Ellie Topp

It's exciting to find a canning book written by a food scientist. This book is "considered a safe canning book by many informed, experienced canners, as Topp has a Masters degree in food science (University of Wisconsin), where she did a major in experimental foods with a minor in microbiology on organisms causing foodborne illness. She was then a research associate in the Department of Food Research at the University of Illinois." (Healthy Canning website) And the information on equipment, processes, and set-up is sterling.

This book is definitely a keeper for the canning reference shelf!

However, this isn't going to replace my Ball Blue Book. There are a lot of fancy flavour combinations, but few that I really want to make in quantity. Good thing it's a small batch cookbook. (Gingered Pear Apricot Conserve? Plum Conserve with Maple Syrup? They sound really good, but breakfast is a time for standard comfort food; these might shine on the afternoon tea table!). I thought I'd found a reason to love the book in its pages of mustard recipes, but none of them were actually preserved; all said "keep up to two weeks in refrigerator" -- that's a lot of mustard to eat in two weeks, unless I was cooking for a large commune! I did find some very attractive jams, but I was slightly discouraged because many of the recipes involve lengthy cooking to reach the "gel" stage. And some of the recipes puzzle me because I don't know the author's cultural background -- does Ms Topp's taste in Oriental ginger or pickled daikon align with mine? How authentic are these recipes? (When there's soy sauce in the pickled ginger, I am fearing not entirely.) The Indian chutney "along the lines of ... Major Gray (sic)" doesn't have any of the same major (Grey) ingredients. And the Satay Sauce recipe uses peanut butter, usually on the do-not-can list, so I wish she'd given her reasoning or research as to why it's an exception to the general rules.… (more)

I'm a little in love with this book, which covers jams, jellies, marmalades, conserves, pickles, chutneys, salsa, flavored oils and vinegars (the latter two I'll never make). By far this one is my favorite canning cookbook I've read so far, ever.

It focuses on small batch water bath canning - exactly what I'm looking to do. Make small batches of food, using ingredients mainly from my garden, with maybe a couple of things added (like peppers, because my garden right now is just not producing peppers). Another reviewer mentioned the book had a "vintage" feel to it - the recipes, that is, not the book itself - which is probably why I like the recipes so much.

There are a lot of freezer / fridge "canning" in here, but the name of the book is small batch preserving, not small batch canning, so it's to be expected that there's a variety of prserving methods included.… (more)