Re-useable canning lids by Tattler – Part 1

Have you seen this product yet? The company that makes these re-useable canning lids was kind enough to send me a sample box.

They cost 3 or 4 times as much as the traditional throw-away canning lid flats, but the whole thing, including the rubber band, is indefinitely re-useable.  In fact, the owner of the company still has some of the original batch that was made in the mid 1970′s and is still re-using them (even the rubber rings!).

You use the same metal bands to close the lids when you are prepping the jars for the water bath or pressure cooker, but instead of a nice finger-tight seal you have to back them off a quarter-inch to allow them to vent when they are processing.

After the jars have been in the canner long enough, the lids are retightened when they are removed from the water.

As you can see, they form a very tight seal. Granted, I used half-pint jars for this Cinnamon Apple Cider jelly (they aren’t very heavy) for my first test, but I held this jar up by the edges of the white lid for about a minute while I fiddled with the camera settings with the other hand.  It’s a tight seal.

I just used a few of the Tattler lids on this batch because I want to try them with a variety of jar sizes and I also want to try them with pressure canning.  Hence the reason this post is titled “Part 1″.

The Tattler lids are BPA-free, which is not something you can say about all canning lids. Any of the metal canning lids with the white under-coating contain BPA. Yep. But not these.