Keto Preserving: 4 of the Best Recipes for Beginners: If you follow a keto diet or a low carb diet, preserving low carb veggies is a technique that can help you access minimally processed vegetables when they are out of season or when you are simply not able to run to the store. This post will share 4 of the best keto preserving recipes for beginners plus a great keto meal planning tool that will save you a ton of time. 

Canning is a simple way of preserving food in BPA-free glass jars so they are shelf-stable for a year or longer. You might think of canning as a way of making jam and jelly, and it is, but reimagine it instead as a method to help you attain your low carb diet goals.

Once you can some or all the following recipes, you can use my friend Elisa’s Keto Meal Planning Resource to use theme nights to plan out a whole week -or more!- of keto meals- and use these keto friendly canning recipes as ingredients. It’s a genius pairing, really.

Canning in a modern home is fast and fun. If you haven’t tried it, you can take my quick, FREE Canning Basics Course to teach you how to preserve these recipes (and any canning recipe!) in jars. You can sign up right here!

Let’s get you excited about keto preserving with these beginner-friendly recipes!

Keto Preserving

Pickled pearl onions are delicious on a pile of shredded beef topped with melted cheese, skewered on a toothpick garnishing a cocktail, or straight out of the jar. Grab the recipe here!

Roasted bell peppers are versatile in Mediterranean or Mexican dishes, and are right at home mixed with white or red meat. They add a ton of flavor to any dish- especially in the dead of winter when delicious veggies are harder to find. Get the recipe right here!

Pickled carrots are a super simple preserve that satisfies the craving for a salty snack. Where you used to grab a bag of chips, now you’ll grab a jar of pickled carrots. Aside from snacking straight out of the jar, they are great adding color and flavor to salads. Read the easy recipe now!

Keep reading for more keto preserving goodness!

I always tell people if I had to can one recipe for the rest of my life, it would be this sugar-free tomato sauce recipe. As a busy mom, I NEED a sauce that still counts as a wholesome vegetable that can be used as a blank slate for whatever I’m cooking for supper. It tastes like summer, is rich and flavorful, and I can use it for any number of recipes. Head to the best tomato sauce recipe right here, my friends!

If you have read this far and are thinking that canning seemed really hard and complicated when Grandma did it, I assure you that adopting a diet like Keto or Paleo is far more complex. Canning is easy! If you would like simple, step by step canning lessons, sign up for my FREE Canning Basics Course!

Keto Meal Planning

If you came to this post and are still hungry for more keto resources, I have an awesome resource to share with you. My friend Elisa is a meal planning wizard (and by wizard I mean she makes meal planning FUN and EASY even for a Type B person like me!) and she’s created the Simple Keto Meal Planning Guide where you use theme nights (think One-Pot Wednesdays, Slow Saturday, Mexican Monday, etc) to meal plan. The guide is under $10, and it allows you to plug in keto recipes that match! It’s a genius! Here’s how it works!

Have a beginning canner you are shopping for? Want to get the best canning supplies for the beginning canner in your life? This post will share exactly the Best Home Canning Equipment For A Beginner, even if they are just canning curious and want to to start canning, or if they have canned a few times before. Read on for the complete list of canning supplies for a beginner!

This post contains affiliate links. That means I get a teeny, tiny commission if you click through and make a purchase and your purchase price isn’t affected at all. It’s a great way to support your favorite canning blogger.  

The first item that everyone thinks of when they think of canning is the big, speckled canning pot. My favorite tips for beginners is that they DON’T need that pot! What?! That’s right. You don’t need it.

Here’s what you need instead. You need a regular stockpot, or a pot that’s 3 inches taller than the tallest jar you plan to can. A pot that you could boil artichokes in is probably large enough. Think this type:

You don’t need the lid. Yeah, it’s helpful if you have it but it’s not absolutely necessary. THEN, you need this gem:

 This is a silicone trivet, and they sit in the bottom of the regular stockpot and prevent the mason jars from rattling around and breaking. They are useful as a regular trivet, inexpensive, collapse for storage, and once I got one, I NEVER pulled the giant speckled canning pot out again.

The canning jars that are best for a beginning canner are wide mouth pint canning jars. You want to get wide mouth canning jars because they are easy to clean, the most versatile size for the widest number of recipes, double as drinking classes, and you can freeze in them.

The next size that’s great for beginners is the wide mouth half pint. This size jar holds one measuring cup, so it’s just right for jam, applesauce, and for gifting the fruits of the canner’s labor.

Best Home Canning Equipment For A Beginner Continued: If the canner in your life has jars already , or maybe has canned a time or two, you should DEFINITELY get them several boxes of NEW lids. Lids can only be used ONE time through the canning process so a canner goes through them fairly quickly. They are a great gift item that a canner will always use in the same way a cooking enthusiast would always love a great bottle of olive oil. Here are the wide mouth lids that fit the jars above.

A beginning canner needs a set of tools that are usually sold together called a canning utensil kit.

Here’s my pro tip: That little wand that has a magnet at the end is called a lid lifter. They are used to lift lids out of simmering water before putting them on jars. If you’ve not canned much, or even if you’ve canned a lot, you might think that because that thing is sold in the kit, you need it, right? Wrong. You actually do NOT need to have that lid lifter and I wrote a blog post about why here but the short reason is that the lids haven’t had to be simmered since the 1960’s.

You NEED the tongs (called a jar lifter) and the funnel and you can get them separately through those links if you don’t want to purchase the kit, though I bet the kit is cheaper.

The Best Home Canning Equipment For A Beginner list is nearly finished- download the checklist here to be sure you got everything you need!

And finally, if you or someone dear to you wants to learn how to can, I cannot recommend enough that they join the Start Canning Course. This premium video course teaches STEP BY STEP exactly what to do when!

In Start Canning

I teach how to can:

• Strawberry Jam
• Strawberry Rhubarb Jam
• Strawberry Syrup and Strawberry Butter
• Tomato Sauce
• Roasted Bell Peppers

Plus once you know how to make the basics, you can take your newfound skills and use them with different types of fruit and vegetables. It’s like having an entire farmer’s market on your pantry shelf!

Click here to learn more about Start Canning!

And for the canning enthusiast, they need these super cute canning tee shirts.

And once a canner starts canning, it’s not long before they experience Canic- the fear brought on by having tons of quickly ripening produce, but not enough time to can it all. It’s a very real thing, and the canner in your life needs this shirt.

Many canners have little Berry Picker helpers- these shirts are awesome for those littlest helpers whose motto usually is, “one for the basket, two for me.”

I hope this Beginner’s guide to home canning equipment was helpful! Best Home Canning Equipment For A Beginner shouldn’t feel daunting- there’s really not a lot you need to start preserving healthy, homemade food in jars!