Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving - Complete Canning & Food Preservation Guide for Beginners to Experts - Perfect for Home Canning, Pickling, and Food Storage

This book has a good all around introduction to canning, freezing and dehydrating and contains a lot of good recipes.It begins with a thorough introduction to canning principles and methods, equipment, processing and storage, and food types. From there the chapters clearly define the type of food(high/low acid)and recipes(jams, pickles, special diet, etc). Each chapter starts with information on ingredients, techniques, and equiptment needed. The text is an easy read without getting too technical and to the point. The recipes that follow are in alphabetical order and easy to follow.The recipes are pretty basic; for instance, there are 22 jam recipes from 3-7 ingredients including apricot, elderberry, kiwi, peach,raspberry, tomato. No fancy designer blends here. Other topics with recipes include juice, jelly, meat, seafoods, veggies, condiments, salsas, low sugar/salt, leathers, jerky. There are not a lot of pictures but the featured illustrations are clear and comprehensive. At the end of the book is a section called 'Problem Solver', glossary, and index.This is a great book for a beginner as it covers the basics of the different type of preserving and its a great collection of favorites for any home preservers library. Highly recommended!