Best Pressure Canner in Canada: Presto vs All American

If you’ve decided you want to pressure can — green beans, soups, plain meat, broth, vegetables — you need a pressure canner. Two are worth buying in Canada. This is the honest comparison.

Quick answer: Most Canadian home canners should buy a Presto 23-quart (about $180 CAD). Serious canners, homesteaders, and people who plan to do this for 40+ years should buy an All American 921 (about $600 CAD). Everything else on the market is either an old-stock discontinued model or a pressure cooker pretending to be a canner.

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First: do you actually need one?

Pressure canning is required for low-acid foods only. These are:

• Vegetables (green and yellow beans, corn, peas, carrots, beets)
• Meats (beef, chicken, pork, fish, game)
• Broth and stock
• Dried beans
• Vegetable soups (without thickeners or dairy)
• Bernardin-tested pressure-canned recipes (pasta sauce with meat, etc.)

If you’re sticking to jams, jellies, pickles, salsa, fruit in syrup, and acidified tomatoes, you do not need a pressure canner. A $40 tall stockpot with a rack is your water-bath canner. See our water-bath canning pillar.

A common mistake is buying a pressure canner because you saw a Pinterest recipe for canned spaghetti sauce. Most of those recipes are unsafe for water-bath canning regardless of equipment — see the pH rule article. The fix is to follow a Bernardin-tested recipe, not to buy more equipment.

If you do need one, read on.

Presto 23-Quart — the value pick

About $180 CAD on Amazon.ca and Canadian Tire. Pays itself off in one season of bulk-bean canning.

The Presto 23-quart is the most-recommended pressure canner in Canadian home-preserving circles for good reason. It holds 7 × 1 L jars or 16 × 500 mL jars in one batch — a full case of either with two batches in an afternoon.

What’s good:

• Capacity: 7 × 1 L jars per batch matches the standard Bernardin recipe yield for most low-acid recipes
• Both gauge types: dial gauge for precision; weighted regulator for set-and-forget operation
• Repairable: gaskets, rubber overpressure plug, and dial gauge all available as replacement parts (~$15-30 each); a 15-year-old Presto can be brought back to new condition for under $50
• Widely available in Canada: Canadian Tire, Amazon.ca, Lee Valley sometimes
• Lightweight enough to move around the stove and store in a cabinet (about 7 kg empty)
• Works on glass-top stoves (most models — check before buying; some older Presto units don’t)

Trade-offs:

• Dial gauge must be tested annually. Take it to your provincial extension service or a small-appliance repair shop. Free or low-cost; usually offered seasonally in spring/summer in farming regions. An out-of-calibration dial gauge is the #1 cause of pressure-canning safety failures.
• Gasket replacement every 3–5 years. Gaskets dry out, crack, and lose seal; doing two seasons on a marginal gasket risks failed seals on whole batches.
• Lighter construction than the All American — feels less industrial, more “kitchen appliance”

Best for: households doing 1–4 pressure-canning sessions per year. Anyone canning their first 5+ years.

All American 921 — the lifetime pick

About $550-700 CAD on Amazon.ca. Built in Wisconsin since 1933.

The All American is what Canadian homesteaders, off-grid families, and serious preservers buy. It’s the canner you inherit from your grandmother and pass down to your daughter. The current All American 921 holds 7 × 1 L jars — same capacity as the Presto 23-quart — but is built like a different category of object.

What’s good:

• Metal-to-metal seal instead of a rubber gasket. No gasket to dry out, replace, or warp. Six wing-bolts clamp the lid down with a precision-machined metal-on-metal seal that doesn’t degrade.
• Weighted gauge only — no dial to calibrate. The weight is a fixed mechanical reference; if it jiggles, the pressure is right. Set-and-forget.
• Cast aluminum body — heavy and rigid. Doesn’t warp, dent, or distort even after decades.
• Lifetime warranty. All American honours warranty claims on units 40+ years old.
• Made in Wisconsin continuously since 1933. Spare parts (overpressure plugs, weights) interchangeable across nearly every era of production.
• No annual testing needed — eliminates a recurring chore for the canner’s lifetime.

Trade-offs:

• 3× the price of the Presto. $400-500 more upfront.
• Heavy — about 13 kg empty, harder to move and store. You probably want a permanent storage spot.
• Wing-bolts take time to tighten and untighten. Slower than the Presto’s twist-lock lid.
• Overkill for casual use. If you’re doing one canning session per year, the Presto serves you fine and the All American sits in storage 364 days a year.
• Larger sizes (910, 925, 941, 930, 941) get even more expensive — $700-1,200 CAD. The 921 is the residential sweet spot.

