New Toy

Nice stuff.

Hiya Stubbs, it's a pressure cooker/canner. A pressure canner is the only safe way to preserve low acid food, such as veg, meat, poultry, seafood, etc. A FV stands for Fowlers Vacola, and is the age old Australian system for preserving via water bath e.g.: high acid foods such as fruits.

This particular 'canner' can also be used as a normal pressure cooker.

Hope this helps?

Cheers from the Veg.

Hi Mr Pete, it's actually an Esse brand, model 990.

Here's a better pic.

Va-va-voom ......is an old-fashioned exclamation denoting admiration of physical attractiveness.

Ohh... shiny! So jealous, I'd love to be able to afford an all american. I think Presto is more within my means *sob*

Something to dream about...
And I just look forward to getting a trusty FV set up in the near future. I grew up with one and would love to make use of one again...but then again, for versatility maybe we need to look at something like this?

Yeah Mr. Pete, they do both.

The fowler thingies just uses a water bath, [you could use a pot on your stove just as easily, I have plenty of times] temperature to denature/kill pathogens which is fine if it's high acid [think pickles] or high sugar [jams]. It's not good for meats or non-acid foods, there's lists you can find online and in books to see what you can and can't do. Tomatoes for instance have high acid and can be done this way just fine.

The pressure canner creates an autoclave/sterilizer which raises both temperature and pressure which kills just all of the pathogens [very nearly anyhow] and then the glassware [Bell jars and that sort of thing] seal themselves whilst under pressure and heat, that is within a sterile environment. With this method you can preserve just like they do with canned food and can put in pretty much anything in the cans so long as you go through the process and have the special sealable jars. The Fowler jars are no good for this process. You could of course put jams in this, though it might be quicker to do them on the stove or with the lid off. Perhaps do both

Despite what people say, the jars you get for pickles/tomato paste/pasta source and so on are fine to use for the water bath method. If anything with a silicon layer in the lid, they're superior than the old fowlers way with their rubber seals that disintergrate in time. I've never had one issue to date and if you get the lids on whilst still hot they 'seal' for you and give you a satisfying 'pop' when you undo them. Only good for acid / high sugar type preserving. I'm no expert, just a hack, so do your own experiments to confirm, they seem to work just fine for me.

I've been using Fowlers jars in the pressure canner for years. I still think they're one of the best jars you can buy. Some of my jars and stainless lids have been in regular use for decades, not many products last that long.
I also use ball masons but they are pretty damn thin and the lids will rust if storage conditions are even slightly less than perfect, I'm changing over to tattler lids as I can afford them. There are a lot of canners complaining that ball jars are not lasting longer than three or four uses in the pressure canner.
As far as seals on the folwers I buy the regular one use seals and use them until they fall apart, I get years out of them. The problem with fowlers is cost, you can still pick up secondhand jars but no where near as often as you could 20 years ago.

Edit: I should also add that I don't reuse supermarket food jars, I just don't have enough I doubt we'd buy more than 20 jars of food a year.

I have the occasional bottom failure too. I think it has a lot to do with handling, one of the reasons I like new jars. You never know how jars were handled by previous owners.All together I think I've had around a dozen broken jars in the past 30 years, not too bad .