Canning and food preserving

Thus began the next phase of my journey—canning.



This is the kind of canner my mom used to have. It's called a water-bath canner, or a boiling water canner. She used it mainly (only?) for jams and marmalades. The idea is simple—you fill it with water, over the tops of the jars, boil it for a while, and the heat kills bacterias and whatever other little nasties are lurking in there, including salmonella. The flat part of the jar lid has a rubber gasket around the edge, and you have the ring part on loosely enough so the air can get sucked out. It does that, don't ask me why or how. Then, with a vacuum inside each jar now, the lid is sucked down hard and won't let any air get back in. It acts like a big one-way valve. The advantage of canning over just vacuum sealing is that the heat kills off all the little nasties. It will also kill any insects that might be hiding in there, but it isn't actually hot enough to kill the eggs. However, if/when the larvae hatch they find themselves in an oxygen-free environment—a freakin' VACUUM in fact—and they croak over dead real quick. Pretty nice arrangement if you ask me. Almost perfect, but there's one problem remaining...

Botulism

A water bath canner is good enough for high-acid foods, mostly fruits. The acidic environment kills botulism. But when it comes to veggies and meats and other low-acid foods, you need a little extra kick. Well, you could just add acid to everything, but that would mean lemon juice or vinegar, and that doesn't go well with many foods. The other option is more heat (24o degrees). How do you get boiling water to go hotter than 212 degrees? Pressure.



Enter the humble pressure canner. This model is a Presto 23-quart. It's the one I got. A pressure canner is not the same thing as a pressure cooker, though it can be used as one, and it can also be used as a water bath canner. Very versatile. This model will hold 7 quart jars or something like 16 pint jars.

I forgot to mention above that canning will also kill off molds and fungi and other things that cause spoilage in food. So once food has been properly canned it becomes shelf stable, meaning it doesn't need to go in a refrigerator or freezer. You can keep it on a shelf almost indefinitely. Just keep it away from direct sunlight and heat. They say food will last a year and still retain all its flavor and nutrients. Beyond a year those factors begin to decrease, and you start to take your chances, but many homesteaders report they've opened food after five or more years and often it was still perfect.

Oh, I was going to say a few things about botulism. It thrives in a vacuum and a moist environment—those are its favored conditions. And those are exactly the conditions inside a canning jar. So it's necessary to kill the botulism. Bring it up to 240 degrees under pressure for a certain amount of time. The time required varies for different kinds of food, depending on its density and how big the chunks are. But there are cookbooks for canning with recipes in them, and if you get newer ones they tell you how long to process each recipe. I'll put some safety info below in a bit, but just roughly. This definitely isn't a one-stop info-dump for how to can food, just a quick intro. For the real information watch a bunch of Homesteader canning and food preserving videos on Youtube. That's where I learned much of what I now know.

Safety info

Several older methods of canning are no longer considered safe, including what's called oven canning or dry-heat canning, where rather than use a canner you put your jars in an oven to bring them up to temp. I think the problem is it doesn't get things hot enough to kill off botulism.

One big danger of learning about this on Youtube is that many people on there use these old methods and either don't know or don't care that they're not considered safe anymore. Our grandparents used them, and most of them lived through it. But many didn't. There have been many rounds of lab testing recently, within just the last few years, and there are new safety protocols based on the results. Link below.

Botulism is pretty rare, so rare that often hospitals and doctors have no idea what's wrong when somebody has it. But still, you don't want to be the one in ten thousand who gets it, and you also don't want anybody else to eat anything you accidentally put it into. So you want to get newer books of recipes. I've found the ones made by Ball are excellent. I have the New and Updated Ball Complete book of Home Preserving, 2020 edition, and the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving. Also looks like a 2020 edition. Another excellent source is this website:

• National Center for Home Food Preservation—Canning

They have resources to learn about all forms of home food preservation, just pick one and click it. The link above goes directly to their canning page, but there's an index to all the others.

I recommend downloading all the files and keep them in a folder for canning info. Maybe print a couple out.

And of all the Youtube homesteading channels I've been binging on, RoseRed Homestead is the one I've found to have the best info, especially concerning safety. The woman who does the videos used to be a teacher, and it shows.

