I've always used my stockpot for canning. You just need a pot tall enough that your jars are fully submerged. And something that keeps your jars off the bottom of the pot. I use a small round cooking rack for that.

I have the aluminum rack from the pressure canner I could use, and my stockpot is definitely tall enough, so sounds like that will work!

Same here -- I have both a canning kettle and a stockpot and often use the stockpot for pints of jam as it is lighter and less unwieldy than the canner. If you've got a rack, too, you're good to go.

Stockpots work fine - you just need something to keep the jars off the bottom, and it has to be tall enough that the jars are fully submerged. That's part of why it's easy for people to do.

I use my pressure canner as a boiling water canner. The instruction book even gives instructions.

I sometimes use a stock pot along with my canner if they don't all fit in the canner.

I use my stockpot. My "Big Bertha" canning pot is too big for most of my smaller processing. The stockpot is the perfect size. You don't want a lot of extra space with no jars in the pot anyway, wastes energy. But make sure it's deep enough to immerse your jars with an inch of water above. I too have a perfectly sized round cooling rack to use on the bottom to set the jars on, but you can use an old dish towel if you want, or walk on the wild side and go without anything! The risk is jars rattling around too much as the bubbles move them around and a possible crack or break could occur. That hasn't happened to me in 30 years of canning, a lot of it bare bottomed. (Sorry, I had to have some kind of risque comment to add!) :) I'm not recommending it, I'm just saying don't lose sleep over it if you have to use a towel or nothing . . . can on! Most of my stuff is only processed for 5-10 min. anyway, jams, pickles, relish, applesauce, salsa, etc. I know tomatoes are much longer. I might not risk it with those.

I hear you on not wanting to buy one more single use thing. But if you do enough water bath canning of high acid foods a Steam Canner is worth the investment. It was a no-no for a long time to use them but have been deemed safe by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An update on safe use of steam canners – Safe & Healthy Food for Your Family (wisc.edu)

LOL Fori!

Ditto on the steam canner. Sooo much easier to use than a water bath, especially if you don't have a full rack of jars. I've been using mine for many years.

I use my stock pots, plus an age old canner we used for corn that grams had, for water bath canning. I managed to warp my pressure cooker by opening too soon. senior moment

I would think you could use a pressure canner by just leaving the lid off or disengaged. As long as the boiling water is fully covering the tops of the jars. Or set a cookie sheet or a lid from another pot on top to prevent splash and too fast evaporation.

I've used my pressure canner for boiling water bath canning by leaving the lid off and just covering it with a pizza pan for a lid. I've also used a stockpot.

I do have a steam canner but I don't really like it. I even took an on line class because I wasn't sure I was using it correctly. I bought it to make pickles, having been told that they would stay more crisp because they didn't get "boiled". By the time I bring the water to a boil, check the little temperature gauge, remove the lid to add the jars thereby releasing all the steam and burning my arm, add the jars, bring it back up to the proper temperature and then process for the appropriate period of time, I could have water bath processed at least two batches.. The pickle are not crisper because they are cooked for the length of time it takes to come up to steam temp plus the processing time. It does, however, use far less water, so that's a point for the plus column.

Annie

Hmm, sounds completely different from my steam canner, Annie. Mine has no temp gauge--you just start counting time when the steam coming through the two little holes low on the side is about 10 inches long. Very, very easy to use.

Of course you can use any pot that will let the jars submerge and cover a bit.

I have a canner with the rack and all, but it is way too big and takes way too long to get it all boiling up. So, I use my largest stockpot and I mostly can in pints now.

I cant safely lift a rack of full jars out of a pot of boiling water anymore.

I only can a few pints at a time. I dont have a garden bursting with things that need canning. As I got older I found the big jars and the big pot to be too heavy and to heat up the kitchen too much.

I dont have anything on the bottom of the pot and I have only ever had one jar break on me. I used to put a dish towel on the bottom, but I just forget and havent had much problem.

My steam canner is the same as laceyvail's. I put the jars on the rack with the water boiling, cover and wait for the steam to start escaping, then count the time from then. I've been canning fruit and jam for nearly 50 years in mine. I'd never go back to water bath again.

