Tools We Use to Can Apricots

Water Bath Canner - Tool 4

You certainly may use a water bath canner to process your fruit. It works fine. For us it has a number of disadvantages over a steam canner. It uses much more water than a steam canner. Important for us with a well. It requires more heat because you must heat more water, thus heating up the kitchen in the hot summer. It is quite heavy to empty for us. Lastly, you cannot set cold jars in a pot of very hot water or the jars may break. So doing batches of jars becomes a problem. With a steam canner you can set cold jars on the rack above th hot water with no problem making cycling batches much easier and faster.