How To Open Kettle Can Pickles And Pickled Vegetables (2025)

Preparing vegetables for pickling

1. Throw away any damaged produce. Unlike in juicing, pickling requires you to use unbruised, undamaged produce.
2. Wash veggies under running water to get rid of dirt and debris.
3. If you are pickling whole cucumbers, you will need to soak them in cold water for about 5 hours. Next, you will need to trim the ends of the cucumbers. Do not skip these two steps if you want your crisp pickles.

Jar cleaning and sterilization

1. Wash jars in a dishwasher and sterilize using one of the two methods described in this article.
2. You must have the jars sterilized before you start filling them with the vegetables

Filling sterilized Jars and hot water treatment

1. Pack the vegetables you are want to can into the jars. The goal is to pack vegetables in a way to minimize empty space. If necessary, cut the vegetables into halves or quarters. Add spices and aromatics as required by your chosen recipe. Do not add sugar, salt or vinegar at this time.
2. Measure out enough water to fill all the packed jars. Pout the measured out water into the pot large enough to hold it. In a pot large enough for the measured water, bring it to a rolling boil for 2-5 minutes.
3. Remove from heat and pour the boiling hot water into the jars containing the vegetables. It’s best to do this while keeping the jars in a kitchen sink.
4. Let the vegetables sit in hot water for 10 minutes. Do not discard any hot water you may have left in the pot.
5. Depending on the recipe you may have to repeat this step twice.

Preparing the brine

1. Pour the water from the jars back into the pot, and add salt and sugar as specified in the recipe
2. Bring the mixture to a boil, continuing to boil until the sugar and salt are fully dissolved (approximately 5 minutes).
3. Just before turning off the heat, add the pickling vinegar to create your pickling marinade or brine.

Sterilizing the lid

1. As you’re preparing the brine, bring a smaller pot of water to a boil to sterilize the lids.
2. Put the lids into freshly boiled water (but not actively boiling!) for at least 1 minute, up to 5 minutes.

Final Steps:

1. Carefully pour the hot brine into the jars containing the vegetables.
2. Use clean tongs to put the lids on the jars and screw them on tightly with the bands. Make sure to tighten the band as much as possible. To hold the hot jar safely, wrap a thick kitchen towel around it before tightening the band.
3. Turn the jars upside down and tightly wrap them in warm towels (use 2-3 beach towels for three large jars). This step is mandatory because, with an open kettle canning method, the seal gets created when jars packed with hot preserves are cooled upside down.
4. Leave the jars upside down, snugly wrapped in towels, for 2 days or until they’re completely cool to the touch. Just like with water bath canning, using heat to process your preserves lowers the risk of spoilage. However, in open kettle canning, the way to keep the preserve temperature high inside the jar for a longer time is by means of wrapping jars in something warm, like a beach towel.
5. The jar is ready to be stored only when it is completely cool to touch. For larger batches, the jars may need to stay wrapped for an extra day.

Heating food in a kettle this way is quicker and more even than heating food in a jar. But the disadvantages of open-kettle canning seem to outweigh the one advantage.The chief difficulty is that food can so easily be contaminated while pouring it into the jars or sealing them.

USDA National Agriculture Library: Breazeale, J. F. & Benson, O. H. (1936). Home canning methods.United States Department of Agriculture, Office of Information. https://archive.org/details/homecanningmetho1936unit

How do I know if my preserve is unsafe to eat?

Watch for any of these signs of a failed canning process and discard the contents of the jar immediately:

• The safety button on the jar remains popped out after you finish processing your jars.
• There are signs of leakage on the walls of the jar. Also, watch for the bulging lid.
• The contents of the jar exhibit spoilage signs, such as an unusual smell, mould, bubbles, or cloudiness.

All of these tell-tail signs apply to any canning method you use and not just to the old fashioned way of canning we’ve described in this article.

Keep in mind that botulism is not visually detectable.

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