[shekinah]

My pressure canner is the Presto 16 quart. I did some research a couple years ago and landed on that as being the most popular, so I just went with it. I am super happy though! No problems, very easy to use, instructions are in depth and easy to follow, and the manual has all the pressure times and directions for just about everything you would ever want to can. It doesn't take up much space, and I find when it's full of jars (it does 7 large jars at a time), it's just heavy enough that I can still lift it off the burner when it's time, but not too heavy that I need DH's help or am afraid of dropping it. It would be nice to have the double decker, but I likely would not be able to lift it!

I have canned potatoes, carrots, beef stock, chili, soups, applesauce, and spaghetti sauce. My experience is the ready to go meals and stock can really well, but when doing individual vegetables, you can choose to hot can (flash cook the veg first) or cold can (just pour boiling water into the jars without any pre-cooking). I thought cooking first would help make it easy to be able to open a jar, heat up, and serve, but really it just turns to mush from the extra processing. It's an unnecessary step in my opinion, as the canner heats it so much anyway it cooks them. I mostly just can all my veg in a soup or chili rather than bother individually doing them.

If doing potatoes, I also recommend soaking them in cold water for 30 minutes after chopping them into pieces to draw out the starch first. Then use different fresh boiling water to pack them in the jars. Otherwise, you end up canning them, and the jars are full of starch which makes them taste really strange no matter how good you rinse them before cooking. I learned the hard way.. lol.. totally not edible.