Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought this book because I enjoy water bath canning and wanted to try to preserve other items you can't preserve with the water bath method. I made several recipes from this book and all turned out to be time-consuming and disappointing. We made the BBQ pork and BBQ baked beans. The BBQ sauce recipe required small amounts of over a dozen ingredients so it was expensive to assemble. The BBQ sauce tasted good before the canning so it might have a use outside of canning but it was so expensive to make for what it was, I wouldn't do it again. During the canning process, the BBQ pork turned into inedible bricks and the BBQ beans were hard and inedible. We also tried the carrot soup recipe which resulted in a carrot paste. It was still too thick even after adding an extra quart of stock to thin it. Of course, you shouldn't alter canning recipes as you don't know how that will impact the safety in the canning process. Also, these recipes take hours. It can take an hour or more to make the recipe and then you still have to prepare jars and go through the canning process. For many pressure canners, you have to watch the gauge on the pot carefully so that it remains at the correct pressure. If the pressure is too low, you won't kill bacteria. If the pressure gets too high, the pot can explode. So, part of the canning aspect in this book is standing over a pressure canner watching a gauge for often over an hour. Once you've invested 3 hours or more in the entire canning process, it's very disappointing when you end up with expensive jars of food that are totally inedible. It's also really important to know that these recipes have not been tested for safety. This is not a pressure canning "bible." I wouldn't serve canned food from this book for this reason. If you need safe pressure canning recipes that have been extensively tested, you can download the USDA Pressure Canning Guide for free. That is the actual pressure canning bible. In the end, this book failed on every level. The pressure canning is not reliably safe and I'm not risking my family's health. The stand alone recipes without canning also seem to be untested and all of the ones we tried needed adjustments. Don't waste your money or take risks with this book.