Another Canning Opportunity - Carrots

I learned very quickly in my younger canning days to make hay while the sun shined.  As a frugal home canner I tend to take advantage of any good sale I see on cannable foods year round.  This time of year the frugal canning choices tend to be citrus fruits, some meats and poultry.  We arrived home from our vacation home with only two days left to do the grocery shopping and prep for Christmas.  During our grocery shopping excursion I spotted a deal on carrots I could not turn down.  They were on sale 10 lb for $1.75.  At that price, it did not matter how tired I was I knew a bag was coming home for me to can!

The locally grown carrots were gorgeous looking, nice big carrots.  I used a couple for the crudite tray during our Christmas celebrations then a couple of days later poured the rest into the sink to wash for canning.  The carrots would easily have kept in the crisper for later use.  However, canning them up would help replenish my pantry stock of carrots. 

We don't use a lot of canned carrots as is but rather as an ingredient in other dishes and most times it is mashed so you don't even know carrots are in the dish.  Home canned carrots ends up being a real convenience product in the pantry.  I was completely out so this was a very welcomed canning session.

Preparing carrots for home canning is quite easy.  Simply wash, peel then cut as desired and wash again.  Carrots are generally tapered.  What I do is cut the smaller portion of the taper into coins then dice the larger end.  Quite frankly for my use of the home canned carrots it makes no never mind as most times the carrots are mashed as an ingredient but from a processing aspect it does.  Larger carrot coin sections take up more jar space and use a bit longer processing time.  The standard processing time is based on 1 - inch coins or smaller.  Dicing the larger pieces means I can process at the same time without compromising the safety of the final product. 

Here is where home canning really pays off.  The 10 lb bag of carrots cost $1.75.  I ended up with six 500 ml (pint) jars each of diced and coined carrots.  I used a dozen snap lids at a cost of $1.25 and about 15¢ in natural gas for processing the carrots for a total cost of $3.15 or about 26¢ per jar.  Had I used the Tattler reusable lids or glass inserts the cost for the lids would have been very close to zero since I've used them enough to recoup the initial cost.  This would have brought the cost per jar down to 16¢.  Either way the home canned carrots are considerably less expensive than store bought.  I really should have bought two bags of the carrots.  Hopefully, I will have enough jars to last until I have carrots from the garden.

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