How to Use Home Canned Foods (with Example Recipe)

If learning to can, or improving your skills, is one of your goals this year, that’s wonderful! We’d like to help by giving you a simple collection of easy ideas on how to use home canned foods. Whether it’s a quick dessert to take to the potluck or a simple dinner on a busy night, home canned foods provide you with food security, flexibility, and a deliciously healthy alternative to store-bought canned goods.

How to Use Home Canned Foods

There are many reasons to learn to can your own food, especially if you’re growing even a portion of that food yourself.

Some of these reasons include:

• You can preserve the year’s garden harvest by making it shelf stable.
• It’s easy to prevent food waste by preserving extra veggies, fruits, and meats.
• You end up with easy to use components for quick meals during busy weeks.
• Sharing the extras from the harvest with friends and neighbors is simple.
• Home canned foods can be cheaper and healthier than store-bought canned goods, especially if you’re purchasing organic brands.
• The taste of home canned foods is far superior to store bought.
• Home canned foods make great holiday gifts!

To name just a few.

To help you keep track of your home preservation goals, meal ideas, methods, and so much more, please join our newsletter family and get your free download of our Home Preservation Worksheets sent to your inbox! You can print off only what you need; there’s a black and white option for economical printing, too.

 

Home Canned Foods Provide Control

When you preserve food you’ve grown yourself or purchased from reliable sources, then you know exactly what’s gone into the production and preservation of that food.

Here’s something to consider from our book, Once a Month Canning,

Canning your own food provides control. You control exactly what goes into each home-canned jar of food. Many commercially canned foods contain elevated amounts of salt and other preservatives. There are also potential problems with pesticides and herbicides contaminating store-bought canned foods.

Save yourself a headache and preserve foods you’ve grown yourself that are full of nutrients and picked at the peak of freshness. You can also buy in bulk from growers you trust and you’ll be able to can quality products for your pantry.

Home Canned Foods Save Time

When you have home canned foods lining your shelves, you have meal components pre-prepared for your use. Here’s another quick quote from Once a Month Canning,

Maybe one of the most important benefits of canning for busy families is that home canned foods can become the ready-to-go components of nearly instantaneous meals. If you’re feeling pressed for time during soccer season, or the harvest season, or even because it’s Wednesday, you can turn to your pantry to throw together quick, healthy meals.

Get your own copy of the book, which includes canning schedules, inventory sheets, recipes, and tutorials!

Home Canned Foods – Examples of How to Use

After we’ve created a wide array of home canned foods and they’re sitting nicely on our shelves, we might just wonder how to use them all. 

The truth is, you won’t need this article in a few months after you’ve gotten used to incorporating home canned foods into you everyday meals. However, sometimes our brains can use a nice jumpstart when we’re starting a new venture.

In that light, the following are a few ideas for using home canned foods. Let’s start with soup!

Home Canned Soup Components

Creating a soup from home-canned items is relatively simple and we’re so glad that it is on busy nights!
To create a basic chicken noodle soup, simply combine the following in a large pot:

• 1 Quart Home Canned Chicken Broth
• 1 Quart Home Canned Chicken
• 1 Quart Home Canned Carrots
• 1 Quart Home Canned Potatoes

Heat these on the stove and add frozen peas for something green to warm up with the soup. Another variation is to omit the potatoes and add cooked pasta to the soup instead.

As you read the recipe, you came up with your own changes and combinations, right?

• Maybe you’d like to can celery with your carrots to add to soups?
• Perhaps you’d like to add home canned beans to your chicken soup?
• A jar of zucchini relish can add some zing to soup, as well as bulk it up!

Home Canned Foods – Basic Enchilada Casserole Recipe

Here’s how to make a super quick basic enchilada recipe for a weekday night when you’re just to tired to cook from scratch! Using home canned enchilada sauce, ground beef, salsa, and corn. Add a few fresh ingredients like cheese, sour cream, and green onions and you have a delicious dinner in no time!

FYI, this recipe comes directly from our book, Once a Month Canning.

Basic Enchilada Recipe Notes

You can add any number of fresh ingredients to these recipes to liven them up. Try fresh herbs like oregano and thyme. Garden tomatoes or thinly sliced zucchini can be served as garnish or tossed into the casserole to add more veggies.

If you have time, make a delicious tossed salad or add fresh tomato salsa with ingredients that came from the garden.

If you’re just too busy that night, serve the casserole as is and know that you’ve included wholesome ingredients preserved in healthy ways.

• Make your own enchilada sauce for canning with Bramble Wine Cottage.
• Stone Family Farmstead can teach you how to safely can ground beef.
• Canning homemade salsa is simple with The Rustic Elk.
• A Modern Homestead can teach you how to can corn, either raw or hot pack.

You don’t have to stop the homemade items with just the home canned foods, either! You can make more of this meal from scratch ahead of time with the following recipes.