Claudia, i have a big canner too that I never use anymore. I never thought about lifting the whole boiling-hot rack plus the jars. It would be too heavy. i’ve always used a jar-lifter to get each jar out of the water one by one.

Now I use my tallest stock pot for the few things I water-bath, but then I also only do pints… or smaller.

Mine's a "Fruit Saver" brand, has a little gauge in the knob on the lid. It just seems to take forever to come up to the proper temperature according to the gauge. I timed it last time I used it and it took almost 17 minutes before the gauge said it was the right temperature and I started timing my pickles and that's starting with simmering water. That means the jars are in the device until it comes up to temperature and then still has to process for the required time. Those pickles are cooked for a LONG time, over half an hour. If I start with simmering water with a water bath, I can add the hot jars to the simmering water and have it up to temp in just a couple of minutes.

But, as I said before, it does only use 2 1/2 quarts of water, so that's a plus. It works OK for things like fruit juice and jam, but doesn't save me time.

Like Kate, I don't try to lift a whole rack of filled jars, I just pull the jars out of the canner one at a time with the jar lifter.

Annie

I, too, use the single jar lifter. How anyone lifts that heavy basket of hot jars out of that tall canner pot is hard to imagine. It seems so risky with all of that boiling water. I first try to bail out as much as I can and let it cool just a little bit.

Back in the day I was OK with the half pint or pint jars in the basket, but seems like quart jar canning at that level would be a two person job . . . for a whole host of reasons. Hubs and I did some joint tomato sauce making and processing, oy vey. Even then, we couldn't hardly process enough sauce to fill a canner . . . I can barely lift a quart with a jar lifter. I bail out some of the hot water usually first, for safety in case I drop it, less splashing . . . With just me and hubs, I rarely do anything as a quart. My one foray into quarts was peaches and pears one year. I do actually save my spaghetti sauce jars which I think are 12 oz. and use those for Italian style sauce. Not much though, so much cooking . . . and cooking . . . and cooking . . . particularly on my flat top electric stove, yuck. I am much more likely to just can the crushed tomatoes and use store bought tomato paste later to make them into sauce.

I had a mishap yesterday when I went to iift one of my hot jars from the canning pot. I had told myself that I was only going to use pint jars, but I thought just these few quart jars I wil use because I was running out of pints. I dont know what happened but it exploded when I took it out or maybe I dropped it or hit it with something. But wham it went!

It can be so dangerous lifting those jars out of the hot bath. I should have let it cool just a bit and ladeled out some of the water. But I didnt.

I got a nasty burn on my foot but am glad that I am not so old that I cant jump fast out of the way.

Canning pots can be very dangerous. I was using a smaller stockpot, and using one those single jar lifters.

I have just a few more jars to take care of and I am done.

Yes, I have a scar on my stomach from a splashback incident. The bigger the jar, the bigger the splash. No cutting corners with canning safety and boiling water. Ladle some of the water out and let it cool down if you are the least bit concerned. I had a devil of a time getting some of my jars out last week, even with a jar lifter, after the first couple came out, the rest got knocked over and were floating around and I couldn't get a good grip . . . then I said, "Duh, ladle out some of the water!" Sometimes at the end of a long canning session your brain is just fried, that's when accidents can happen. In my case, it's usually a plastic canning implement that gets melted . . . I also forget to move the pot away from the vent over the stove and with the bigger jars, there's not as much room to maneuver over the pot . . . my stove vent isn't to code either, YMMV.

Glad it wasn't more serious, Claudia!

I'm not getting much in the way of harvest this year, so haven't had to try to use the stockpot for the hot water canning yet. I did finally use my brand-spankin' new All-American pressure canner, dang that thing is heavy, but it was fairly easy to use. The canning session wasn't worth the time or the effort, though -- my green beans ended up just like the canned green beans from the supermarket. Blech. If this is what home-canned food is going to taste like, forget it....

I wish I had a lot of tomatoes so I could play around with canning tomatoes and sauce -- that may be worth the effort.

