book also includes recipes, divided by season, as well as suggestions for hosting a canning party. A lot of the recipes seem to use ingredients I don't have access to, like garlic scrapes, or are recipes that just don't appeal to my family. The book is very well written and easy to read, though.

There are really two kinds of canners out there.

1) The kind that do so to fill a need and many mouths.
2) The kind that do so to be cool.

I am the former. The recipes in the book are for the latter. Each recipe only yields a few jars each and are meant more for pleasure than preparedness.

Some excellent ideas for canning though. Peach lavender jam, for example. yum.

Recipes I want to make from here:

- Ginger Key Lime Syrup
- Pickled Baby Beets with Juniper Berries
- Wasabi Green Beans
- Mexican Baby Carrots
- Chili Black Pepper Pickled Watermelon
- Pear Chili Chutney

Recipes using Pomona pectin! woot!

Loved it! Super inspiring recipes with simple, clear instructions.

Read this yesterday and am reading it through again. It's like food p*rn of the canning world. lol

Lots of great recipes with novel favor profiles. The pickled garlic has become a staple in my cooking. Not sure it always qualifies as "small batch", though...

Doesnt include pressure canning recipes :) and recipes are arranged according season. Also includes recipes to use your canned foods in!

Really handy! I found some great helps in this book and a couple good recipes!

I have used the red currant jam recipe in this book so far and was impressed with the low sugar use and the use of some honey, along with its aim to keep things simple...

I didn't make any of these recipes, but they look promising.

The Carrot Habanero is the best, I first canned up some of this in August of 2012, ate all of it and just did a double batch Jan 2013.

A good book for me as I'm in the research stages of canning, so while I've not made any of the recipes, many of them interest me and I enjoyed reading the book from a research point of view.