About Lid & Larder

Who this is for

Someone who has just been handed more peaches than they can eat, or whose garden has produced all at once, and who wants to preserve it without poisoning anyone. Not a spec-comparison researcher. Not someone who has been canning for years and wants the marginal upgrade.

That focus decides everything about the site. The pages answer the question first and explain afterwards, because the reader is mid-task and anxious. There are no life stories before the useful part. And the safety pages come before the buy buttons, because for this reader the fear is the thing standing between them and a shelf of jars.

Who writes it

Scooter M.. I’m an enthusiast who’s genuinely into this — I read the manuals, compile the published specs, and do the math. No lab coat, and no twenty years behind a stove. What I can promise is that every processing time on this site traces back to the National Center for Home Food Preservation, and every price is the one that was live when you loaded the page.

That framing is deliberate and it is the honest one. The dominant credential in this niche is time served — “canning for more than twenty years”, “thousands of jars” — and I do not have it. Inventing it would be the easiest lie in the category to tell and one of the easiest to catch.

What we do instead

Nearly nobody in this niche cites the authority they are all silently depending on. Every safe canning recipe in the English-speaking world traces back to NCHFP and USDA process times, and almost no publisher links to them per claim. We do, which costs nothing and is verifiable by anyone.

Three things follow from that:

• Published specs, cited per product. Every capacity, diameter and rating comes from the manufacturer’s own page, linked on the product. Blanks stay blank.
• Original arithmetic. NCHFP’s four-inch element rule applied to each canner’s published base diameter, which is the decision a spec sheet cannot make for you and which nobody else in this field publishes. It lives at will it fit your stove.
• Live, dated prices. Not one competitor we surveyed shows a price at all. Ours carry the date they were verified and vanish rather than going stale.

What the site is

37 guides, roundups, comparisons and reference tables across six sections, laid out as a path rather than a filing cabinet: work out which method your food needs, buy the water bath gear, get the jars right, and move to pressure canning when the food requires it.

There is no forum, no newsletter you have to join to read anything, and no gate on any of it.

How it is funded

Lid & Larder participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. When you buy through a link here, we earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We accept no free products and no sponsored placements, and every roundup names something we would not buy — that is the check on the commission. Full detail in our affiliate disclosure and how we pick.

What we are not

We are not a testing lab, a food safety authority or a substitute for one. Nothing here is advice for your specific situation. Follow a tested recipe from the National Center for Home Food Preservation or your state extension service, and where our summary and their guidance differ, theirs is correct.

The publisher

Lid & Larder is published by Slate Mill Group. Reach us at info@lidandlarder.com, or through the contact page. Corrections are welcome and we would rather have them than not.