The All New Ball Book of Canning and Preserving Review: 350+ Recipes for Canners Beyond the Basics
This page reviews "The All New Ball Book of Canning and Preserving," which offers over 350 canning recipes for those who want to try more than basic jams and pickles. It explains the book's content, provides safety tips for canning, and suggests checking for recipe corrections.
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Once you’ve put up a few batches of jam and a shelf of pickles, the beginner recipes start to feel familiar. The All New Ball Book of Canning and Preserving, from the Ball Home Canning Test Kitchen, is aimed at that next step: more variety, more techniques and more ways to use what you’ve preserved. Here’s what’s inside, what the publisher says, the corrections you should know about, and how to use any canning book safely.
The Book at a Glance
- Full title: The All New Ball Book of Canning and Preserving: Over 350 of the Best Canned, Jammed, Pickled, and Preserved Recipes
- Author: Ball Home Canning Test Kitchen
- Publisher: TI Inc. Books / Oxmoor House
- Published: May 2016
- Format: trade paperback, 368 pages, color photos; about 8 x 9.1 in
- Recipes: over 350
- Also available: Kindle/ebook and a spiral-bound edition
- ISBN: 978-0848746780
Organized by Technique
Instead of sorting recipes by fruit or vegetable, the book is organized by preserving method. It covers:
- Water bath canning
- Pressure canning
- Pickling
- Fermenting
- Freezing
- Dehydrating
- Smoking
That makes it easy to work through one technique at a time, and it’s a big part of why this book feels like a step beyond a basic canning guide.
How It Teaches
Step-by-step photos walk beginners through each method, while experienced canners get more advanced techniques and new ingredient twists. Reference charts cover processing times, temperatures and recipe formulas, and sidebars highlight seasonal fruits and vegetables, which helps when you’re planning the preserving year around the garden.
The Recipes
The 350-plus recipes run from jams, jellies and pickles to salsas, sauces and jerky. The publisher’s examples include Tomato-Herb Jam, Tart Lemon Jelly, Ploughman’s Pickles, Asian Pear Kimchi, Smoked Maple-Juniper Bacon and homemade kombucha. There are also “extender” recipes that use your preserves in everyday dishes, so the jars on the shelf actually get eaten.
Canning Safety: Follow Tested Recipes Exactly
The publisher says the recipes were tested for safety and quality by thermal process engineers at the Fresh Preserving Quality Assurance Lab. That’s the publisher’s claim, and no book can guarantee that a batch is safe. What keeps home-canned food safe is following a tested recipe exactly:
- Ingredients: use the amounts and acid the recipe calls for, with no substitutions or improvising
- Headspace: leave exactly the headspace given
- Processing time and method: water bath or pressure canner, for the full time
- Altitude: adjust processing for your elevation
Cross-check recipes and methods against current guidance from the National Center for Home Food Preservation (nchfp.uga.edu).
Some Recipes Were Later Corrected
This is the 2016 edition, and a few recipes have since been corrected. HealthyCanning.com keeps an errata list for the All New Ball Book. Examples:
- Roasted Eggplant and Pepper Puttanesca Sauce (p. 181): Ball later added balsamic vinegar and lengthened the processing time.
- Cherry-Bourbon BBQ Sauce (p. 184): the headspace should be ½ inch, not ¼ inch.
- Metric headspace (pp. 274 and 276): the metric conversions are wrong.
- Salsas: HealthyCanning notes that several salsa recipes call for fresh rather than bottled lime juice.
HealthyCanning also reports that some university Extension programs have had reservations about certain recipes in this book and don’t teach from it. Before you start a batch, check the recipe against the errata list and Ball’s website for a corrected version.
Honest Limitations
- It’s a 2016 edition. It’s not Ball’s newest guide, and some recipes were corrected after publication.
- Not every recipe is a canning recipe. Many are for fermenting, freezing, curing, smoking, dehydrating or cooking with your preserves.
- The paperback doesn’t lie flat until the spine is broken in. A recipe stand helps, or look at the spiral-bound edition listed on Amazon.
- Check the errata. See the corrections above before canning from it.
Who It’s For
Home canners who have the basics down and want more variety: new water bath and pressure canning recipes, plus fermenting, smoking, curing and dehydrating, all in one book. On the homestead, it pairs well with a water bath canner, a case of jars and a food dehydrator. If you’re brand new to canning, start with a basic guide and NCHFP’s resources, then grow into this one.
The Bottom Line
The All New Ball Book of Canning and Preserving is a rich, well-organized recipe collection for canners ready to go beyond the basics. It has over 350 recipes organized by technique, step-by-step photos and reference charts, and the publisher says the recipes were tested. Check the errata, follow every recipe exactly, and lean on NCHFP for current guidance.
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