Bocaux

Bocal means jar in French, and the most common kind of canning jar used here for putting up jams or jellies, tomatoes or tomato sauce, and all kinds of vegetables — even meat pâtés — is the bocal à joint. The plural of bocal [boh-KAHL] is bocaux [boh-KOH].

Old jars, metal bands and rubber rings removed,
just washed in the dishwasher

The joint [rhymes with foin, soin, moins] in bocal à joint is the rubber ring or gasket that fits onto the lid and makes it possible to seal the jar hermetically by filling it with boiling ingredients and closing it immediately. It becomes vacuum-sealed as it cools. For some ingredients, it's also recommended to boil the jars in water in a canning pot or pressure cooker to make sure everything is sterile.

Couscous "grain" stored in the kitchen in a bocal à joint

Being an optimist, I'm convinced we are going to have a lot of produce from our garden to put up in jars for the winter. Actually, for sauce tomate and confiture (jam) I mostly reuse jelly, pickle, and mustard jars that I've saved after buying such items at the supermarket. They work fine as long as the screw-on lid is in good condition. Most people here reuse old store-bought jars in canning, especially for jams and jellies.

Glass jars with glass lids

The bocaux à joint are safer, and I use them for putting up fruits and vegetables, but we also use them to store all kinds of things — ground coffee, tea bags, rice, dried beans, dried mushrooms, flours, couscous, wheat berries, dried hot peppers — in the kitchen. The rubber ring and the metal band and closure make sure that the jar is tightly closed, whether it has needed sterilizing or not for a particular use.

Jars don't need to be hermetically sealed for dry storage.

To use the jars for actual canning — not just dry storage — you need to replace the rubber ring with a new one each time. The rings are easy to find at the supermarket this time of year. (Joint is also the word for washer — the kind you put in your faucets or garden hose fittings to keep them from dripping.) There's a special tool that makes opening the sealed jars easy — it clamps onto the tab on the rubber ring and you twist it until the ring stretches far enough to break the seal. You can't reuse the stretched-out ring for canning.

This neat tool makes it easy to open the sealed jars.

I'm getting my jars ready for the autumn. I hope I'll be able to fill them all up with good produce that we'll enjoy all winter. The ten one-liter jars in the photos above were a windfall — long story.