Glass. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
When I keep cheese in a pyrex container, it's easy to see how much is left, and it's easy to seal. (My family often has difficulty sealing supposedly-resealable plastic bags, and so cheese in plastic often gets hard edges in my household. Cheese in pyrex stays the way cheese oughta stay).
Food I keep in glass bowls or glass containers can go straight from the fridge into the microwave, or straight from the fridge onto the table, making snacking or meal prep that much easier.
Matching lids with containers is So Much Easier with glass than with assortments of plastic storage containers. This is true of pyrex-like containers; it's true for glass bowls that I just put a plate on top of in the fridge, and it's Sing-to-the-Heavens true for canning jars, which have exactly two sizes of lids despite the variety of shapes and sizes possible for these amazing jars. (You may have more sizes of phone and computer chargers in your house than sizes of canning jar lids. Crazy).
You can take glass containers to many different stores and ask people to fill them directly. You just "tare" (weigh) the container first, and then buy things in bulk. If you store the empty containers in your shopping bag, the contents of this bag become your shopping list. We've brought glass containers to grocery stores, butchers, farmer's markets, etc, and we've purchased olive oil, beans, rice, spices, sandwich meats, salmon, other fish, jelly beans, m&ms, liquid hand soap, and probably other stuff I've forgotten.
Canning jars don't leak. The wide-mouth pint sized are totally my favorites for storing leftovers that I'll take to school for lunch for that reason -- no spills. I can bring soup in one of these jars and not have to worry about spills even if the jar lies on its side in my bag.
If you keep the food below the "freezer line" (marked on the side of the jar) to allow for expansion, you can freeze food in jars. You can put jars (without the metal lids) in the microwave. You can put canning jars in the oven. They're incredibly versatile.
Food stored in canning jars is pretty. That's partly because you can see the food and all the colors of the food, and it's also partly because the jars lend a kind of uniformity to any array.
Canning jars often come with measuring marks on the side, so it's simple to make things like salad dressing without using extra measuring cups that you have to wash later. For that matter, most canning jars come in sizes that match English units of measurement (cup, pint, quart), so they can be used as measuring cups themselves -- especially if you're as slapdash about cooking as I am.
I guess I ought to mention . . . you can use canning jars to can food. Yeah, that. So if you snag a bunch of locally grown or cheap produce (for example, I was once given a crate of plums leftover from a big event), with a bit of upfront effort you can store that food on your shelves and eat it later. So canning jars allow you to take advantage of frugal finds and of healthy in-season produce.
Rodents and pests can't eat through glass.
The rings for canning jars make great cookie cutters (regular size) or burger patty shapers (widemouth size) or baby toys (any size).
The half-cup and one-cup sized canning jars make great wine glasses, if you happen to host a party with a bunch of people drinking wine and you don't happen to have wine glasses any more because you gave them all away because you have canning jars instead.
Making your own yogurt (which stores nicely in glass jars) or your own vinegar (likewise) is way cheaper than the store-bought versions.
Those are the things I can think of quickly . . . I'm sure there are more reasons I love these guys. I might come add some stuff in the comments. (Feel free to suggest things I left off this list!)
What a lovely list! Here are some additional ways I use glass containers:
ReplyDelete* to reconstitute and store frozen juice concentrate
* to make and store vanilla extract
* to bring food to parties (in the olden days)
* to hold pencils, scissors, and reading glasses in various locations
* to hold other office supplies (like thumb tacks)
* to store board gaming supplies like spare dice and markers
* My bulk purchases include nuts, chocolate chips, and wheat germ.
I also want to emphasize spices which are so much cheaper when bought in bulk, even if it looks scary ($20/pound, etc.). I save my old glass spice jars to re-use.
And I want to emphasize that glass is vermin-proof unlike cardboard and plastic, which they can eat through.
I would not have guessed glass could go from the refrigerator to the microwave without danger of breaking.
