UPDATE: 8/21/2011
I ended up buying the Bayou KAB6 burner. It is a 10 inch wide (!) element and can seat a huge and heavy pot on it. The thing makes enormous flames, put out incredible heat (over 210,000 BTUs) and sounds like a jet engine. Ive never seen water boil so fast. After I read other people's experiences with canning, it seemed like most of the time wasted was just waiting for the water to boil. Therefore I wanted to get a good enough heat source that would boil water quickly.
Not with this burner...in 30 minutes an 80 quart pot of water was brought to boil from faucet temperature. Also, we could turn down the burner to a mere simmer. When we placed a full rack of jars in the water, we turned it up to full blast and in 30 seconds the water was fully boiling again. We burned quite a bit of propane but overall we are very happy. Great burner but make sure you have a wide enough pot to use the full potential of the burner when you turn it up to full blast.
-------------
OP:
The woman and I have a garden going and the tomato crop is looking excellent so far. I don't know if I'm being overly optimistic but we're expecting hundreds of tomatoes. :-D
Therefore, it looks like this year we'll be doing some canning. it will be my first time attempting it on my own. I helped my parents canned every year but did it differently than most people. My dad owns a restaurant and we enjoyed the benefit of using high output commercial natural gas stoves. But one year, the tomato crop was exceptionally excellent and my dad could not resist buying several bushels. Therefore, instead of boiling the submerged jars, we instead filled 2 pizza ovens with jars and canned over 500 jars at once this way, keeping the oven at 250 degrees overnight and the next morning all the jars were beautifully sealed. We ended up switching to the oven method for all future canning sessions since it was far cleaner and easier than submerged boiling.
Nowadays, we don't have access to the restaurant due to distance. But I've canned on a household stove before and to be blunt about it, it sucked. Residential stoves don't have the BTUs to boil vast amounts of water at once, therefore we can maybe do 2-4 jars at once. Nor do I wanna use the oven either. Imagine keeping the oven on overnight inside the house in the summer. And for maybe 20-30 jars per cycle. No way...
Admittedly I was spoiled by the large restaurant kitchen and I think the next best thing is an outdoor propane burner with a large pot that people use for turkey frying.
I've been looking at the "Bayou" brand of burners. Specifically the "banjo" style burners but the jet burners look attractive too. If anyone has any recommendations or experience with bayou or other brand burners please share... Thanks.
I ended up buying the Bayou KAB6 burner. It is a 10 inch wide (!) element and can seat a huge and heavy pot on it. The thing makes enormous flames, put out incredible heat (over 210,000 BTUs) and sounds like a jet engine. Ive never seen water boil so fast. After I read other people's experiences with canning, it seemed like most of the time wasted was just waiting for the water to boil. Therefore I wanted to get a good enough heat source that would boil water quickly.
Not with this burner...in 30 minutes an 80 quart pot of water was brought to boil from faucet temperature. Also, we could turn down the burner to a mere simmer. When we placed a full rack of jars in the water, we turned it up to full blast and in 30 seconds the water was fully boiling again. We burned quite a bit of propane but overall we are very happy. Great burner but make sure you have a wide enough pot to use the full potential of the burner when you turn it up to full blast.
-------------
OP:
The woman and I have a garden going and the tomato crop is looking excellent so far. I don't know if I'm being overly optimistic but we're expecting hundreds of tomatoes. :-D
Therefore, it looks like this year we'll be doing some canning. it will be my first time attempting it on my own. I helped my parents canned every year but did it differently than most people. My dad owns a restaurant and we enjoyed the benefit of using high output commercial natural gas stoves. But one year, the tomato crop was exceptionally excellent and my dad could not resist buying several bushels. Therefore, instead of boiling the submerged jars, we instead filled 2 pizza ovens with jars and canned over 500 jars at once this way, keeping the oven at 250 degrees overnight and the next morning all the jars were beautifully sealed. We ended up switching to the oven method for all future canning sessions since it was far cleaner and easier than submerged boiling.
Nowadays, we don't have access to the restaurant due to distance. But I've canned on a household stove before and to be blunt about it, it sucked. Residential stoves don't have the BTUs to boil vast amounts of water at once, therefore we can maybe do 2-4 jars at once. Nor do I wanna use the oven either. Imagine keeping the oven on overnight inside the house in the summer. And for maybe 20-30 jars per cycle. No way...
Admittedly I was spoiled by the large restaurant kitchen and I think the next best thing is an outdoor propane burner with a large pot that people use for turkey frying.
I've been looking at the "Bayou" brand of burners. Specifically the "banjo" style burners but the jet burners look attractive too. If anyone has any recommendations or experience with bayou or other brand burners please share... Thanks.
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