I froze our green beans one year. that was the best preservation method. Very good, better than store bought frozen because they were younger beans, more tender. You have to pressure cook them too long for canning, IMHO. Only works if you need them for survival and don't have the freezer space. I was surprised at how easy it was to freeze them with such good flavor results. Same with peppers, I sauteed some in EVOO and froze them, they were delish on pizza, much better than store bought frozen peppers.

I froze beans last year and didn't like how they came out, either (yes, I blanched them first). They were better than the canned, but still not all that enjoyable. My expectation is that processed beans are going to have the same color, texture, and taste as fresh off the vine and have to come to terms with the fact that that just isn't going to happen.

RE: easy removal of hot jars...I have one of these and it's great. You can stick your hand directly into boiling water and the grip is great

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WUDQ61W/?tag=thewire06-20&linkCode=xm2&ascsubtag=AwEAAAAAAAAAAPCv&th=1

@mxk3 z5b_MI I have absolutely no expertise, but have had good green beans that had been frozen. I don't know about fresh off the vine, but pretty much same as fresh from the grocery store and blanched. (I adore green beans, especially blue lake, and my favorite way is steam blanched but still pretty crunchy, so I do know the difference.) I'm pretty sure they were flash frozen (not by me—my freezer will do it at -20F, but make itself unwell in the process). Home flash freezers are too expensive and I'm not sure if the ugly small commercial ones do the same job. Neither will be like big factory lines, but you can approximate it by doing the meatball thing. I haven't done this much, and never on produce but learned it when I first joined CF. That's where you make room in your freezer for a tray and line up each meatball—or green bean—on the tray with air space around it. After it's completely solid, but not so long as the evaporator disturbs it, remove the tray, bag the balls or beans and return them to the freezer. I'd guess that turning the temperature down first helps, too, but not so far that the fan freezes! Anyway, it's supposed to work, but each freezer is different.

Good tip about the freezing.

I grow Blue Lake poles -- my favorite!

That's how I froze my green beans, separated, on a tray in the freezer covered with waxed paper, and then when they were frozen I put them in freezer bags.

I've used my pressure canner as a boiling water canner many times without any problems, you just use the same instructions for a water canner but don't clamp down the lid. When doing tomato juice I've had 2 pressure canners going as boiling water canners on the deck while using a third boiling water canner going on the stove. I just don't like what feels like an eternity to run a large batch of juice.

But now I'll just pressure can the juice or sauce using 2 canners on the deck, with less mess, less pot watching and if feels faster. I just processed 150 lbs of Roma's and Celebrities to get 16 quarts of very thick sauce I can easily stand a spoons or ladle in without cooking off the water for days with no risk of burning the sauce.

After cooking the raw tomatoes I use a basket ladle to remove only the solids into a pan, and then use the basket ladle again to feed the mill and won't add any juice and got 10 quarts. I then mill the rest of the left over juice but filtered the left over watered down juice through a fine screen to capture most remaining pulp for a nice thick sauce to get another 6 quarts and mix the two together.

If I'm just making juice I will mill all as normal and filter it, and then add some of the tomato water back to control how thick I want the juice, I like thicker juice. I just happened to take a few pictures and videos this year of the process but can only post a few of the pics. The screen size is critical to capture the pulp but allow water to pass through quickly without clogging up. The screen I'm using may look familiar because it's just a grease splash screen used when frying foods. These are from straining only 2 cups of juice each from the juice already removed of most solids.

Kevin, I salute you!! Hubs and I still haven't recovered from the year of 51 tomato plants, 2021! Maybe next year. Looks yummy!

After coming to a stopping point with the number of jars of tomatoes that I can do, I remembered last year how I had made ketchup. I remember putting what I did in a file on teh computer, so I dug it out and put together two quarts of home made ketchup that I quite like. I have made it in the past and was not overly impressed. But I put this together last year and liked it

I put it hot into hot sterile jars and put a seal lid on and it will keep in the fridge. It is so good!

Kevin - wow, I'm tired just thinking of doing all that!