Complete Book of Home Preserving

This is my least favorite canning book. There is a lack of charts in many areas. Many of the canning recipes are bland and unpalatable. It is a good source for basic canning, but the special recipes are putzy and too much work for a good outcome. Although all recipes are "safe" recipes, I rather have safe and delicious.

There are a lot of great recipes in this book that I can't wait to try... once fresh fruit is in season in New England again. I've already made the jalapeno salsa and it was so delicious that I ate an entire half pint with one meal! This would be a great reference book to have around, but I'm not sure if I'd be willing to pay full price for it.

This weekend a group of friends and I tried canning together and used a salsa recipe from this book. We had a crapload of stuff and altogether it was really successful. This book definitely has more recipes I'd like to try.

My one complaint is that it sometimes skips past more common recipes and leans toward unexpected ones. I'm sure I'll appreciate that eventually but for now I'm a beginner and would like to learn some basics.

A better title would be The Complete Book of Home Water-Bath Canning. It's not complete because home preserving includes dehydrating, freezing and pressure canning as well.

The recipes are good, leaning towards the unique rather than the basics. Everything I have tried has turned out well.

I learned everything I know about canning from Ball's Blue Book. This book takes many of their standard recipes and updates them, adds many new recipes, and gives loads of tips on every step from choosing produce to trouble shooting what went wrong.

I would recommend this book to seasoned canners to try new flavors and ingredients as well as to beginners who will get reliable, tested directions for this rewarding endeavor.

This is the 2024 edition; mine is entitled BALL Complete Book, etc., because Ball and Bernardin are (if not identical) closely entangled. It contains the recipe for black currant jam, which is a great find, but of course requires Bernardin powdered pectin. Disregarding the free-association babble of AI, the jam makers on Reddit say that Bernardin and Certo are not interchangeable, so that's a thing to know while using this book.

This book contains 448 reliable pages, including index and glossary.

Very concise and easy to understand instructions. I made the "golden gossip" chutney first. The end result was fantastic, but I didn't have all the ingredients prepped before hand and it took me longer than I thought because of it. I have two recipes marked to try next: zesty zucchini relish & achar (south asian pickle).