• Here’s how to make your own cultured cream at home for use in this recipe in place of store-bought sour cream.
• Also, here’s how to make delicious and healthy sourdough corn tortillas from Butter For All. My favorite what and corn flour recipe for tortillas!!
• If you want to get super DIY, here’s how to make your own cheddar cheese from Ashley at Practical Self Reliance.

Other Ways to Use Home Canned Foods

If you’re like me, you’re going to want a variety of recipes for using home canned foods. Here are some from some of my favorite canning and homesteading writers.

Mama’s Peach Jam Bars from Mama’s Homestead are a great way to use up a jar of peach jam. Any jam flavor would work in this recipe, FYI.

• If you need more ideas on how to use up jam, please visit Practical Self Reliance for 100+ Ways to Use a Jar of Jam.

Since we’re talking about peaches, try this Easy Peach Cobbler with Canned Peaches from Common Sense Home.

• If you still have canned peaches to use, try these 20+ Recipes Using Canned Peaches from Homespun Seasonal Living.

If you discover that these recipes really work for you, try switching out the fruit for home canned cherries, plums, apples, and apricots.

Sometimes, the home canned foods are meals in and of themselves, like this home canned Chili Con Carne recipe from Angi at Schneider Peeps. 

• Or sometimes the canned food is a condiment, like this absolutely delicious tomato jam recipe from Better Hens and Gardens.
• Or this homemade barbeque sauce from Grow a Good Life.

FAQs of Using Home Canned Foods

Here are a few more questions you might have concerning learning to use your home canned foods to their fullest potential. Don’t waste a single bit!

Do you have to heat up canned food before eating?

No, you do not have to heat up home canned foods before eating them because the preservation process both cooks them and makes them shelf-stable.

However, some foods are simply more palatable once they’ve been warmed up. Meat is a good example of that. However, home canned chicken is kept room temperature when making chicken salad, so it’s not a must.

Is it OK to eat canned food out of the can?

Along those same lines, yes, it’s ok to eat home canned food out of the jar. Fruit is especially delicious and can be eaten right out of the jar. 

Peaches, pears, plums, jams, jellies, and chutneys, too!

Are you supposed to drain canned food?

If I’m making soup, I don’t drain off home canned meats because the canned liquid is like soup stock. If I  need a little more liquid in my soup, I’ll also use the liquid from home canned corn or even green beans.

The liquid that is left from home canned potatoes is starchy and not at all palatable, in my opinion. I always just drain that into the compost bucket.

What are 2 disadvantages of canned foods?

As great as home canned foods are, they do have a few disadvantages. 

One is that they are heavy! With all the water used and preserved in the foods to get them shelf stable, plus the glass jars they’re preserved in, home canned foods weigh a lot when compared to home dehydrated foods.

While home canned foods have the opportunity to be a much healthier option than commercially canned foods, the canning process does decrease nutritional content because of the application of heat.

There are several studies you could read on the topic, but I can also recommend Healthy Canning’s article, Just How Nutritious are Home Canned Foods?

Nutrition Questions

Something to think about, though. The experts are cited as saying that canned foods retain more nutrition than dried foods. First of all, commercial food drying (and canning, for that matter) are different from home dehydrating because the equipment is different.

It’s very important to consider what causes nutritional depletion in preserved food. Usually the culprits are heat and light.

To keep both your canned and dehydrated foods as fresh and nutritive as long as possible, keep them in a cool, dry, dark place. Sunlight and heat can both degrade preserved foods!

Also, with a home dehydrator, I can adjust my heat levels down to what’s considered a “living foods” or raw setting (100F – 115F/38C – 46C). My freeze dryer preserves almost all of the foods’ nutrients, according to its manufacturer.

This isn’t true with canning because of the application of so much heat for such a prolonged period of time to complete the canning process. We discuss this idea a bit more in our article, Dehydrator vs. Freeze Dryer for Food Storage.

We quote Harvest Rite (freeze dryer manufacturer) as saying,

It’s estimated that nearly all of the nutrition is preserved in freeze dried foods. Whereas dehydrated foods retain only about 60%, and canned foods around 40%, according to Harvest Rite.

What I Value Most

For me, the bottom line is:

• I want to grow as much of my own food as possible so that it’s nutrient dense and local (can’t get more local than my backyard).
• Also, I want to preserve as much of my own food as possible so that I can feed my family year round (using the grocery store as little as possible) and to eliminate food waste in my kitchen.
• Although I do have long term food storage items, most of my home canned foods (and home preserved foods in general) are part of my short term food storage program. Which means that I plan to have my family consume the bulk of these home preserved foods within 1-2 years.

The exception to that is some of my home freeze dried foods, which I keep in storage for several years sometimes. Honestly, they’re so tasty that we eat most of them within 1-2 years!

The actual ins-&-outs of nutritional values for each method isn’t something I stress over too much. I use all the methods at my disposal and feed my family good food year round!

• What’s your go-to food preservation method?
• Do you have a favorite home canned food recipe you’d like to share with other readers? 

Just leave a comment below!

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