Here's a good video on general canning safety:

Diversify

Ultimately you want to diversify your food preservation techniques. Some things, mainly meats and vegetables, need to be pressure canned; fruits and a few other high-acid foods can be water bath canned, and dry goods like rice, dried beans, flour, etc can be vacuum sealed in bags or jars. Then there's also dehydrating, pickling and fermentation, and freeze drying. I looked into getting a freeze drier unit, but those cost as much as a good used car. Better off to buy freeze-dried emergency foods instead unless you're made of money.

Here's a video with some good info about diversifying your pantry:



Using these various old-fashioned methods you can make all your food shelf stable, so if the power goes out it won't all go bad in the freezer or the fridge.

You can even do bulk storage of dry goods in 5 gallon buckets if you get some mylar bags and a hair straightener (aka flatiron) to seal them with.

There are also extra large mason jars like half-gallon and even gallon sizes. These are too big for canning—the food needs to get heated up right through to the core for the right duration, and jars this big don't allow that. But you can put things like pastas and other dry goods in them and vacuum seal using a brake bleeder the way she demonstrated in the video.



These kind of jars, with hinged glass lids and little locks and gaskets, aren't approved for canning (though they were used for it in the dangerous days), but are fine for vacuum sealing. Though you'd need to rig up a vacuum chamber, I doubt they'd fit in the adapters using a brake bleeder. Personally though I'd stick with actual mason jars with the two-piece metal lids.

But there's another method, very similar to vacuum sealing. You just put dry foodstuffs in an airtight container along with some oxygen absorbers. They're little packets that look like those moisture absorbers, but they literally suck the air out (oxygen anyway, that's the real culprit). It creates a bit of a vacuum and makes an oxygen-free environment where the little nasties can't live. This only works for dried foods though, moisture is bad and will require canning.

Let's see if I can find a video showing this really wild technique for sealing bulk dry goods in mylar bags using a flatiron...

Here we go, in nice crisp 240p resolution!



Weird—it looks like he also has a flatiron on the table, which makes it much easier to seal the bags than an iron, but he didn't show how to use it. Let me try to find a video showing that:



Special bonus impulse sealer footage included free of charge. I've seen people slide the flatiron slowly back and forth and get a much better, much flatter seal than she did here. Look up a few more videos if you're interested. She let it wrinkle up too much. Also I don't think she put oxygen absorbers in.

This guy gets a much better seal using a flat iron:



Of course it's a lot easier using smaller bags like he did. Here's the sliding method:



She seems to instinctively understand how to hold the end of the bag and slide the iron away smoothly, so you don't get wrinkles. If you do though, I believe you can just iron over the wrinkle until it seals. You can also create two seals next to each other. Double-seal just in case. You can do that with a vacuum sealer as well. If you get a wrinkle or just aren't sure of the first seal, make another one beside it.

Poverty-friendly method for dry goods storage

It doesn't always have to cost a lot of money.

My bad, I posted the wrong video the first time. Fixed.

Double-batchin' it


P1050013 by Darkmatters, on Flickr

One thing I'm finding is I want to start making up bigger batches of food for canning. When I did some spaghetti sauce the other day I only had enough for 3 quart jars. I was expecting twice as much. So now I got ingredients for a double batch I'll be cooking and canning tomorrow.

It's a lot of work and takes some time. Like 4 or 5 hours from start to finish, and then the jars need to sit on a cooling rack or towel overnight to cool all the way down. And it's gonna take about the same time no matter how much food you cook up. So if I'm gonna put in that kind of investment of time, I'd rather end up with 6 jars than 3. Luckily I have a big stock pot I can cook it up in. Lol now I know why the homesteaders always have such big kitchens and big pots and pans. I'll be upgrading some of my pots and pans for bigger ones, but unfortunately I can't trade in the tiny kitchen.

Another change I had to get used to—last time I went ahead and boiled the sauce down until it was as thick as I like it, and it was almost too dry to can. But the process seems to be self-correcting. Water from the canner ended up getting into the jars and became sauce. Freaked me out a little, but when I thought it through it does make sense. First the food expands from the heat and completely fills the jars (or even slightly overfills them, so you end up with sauce in the canner, floating in the water). Then when you take the jars out and they cool down the food contracts back to its normal size, which is what creates the vacuum. The rubber seal around the edge of the lids keeps air from getting back in. But somehow, at some point, it did suck water in.

