The Best Jar Lifter for Canning, Say Longtime Canners
Lifting a hot jar out of a boiling canner is the tense moment of every batch. Canners with fifteen years on one lifter name it, and say what wears out.
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Everything about canning is calm until the timer goes. Then there's a quart of tomatoes, or a half-pint of jam, sitting in water at a rolling boil, and it has to come out and onto the towel without tipping.
Plain kitchen tongs are the wrong tool for that. They hold a wet, round jar neck at two points, and the whole weight hangs off those two points while you carry it over the pot.
If you're canning at home and still fishing jars out with whatever's in the drawer, longtime canners have an answer, and it's a boring one. It's the spring-loaded lifter Ball sells. What makes it worth a piece of its own is that the people who've used it longest also know where it wears out.
Which jar lifter do canners keep for fifteen years?
The thread that put this on our list started as a warning. Someone in r/Canning posted that both grip ends on their Ball jar lifter had given out. The replies turned into something closer to a fan club for the same lifter.
The one they mean is Ball's spring-loaded lifter, which Clemson's extension service lists as the Ball Secure-Grip jar lifter. One reply had owned theirs for ten or fifteen years under heavy use and called it still as good as new. Another had put five years and a hundred-plus jars a year through theirs.
A third had canned hundreds and hundreds of jars with one and never had a problem.
I have one we bought maybe 15 years ago and we love it. The spring loaded action makes getting the jars out so much easier.
u/backtotheland76, in r/Canning
What does the spring do?
A basic jar lifter is a pair of tongs with bent jaws. You pry them open over the steam, lower them round the jar, and squeeze.
The Ball one has a spring at the hinge, so the jaws pop open by themselves. You lower it over the neck, close your hand, and lift. The grip ends are moulded to wrap the jar instead of pinching it, which is the part the tongs can't do.
The spring is the part owners single out. One of them had looked at other brands and found Ball was the only spring-loaded one. That's one family's shopping trip, not a survey. Clemson lists a shelf of lifter brands without saying which of them have a spring, so there may be others.
What wears out, and what to inspect
Now the warning that started the thread. The person who posted it had used their lifter maybe six times, never in boiling water for long. Then both grip ends gave out on the same day.
Their close-up was meant to show the problem: the silicone at the failed spots was too thin, under two millimetres by their own eye. They called it a design flaw.
Another canner said the same from a wider sample: every wire-bodied lifter they'd handled, around six, had the thin silicone fail.
Most of the thread disagreed, and with years of use behind them. One reply wanted to see a few more before calling it a design flaw rather than one defective pair. A few guessed at a dud or a bad batch, and a couple wondered aloud whether they're made cheaper now. Nobody in the thread can know that, and neither can we.
The thread never names a model or a listing, and the photo shows no branding. So we can't tell you which one failed. What we can tell you is how the owners stay ahead of it.
- At the end of a season. One owner who's put thirty or forty batches of tomatoes through theirs checks for cracks and dry rot before the next load. Silicone that's been in and out of boiling water all summer deserves a look before it goes back in the drawer.
- A backup in the drawer. Another owner with no complaints still keeps a second lifter within reach. Whatever you were using before this one is that backup.
One more thing the thread turned up: a couple of people find the Ball lifter short, with their hands closer to the water than they'd like.
For what it's worth, the longest-lived lifter in the thread wasn't a Ball at all. It was a fifty-year-old one made of metal and wood, with no silicone ends to fail. If you inherit one of those, hang on to it.
Get the Ball Secure-Grip jar lifter before the tomatoes come in. Look over the grip ends when it arrives, and again when the season's done. Keep the tongs in the drawer where you can reach them. The next time the timer goes, the jar comes out the way the fifteen-year owners describe it.