Built because nothing trustworthy existed.

nowican.app started in a small kitchen with a pressure canner, a stack of printouts and a notebook full of crossed-out numbers. Every season the same problem came back: the information needed to preserve food safely was scattered everywhere — a processing time on one government PDF, an altitude adjustment three clicks deep on another page, a jar size buried in a comment thread, and a hundred blog recipes with no indication of whether anyone had ever tested them.

There was no single app that was both comprehensive and trustworthy. The apps that looked good treated preservation like any other recipe app — no method, no tested source, no shelf life, no altitude. The sources that were genuinely reliable, like the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning and the National Center for Home Food Preservation, were accurate but hard to search and impossible to keep track of once you were standing at the stove with wet hands.

So this got built instead: one place where every recipe carries the details that actually decide whether a jar is safe — method, equipment, difficulty, safety source, altitude adjustment, shelf life, storage method, jar size and batch size — across canning, drying, freeze drying, fermentation, smoking, freezing, vacuum sealing, cold storage, curing, salt, sugar and infusions.

What we care about

Honesty about safety. Every recipe shows where its process came from, and community-submitted recipes are labeled as such — never dressed up as tested. Where a practice isn't endorsed by the USDA or NCHFP, such as electric pressure canning, the app says so right on the recipe. Garlic and herb infusions carry their botulism warning and a use-by window.

Your own record. Preserving gets better when you write it down. The private journal logs the date, the batch size, how it actually turned out, the equipment you used and what you'd change — and active batches keep their own check-in timers so a ferment never gets forgotten in the back of a cupboard.

Personal use first. This is a tool for your kitchen, not a social network. Community features only get added when they make the food safer or the record better.