Now I understand—there's always supposed to be liquid inside the jars, right up to the top (with a little bit of head space). Every jar you see always has the contents floating in liquid, unless it's dry goods. In fact, if the food protrudes a little up out of the liquid, that part's gonna change color and look a little weird (should be fine though). So for something like spaghetti sauce, you leave it really runny, then when you pop open the jar to eat it later you cook it down as much as you want.

"It would have been so nifty to pull out a jar with pasta in it or something, woah."

Of course that also requires having alternative ways of cooking, like a propane stove, and maybe a rocket stove for when you run out of propane. I'm fortunate enough to live at the edge of the woods, so I can step out my back door and quickly scrape up enough leaves and sticks to cook dinner with.



If you're not so fortunate, save junk mail and newspapers and flattened Amazon boxes.

It is done!!


Double Batch by Darkmatters, on Flickr

Got 6 quarts plus enough to fill my first pint jar. I'm calling that one R2. Left the sauce way more liquid this time. I now have 10 jars of spaghetti sauce and 11 jars of chicken. I'm gonna need to make some shelves pretty soon, or find somewhere to store these things. They're still boiling inside the jars, it looks wild! Like there's something in there trying to escape.

Thanks for the detailed info! I didn't realize you were a canner. Though you did have some suspiciously accurate knowledge on fermentation...

I'm considering getting a slightly bigger canner (the All American), which will hold 14 quart jars, and really step up production. I mean, it's a massive deal every time you can, it takes basically half a day, including cooking time and prep. Might as well get as much out of each session as possible, right? But my arm and shoulder got pretty worn out from stirring all that sauce last night!! A few more times and I guess I'll develop that chef's strength lol! Then I can upgrade. I think if I'm still doing this pretty regularly in a few months I'll go ahead and do it. Quadruple batches baby!! 8 pounds of hamburger at a time!! The mind boggles... (and the shoulder aches in anticipation). I'd need to use the Presto canner as my stock pot if I do that, my little stock pot was just about full last night. Or get another one and run two burners.

I either need to pull the lids off all those jars of spaghetti sauce and re-can them, or throw them away.

Turns out when you can anythying with tomato sauce in it, or tomatoes in any form, you need to add acid. I didn't realize that, I thought as long as you're pressure canning that was unnecessary. But I was wrong. I went through several stages of denial, anger and bargaining before I accepted the facts. What I need to do is dump them all back into the stock pot, bring it to a boil again, and put it back in the jars (after thoroughly washing them and getting them hot) along with a half teaspoon of citric acid powder in each jar.

I don't know if they'll be overcooked or not, but I suspect they will. Possibly not since I left so much liquid in them? I don't know.

At least this gives me the chance to add in the red wine vinegar and sliced black olives I neglected to put in before.

Last night I did another double-batch of spaghetti sauce, and got 6 quart jars this time. Put 1/2 teaspoon of citric acid in each jar to raise the acidity, which makes the botulism go away. Today I opened a jar and tasted it to see what the citric acid does. Ugh... if it tastes like that' I'm dumping it all. It's horrible!!

However, I did some more research, and it looks like you don't need to add any acid to spaghetti sauce unless you're water-bath canning. I'm pressure canning, and none of the recipes I've seen in several books and online mentioned adding any acid. So I think the older batches I did are actually fine—the pressure canning itself is good enough. I'll be doing more research though, I want to know for a fact.

Then tonight I canned up two quart jars of pork chop strips. This is what I was originally going to do, just can up meat and maybe some vegetables and fruits—raw ingredients, and then cook after busting the jars open. But I ran across the idea of doing spaghetti sauce and barebecue etc, and it grabbed my attention.

This was insane though—I bought a pack of either 8 or 10 pork chops, not sure now (guess I could count the bones). But after de-boning them and cutting off the fat and gristle I only had enough to fill 2 quart jars. Wow!! The bag of bones and meat scraps is about the same mass as the meat itself! I plan to look into making some bone broth out of that, as well as all the chicken scraps I have in the freezer now.