Also, how do you store your pyrex-like containers? (Right now I have a bunch of plastic containers that nest/stack and that have matching/stacking lids. So two stacks holds a lot of containers and matching lids.) Glass containers don't nest as well, so I can't store as many. But then, maybe I don't need as many as I think I do.
And now I have hints for getting labels off of nice wide-mouth glass containers (such as Trader Joe's spice jars and Laura Scudder's peanut butter jars) for re-use. I really like how, unlike canning jars, the lids are in one piece (though spice jars may also have a shaker lid). 1) Try slowly peeling the label off--occasionally this will work. If not, 2) soak in water. 3) Sometimes the label will just slide off; otherwise I recommend scraping it off with a metal spatula. 4) If there is still a little residue, try using alcohol to rub it off (this works on the adhesive of many price tags, too, even on books). 5) If none of that works, I just give up and throw it in the recycling.
On the wine glass use, I've enjoyed a philosophy that all clear glasses, though they may not match, coordinate. So canning jars would fit right in with all my other glasses. Some glass jelly jars are quite decorative and good for juice.
I only know one store where I can tare/weigh a container before filling it (my local food coop), but delis weigh things before packing them up, so that would work for containers we bring ourselves. Are your stores still allowing home-brought containers during this pandemic?
Nice list! In terms of pyrex storage, when we moved to this new place, I chose pyrex shelves that would allow me to stack the square & rectangular ones with lids on (container/lid/container/lid/container/lid), partly because we have a couple of different brands and shapes, so this makes retrieval easier. We nest the bowls. I also try to take advantage of kitchen storage (for immediate kitchen needs) and basement storage (for stuff that will go in the freezer and then slowly come back out over the course of the winter) --- although basement storage applies more to canning jars than pyrex for me, right now.
DeleteMy boyfriend stores his containers inside each other so that if you want the smallest one, you have to open all the lids of the bigger ones to get to it. It sounds like you have space to stack them separately. Is that true?
DeleteIt's actually kind of that I *made* space when we moved to this place. The kitchen is tiny and weird, but one of the weirdnesses is that it has multiple triangular shelves. One of those is very deep, and since nothing else goes here well, it's become the "non-canning-jar food storage" shelves. Awkward shelving, but it works okay for this kind of storage.
DeleteI've been in love with our Pyrex collection for months. It's new for us but I love love love the fact that one container with lid can serve the new meal, then go straight into the fridge and then come back out again for reheating for another meal without having to switch to another container! Except when I make a big vat of soup or curry but that's ok.
ReplyDeleteI've been saving all my glass jars from pickles and sauces to store my spices and some are diverted to being pen cups or hold small miscellaneous items. I don't have too many yet so it's still a fun score each time we empty another jar and I soak the label off. I so appreciate a label that soaks off easily!
Right, aren't these nice? You know you're crossing over to the other side when you start to have opinions about "good jars" and "bad jars" based on things that other people don't think about, like label removal or how much the neck flares in.
DeleteWe use a lot of canning jars for canning and non-heat-processed food storage. We like to give home-canned goods as gifts (marmalade or jam never seems to go wrong, I have a colleague who loves interesting pickles, a family member has a wonderful appreciation for apple-rhubarb chutney, ...) and I usually super-awkwardly ask for the jars back once the food has been consumed. I don't mind at all if people keep the jars in order to re-use them, but I really don't want them to end up in a recycle bin (or worse, the trash)! Do your canning jars come back to you when you use them to give food to other people?
ReplyDeleteI don't exactly keep track, but I have so many jars that I suspect the answer is "yes". I have lots of people giving me jars, including some people I never gave food to. There's a chance that I somehow get more jars than I "loan" out.
DeleteFor me, because I use Tattler lids (which are reusable), I kind of pay more attention when I give someone a jar with one of those lids. The metal lids sometimes can be reused, but not with enough certainty that I care much about people keeping those.