Ways to Can Potatoes

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The cool thing about potatoes is that there are just so many ways to eat them! It’s so darn exciting. Tater tots, hash browns, air fried, or mashed. There are many ways to eat potatoes and the majority of them are super delicious. One of my favorite movie lines is from Emperor’s New Groove- “spuds yes, cheese no.” Except, I love cheese on my potatoes. There are so many different ways to eat potatoes that we knew there needed to be ways of canning potatoes that would match. We decided to research beyond our initial methods to find a few different ways to can potatoes.

Boiling

The first method is one that I’ve shared here on the blog before. There is a whole post about it here so I’m just going to give you a summary because you can read the step by step directions there. 

The basic process of this one is to peel and cut potatoes. Putting them in cold water to keep them from turning brown. Then boiling them quickly to get some of the starch out. Next is to put them into jars. Followed by pressure canning them. Again, all of this is written out in the original post, with many more details. 

Dry Canning

This year one of the new methods we tried was dry canning. The reviews from others said that they enjoyed the texture better and that this way was much easier to can as well. I can safely say, we agree with both of those statements. However, these would not be a good potato for mashed potatoes. We love these fried, in soups or stews, and just heated up as a side dish. 

The process for dry canning is to either peel or clean your potatoes thoroughly. 

• Dry them off.
• Cut them up.
• Put them in jars. 
• Add 1Tbsp butter, ½ tsp salt, and ¼ tsp pepper per quart. 
• Add lids and rings, and pressure can at 10lbs for 40 minutes. 

I recommend you use a paper towel or towel with vinegar on it to clean the rims of these jars before putting your lids and rings on. This will help take of the any of the butter from the rim that will prevent your jars from sealing. We did have a pretty poor seal rate with these. We used Ball lids this year but next year we’re going to try something like Denali lids to see if those perform better. It was very disappointing.

No Boil Method

The other method is a mix of these two methods but it skips an essential piece of the first one- the boiling. This also eliminates a lot of time that goes into the boiling and some extra dishes as well. This method would be good for a lot of things but also works for mashed potatoes. 

• Peel or clean your potatoes thoroughly. 
• Cut them up.
• Put them in jars.
• Add hot water to the jars. 
• Add lids and rings, and pressure can at 10lbs for 40 minutes. 

In Summary: Ways to Can Potatoes

There are so many ways to skin a cat or a potato in this case. For us, we like to do multiple methods so that we can use them for multiple purposes. The worst is to feel stifled in what you are going to make or have to buy potatoes for certain occasions. Utilizing all three of these methods, or at least two of them, allows us to create everything that we’ve needed. When we can potatoes, it’s enough for the entire year so we want to make sure that we are able to use them and we don’t have to buy more.