Healthy Canning & Preserves Recipes

You'll want to bring a pitcher of this white sangria to parties and potlucks all summer long. Fresh peaches look gorgeous in these delicious sparkling peach cocktails, but frozen peaches work too (and help keep your drink cool).

For these easy pickled beets, you only need to let them marinate in the pickling mixture for about 30 minutes to get great flavor. Marinating them longer just enhances the taste. Try them in place of cucumber pickles as a condiment or as a vegetable side dish for roasted chicken or beef.

Learning how to make Greek yogurt at home is simple with this easy homemade Greek yogurt recipe. Start by making homemade yogurt by heating milk, combining with a little bit of already-cultured yogurt and letting it sit in a warm spot until the milk turns into yogurt. Making protein-rich Greek yogurt takes one more step than making regular yogurt: straining the yogurt to thicken it. You can add the leftover liquid--also known as whey--to smoothies, or you can use it in place of buttermilk in baking.

Pickled garlic? You bet! This simple pickled garlic clove recipe is made by adding whole peeled garlic cloves to a flavorful brine. Use almost any type of clear vinegar--white, red or cider vinegar. Serve as part of an antipasti spread or chop and add to pasta salad, vinaigrettes or stir-fries. Use the freshest garlic you can find to make the best pickles.

This strawberry preserve recipe is made in small batches, to reduce the amount of time the fruit is heated so it retains more of its intense fresh flavor. If you use about 25 percent underripe berries in the mix of berries (they're higher in natural pectin), you don't have to add any store-bought pectin.

This homemade sourdough starter recipe is the jumping-off point to making your own whole-grain sourdough bread (see associated recipe) at home. You need just two ingredients to make this starter--flour and water--but it takes at least 5 days for the starter to develop. Then, once it's ready, it's easy to maintain. Just store it in the refrigerator and feed it according to the directions below. Each time you feed the starter you discard half of it--but don't throw it away! It's perfect for using in pancakes or waffles.

Learning how to make yogurt at home is simple with this easy homemade yogurt recipe. To make homemade yogurt, heat milk, combine with a little bit of already-cultured yogurt and let it sit in a warm spot until the milk turns into yogurt. If you want to keep making your own homemade yogurt, save some of the last batch to help start the next batch of yogurt.

If you are looking to start fermenting your own vegetables, the Korean dish kimchi is a great place to start. It's easy to make, and fermentation takes just a few days. Once you have kimchi on hand, serve this healthy dish along with any meal, as an ingredient in stir-fries, stews, savory pancakes and more, or as a condiment to liven up grain bowls, tacos, sandwiches--and the list goes on!

Kombucha is a lightly fizzy, fermented tea drink that's making waves for its probiotic benefits and tart flavor. Making kombucha at home is quite simple: make sweetened tea, add it to a jar with a scoby (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) and let it ferment for about a week. The scoby is a pancake-shaped living culture that eats most of the sugar in the tea, turning it into a tangy and delicious fermented beverage.

Want to learn how to make sauerkraut at home? For this easy homemade sauerkraut recipe, choose fresh, firm heads of cabbage and use canning, pickling or kosher salt (not iodized salt). To be sure your cabbage-to-salt ratio is right for fermentation, start with as close to 5 pounds of untrimmed cabbage as you can. To ensure success, pack the cabbage mixture into the container as tightly as possible (eliminating any air pockets) and be sure it stays submerged in the brine at all times.

Perk up your cheese plate or crudités platter with these crunchy, zesty pickled turnips or try them on a sandwich instead of cucumber pickles.

Using sweet brine instead of sour tempers the heat of hot peppers in these sweet pickled peppers.