Make Room for Mushrooms!!
"Dry Canning" dehydrated Mushrooms
This weeks grocery travels took us to the land of Smurfs. Mushrooms were on sale at Meijer 10 for 10, get the 11th free. I bought 11, totaling $.80 per pack, now that is a great deal! Very proud of myself for spotting this deal but now what am I going to do with all these mushrooms?I can dehydrate them of course! Then what? I can't fit anything else in my freezer and I know we're not going to use 11 packs of mushrooms within a month or two even if we were to eat them with every meal, so what do I do to make sure they are preserved for long term storage. Google, Bing, Youtube...my buddies, help me out!
I was looking around on the web and found a couple sites showing how to "dry can" dehydrated or already dry foods(flour,salt). Most canning is done by placing cooked or blanched foods, liquid, and salt or (syrup for fruit) in a canning jar and pressure cooking for a specific amount of time making them safe for storage. This method will preserve most foods for a couple of years. The liquid canning and jelly making is the only type of canning I have ever done.
This "dry canning" seems interesting. You can "can" already dehydrated foods and it takes out most of the oxygen from the jar and many people are saying this method has a 20-25 year shelf life. I don't really need my mushrooms to last 20 years but I like learning new things so I gave it a shot.
I got out a few wide mouth canning jars, washed, dried, and sanitized the jars, lids and rings. Do I really want to run my oven for 2 hours for just two jars of mushrooms? Naw, I took out my dried potatoes and I am going to 'Dry can" those as well.
I now have 6 jars of dehydrated foods cooling next to my stove listening for the familiar ping of the jar lid suctioning down to complete the seal........ping! There goes one now, gotta go check it out! See you later!
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