One of the most common questions we get is "Which preserving unit should I get"?
There is not a single answer to this question, but here are some questions I ask first:
1. What do you want to preserve?
2. How much and how often?
3. Do you have a preference for a stove top unit or an electric unit?
4. If you prefer a stove top unit, do you have a glass top or induction stove?
That is because you can think of preserving as being the act of preserving acidic foods only or of preserving all types of food, including meats, soups and all types of vegetables, i.e. both acidic and non-acidic foods. There are some processes that will only treat acidic foods and some that will treat both acidic and non-acidic foods.
If there is any possibility that now or sometime in the future you might want to preserve non acidic foods then you should choose a preserving unit that can do both acidic and non-acidic foods. That is because even if you currently only want to do acidic foods, if you buy a preserver that only processes acidic foods, then when you decide to expand into non acidic foods you need to invest in a new unit (unless of course you are like me and have both!)
If you only purely want to preserve acidic foods: and by that I mean most fruits, tomatoes, vegetables done in vinegar or pickle, chutneys, jams, relishes etc, a preserver that is a "water bath" is sufficient. Depending on the specifications of the unit you buy, a water bath heats the water to a specified temperature and you process your bottled preserves in the water for the prescribed time to seal the jars. The Kensington Preserving Unit, the Ball Mason Fresh Preserving Kit and the Fowlers Vacola Simple Natural Preserving Kit are all examples of water bath preservers, with the Ball Mason one being a stove top unit and the other 2 electric models.
With the cost of power heading only in one direction, there are a growing number of people interested in preserving non acidic foods. This includes soups, vegetables, meats, fish, and just about anything else that you can buy in a can or jar at the supermarket. In fact you can even preserve milk! Low acid foods need to be heated to temperatures higher than that of boiling water to ensure that harmful bacteria and the toxins they emit are destroyed. This is achieved using pressure in a large pressure cooker somewhat confusingly called a pressure canner. As this type of preserving is very popular in the USA the term comes from their term for preserving in bottles which they call canning. So really a pressure canner is more correctly a pressure bottler or pressure preserver for us Aussies!
It is important to note that whilst pressure canners can also be used as stove top water baths (simply by not putting the unit under pressure) and so can process both acidic and non-acidic foods, the converse does not apply to water bath preservers, which, as previously mentioned, can only be used for acidic foods.
Pressure canners / bottlers use exactly the same jars as water bath preservers but currently they only come in stove top versions. That means that if you have a glass top or induction cooktop you either need to consider a standalone gas burner to use the pressure canner or you have to restrict your preserving to acidic food only.
Once you have decided which type of unit to get, the next questions may help to determine which unit within that subset to buy.
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