There’s nothing quite like the convenience of having a meal ready and waiting when you don’t feel like cooking, but the quality of ready-made meals on supermarket shelves leave much to be desired.
Pressure can meals in a jar are a way for you to create your own delicious recipes from home and store them for yourself, so you save money and have complete control over the process.
All that you need to create these meals is a quality pressure canner and some good recipes, whether you want to create them for yourself or use inspiration from somewhere else.
With a little bit of practice and planning, you’ll be able to have an array of delicious and ready to eat meals at home, without any of the nasty preservatives or bland tastes that you can find at the store.
What Are Meals In A Jar?
So, what exactly are meals in a jar and how did they come about? We can thank people from the olden days who had limited access to things like electricity and refrigeration who had to rely on preserving food like this once they had cooked up a big batch.
The modern premise of meals in a jar is that you make yourself something tasty and nutritions, from your own kitchen, and then preserve it in a jar using a pressure canner. The jar then sits in your pantry until you’re out of meal ideas or just can’t be bothered whipping something up for dinner, and it’s ready to go as soon as you heat the contents.
People these days are looking for ideas like meals in a jar to save money but also to move away from the bland and nutritionally lacking canned and jar meals you might find on the shelves. As you take control of the entire process from cooking to canning, you know exactly what’s in the jars and how tasty they’ll be once they’re out.
Meal Prep In A Jar Using A Pressure Canner
The key to doing meals in a jar the right way is to have your own pressure canner, as these devices have been made specifically for this purpose. You’ll also need some quality jars that will be able to hold enough food to constitute a meal, as well as be sturdy enough to withstand the canning process.
Know what recipes you’ll be following before you begin, and simply cut everything up into small cube sizes that it will fit inside the jar.
Make the process similar to an assembly line, adding your herbs and spices, beans, meat, vegetables, stock, and anything else you want to put in your recipe. As you’re doing this, the lid will be soaking in hot water so that it’s soft for the canning stage.
Suitable Meal In A Jar Recipes
There’s literally no end to what you can create with a pressure canner and a jar, but if you’re looking for inspiration about what recipes are best then these are some of the best ideas. Some require a little extra work once out of the jar and others are simply heated up and ready to go, depending on how much time you have.
Meal In A Jar Food Storage
When we’re dealing with any kind of food preparation, it’s important to understand the health and safety recommendations for storing the food. Using a pressure canner is the best way to ensure ingredients are stored in the correct way as it heats them to 240 degrees Fahrenheit which helps to kill off a lot of the bacteria.
The most amazing thing about these jars is just how long the food will store inside when canned correctly. Depending on whether or not you use stable foods in the recipe, you should be able to keep your meals for around five years on the shelves, if they manage to last that long without being eaten.
An Easy Way To Prepare Food
We’ve probably all tasted preserved food or canned meals before, and the memory of them is enough to put us off the idea altogether. However, making your own pressure can meals in a jar is a completely new experience and one that has so many benefits for your home.
Making food ahead like this not only saves you a lot of money, but it also takes away the hassle of not knowing what meals to make each night. Whether you’re sick or just running low on time it’s great to know there’ll always be a delicious homemade meal waiting on the shelves, and all you have to do is heat it up.
There are so many ways you can use your imagination for meal in a jar recipes, so provided you have a quality pressure canner and the right size jars, the world is your oyster.
These meals help to remove the nasty chemicals and preservatives that are found in so many of our foods these days and taste like a freshly cooked meal from home, so there’s no reason not to get started today.
Resources:SmithsonianMagFoodNetwork
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