Best for: households doing 6+ pressure-canning sessions per year. Homesteads, hunters putting up venison, anyone planning to can for the next 40 years.

Side-by-side

	Presto 23-Quart	All American 921
Price (CAD, May 2026)	~$180	~$600
Capacity (1 L jars)	7	7
Capacity (500 mL jars)	16	16
Weight empty	~7 kg	~13 kg
Seal type	Rubber gasket	Metal-to-metal
Gauge type	Dial + weighted regulator	Weighted only
Annual calibration needed	Yes (dial gauge)	No
Gasket replacement	Every 3–5 years (~$15)	Never (none)
Made in	USA	USA (Wisconsin since 1933)
Warranty	12-year limited	Lifetime
Glass-top stove safe	Yes (check model)	Yes
Available in Canada	Canadian Tire, Amazon.ca, Lee Valley	Amazon.ca
Expected lifespan	15–25 years	40–60+ years
Cost per year (lifespan)	~$9/year	~$12/year

The cost-per-year math is closer than the upfront price suggests. Over a 40-year canning life, the Presto comes in at ~$360 (including replacement gaskets and ~3 dial gauge replacements) and the All American at ~$600. Difference: $240, or $6/year.

Which to buy: the decision

Get the Presto if any of these are true:

• You’re spending under $250 on your canner
• You’re new to pressure canning and don’t know yet how much you’ll use it
• You have storage constraints (small apartment kitchen)
• You’re a “rotate equipment every decade” person, not a “buy it for life” person
• You’re going to be the only canner in the family

Get the All American if any of these are true:

• Budget is not the limiting factor
• You’re committing to home preserving as a long-term practice
• You hunt or raise meat that needs to be canned
• You’re off-grid or food-self-sufficiency-minded
• You want to pass equipment to your kids
• You can’t or don’t want to deal with annual dial-gauge testing

Get neither (yet) if:

• You haven’t made a single jar of water-bath canned anything. Start with strawberry jam or crushed tomatoes in a stockpot first. If you don’t enjoy the process, you won’t enjoy it more with a $200+ purchase.

What about pressure cookers / Instant Pots?

Bernardin and Health Canada do not recommend pressure cookers or Instant Pots for canning low-acid foods. This includes models that advertise a “canning” or “preserve” function.

The reason: pressure cookers don’t hold pressure as precisely as pressure canners, don’t reach the temperatures the tested Bernardin recipes specify, and haven’t been laboratory-tested for the specific pressure-canning safety threshold. The Instant Pot canning function in particular has been controversial — even the manufacturer’s own documentation walks back the safety claim under pressure from food-safety authorities.

If you want to pressure can, buy a pressure canner. They are different machines.

What about other brands?

• Mirro — used to be a third recommended brand; quality has slipped since the 2010s. Modern Mirros are not what they were 20 years ago. Pass.
• T-Fal, Magefesa, Kuhn Rikon — these are pressure cookers, not pressure canners. Even the larger sizes aren’t endorsed by Bernardin for canning.
• Off-brand “16-quart pressure canners” on Amazon — variable quality, frequently not tall enough to fit 1 L jars upright, weighted gauges sometimes inaccurate. Avoid.

If you see a canner brand not on this list, search “[brand name] Bernardin endorsement” — if Bernardin and Health Canada haven’t tested it, treat the equipment as untested.

What you still need (regardless of canner)

• Bernardin jars (the canner doesn’t come with jars)
• Fresh SNAP lids for every batch (single-use rule)
• Jar lifter, headspace tool, funnel (the standard canning kit; Bernardin sells a bundle for ~$25)
• A clear copy of Bernardin’s pressure canning chapter for processing times and PSI per altitude band

See our pressure canning pillar for the full method.

When to buy

The best time to buy a pressure canner is late spring (April–May), before the canning season starts and after Boxing Day clearance has reset stock. Prices typically dip 10–15% in:

• Boxing Day sales (late December)
• Canadian Tire end-of-summer clearance (late August)
• Lee Valley anniversary sale (varies, usually summer)

Avoid August–September buying — prices firm up as demand peaks.

Next steps

• Pressure canning pillar — the full method context
• Can I water-bath spaghetti sauce? — the pH rule explaining why pressure canning matters
• SNAP lids reuse rules — buy fresh lids for every pressure batch
• Altitude adjustments — the PSI tables differ by altitude band
• How to tell if canned food has gone bad — botulism awareness, especially for low-acid pressure-canned products