Canning Some Zucchini

Today's post is about canning some zucchini.

I had a good harvest of big zucchinis from last summer's garden and I had not canned them all, so I was storing them in the basement. The large ones will store reasonably well for a few months before they start getting soft. I check them fairly regularly so they don't go bad without me knowing it. I had a couple of them starting to get a bit soft so I decided to can them. I can zucchini chunks in wide mouth quart jars and use it as a filler in my crockpot stew.

As usual, I thought of taking some pictures after I had started the process. I use the cold pack method for zucchini, it's just easier. I fill all the jars with the cut up zucchini first, and then I put the hot water in all the jars at the same time. I have a pot big enough to heat up all the jars at the same time so they're hot when I put them in the pressure canner. That way there's no temperature shock to the jars.

This was my first picture after I had started the process of cutting up the zucchini and putting in the jars.

Here's the peelings from the first zucchini. This one had turned yellow after I picked it so there was probably some cross-pollination with other squash. If you look closly at the picture, you can see that a few seeds had sprouted inside the zucchini.

In this picture, I have the 7 jars in the heating pot, getting them hot enough to put in the pressure canner. I had not yet put the hot water into the jars here.
I try to have the water in the pressure canner boiling when I put the jars in it so it doesn't take as long to get up to 10 pounds pressure for the canning cycle.

Here's the canner, up to pressure. It was actually about 12 psi at this point. I tend to overshoot the 10 psi mark when I'm canning. The pressure needs to be at least 10 psi for proper canning, but it can be a bit more without any problems. I find it harder to regulate the pressure at one spot with the electric stove than with the propane burner I use in the summer and fall out in the greenhouse.

Here's the jars after they came out of the canner. They're slowly cooling off on the towel.

That's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
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