This site is a great resource not only for canners, but anyone storing food... which should be pretty much anyone. The tips for dry food are important if you don't want moths.
Side benefit of deposit jars for yogurt in Germany: basically free canning jars for jam, especially great for ones I'm giving away.
I do a stress test before getting underway by putting washed jars in the sink, then submerging them in boiling water. I leave them like that until the water is no longer scalding. In a decade of canning, I've only had one jar that cracked after filling, and less than one per batch that fails to seal (could safely be eaten, just needed to be refrigerated and used right away)
I have wasted an obscene amount of food trying to preserve it. This is the kind of skill that used to be learned at home when you were a kid but as I was growing up this was only passed onto daughters - us boys were taught different skills and my wife grew up in the city. Trying to learn this from books is terrible. Most of the time I call up my mom to teach me over a video call but some things are easier taught in person, especially ones that require manual manipulation of things.
I worry that enormous amount of nuance is lost when transmitting skills through written down form instead of in person.
Canning is easy - it's a straight forward recipe and instructions. You just have e to ensure the recipe is from a good source. Occasionally you'll have a few lids that don't seal. Or you'll try a recipe that results in soggy pickles.
Curing is pretty easy too. Using equilibrium cures and leaving it refrigerated removes a lot of concerns. Curing for room temperature storage is a little trickier but is mostly about having a good environment to store it in.
Dehydration is easy - basically just slice things and pop them in the dehydrator at the recommended time and temperature.
Fermentation is the one that I've wasted the most food with, which still isn't that much. I've made a few bad batches of beer and wine. I've also had a batch or two of sauerkraut turn out bad. These are usually due to bad quality ingredients, like cabbage that wasn't that fresh, or to waiting too long to bottle beer.
The big thing is to try stuff in small batches and learn. Ensure that you follow the directions from a reputable authority so you don't get sick. When in doubt, throw it out.
For fermentation, you don't want very small batches. Fermentation can be sensitive to small variations (concentrations of salt, sugars, etc.) Also, fermentation is spoiled by access to air. Both are helped by working with a larger container. If you have trouble with small batches, maybe try a larger batch for once and see how it goes.
Stuff that I ferment regularly: sourdough bread (for example, pizza dough -- for up to two weeks in the fridge), cabbage (sauerkraut), cucumbers, beets (I love good borscht, what can I say), jalapeno peppers (I love to add them to scrambled eggs and always have a batch in the fridge), and habaneros (I make mean habanero sauce and it is best when I use my own fermented habaneros for this).
I wouldn't do very small batches like 1 jar. But something like doing 1 gallon of wine vs 5 gallons, or doing a 1-2 gallon crock of kraut vs a 5-10 gallon crock.
If you see a lot of failure, it is not normal. Things do fail me, but very rarely, and usually I can track it to some concrete reasons.
Some reasons for fermentation failures:
- too small concentration of salt. You need to count water both in the liquid and in the thing you are fermenting. And yes, you need to weigh your salt and use calculator to figure out how much salt you need exactly. And a scale that allows you to weigh it precisely enough.
- not enough sugars. Fermentation needs to run to a point where the liquid is acidic enough to stop other things from invading your food. This usually means there needs to be enough sugars so that fermentation can run its course and stop after the solution is acidic enough and it ideally should coincide with all sugars being depleted. This is the perfect stopping point, if you have too little sugars it will stop before it is acidic enough and if it has too much sugars some bacteries might still be able to live on it. Out of two, it is better to have too much sugar than too little.
- wrong temperature. You want correct temperature so that your choice of yeast can invade the food faster than anything else. If it is too warm or too cold, some other living thing may be more efficient than yeast and your food will spoil.
- Oxygen. You want Oxygen out of your fermentation liquid. You want to use airlock . Use super salty water in the airlock to prevent contamination by liquid splashing back. I am also using using carbonated water to make sure right from the start there is little or no oxygen dissolved in the liquid, and as it bubbles out it also removes Oxygen above the liquid.
- once fermentation runs out, keep in a cool place. I keep it in the fridge. My jalapenos last for a year in a jar I open from time to time. I have not tried for longer because I just replace it with a newly fermented jar of jalapenos every time there is season.
- cleanliness. You want to keep stuff clean, as much as possible. Make sure you get your fermentation glass to 100C for some time (don't just flush with hot water, actually submerge in a pot of boiling water). Try not to use plastic that is scratched and can harbor bacteria (although I am using PET bottles frequently with good effect, but I am not reusing them afterwards). Wash your food well and maybe even wash with boiling water if it makes sense.
- slow start. If your food is in large chunks and not releasing sugars to the liquid, it might take for too long for the fermentation to start which gives time for it to spoil. Mash/crush some of the food so that some of the sugars can be released and start fermentation.
- too much liquid. It really is not enough sugars point, but for some foods that do not have much sugars in them in the first place, you may want to consider really pack them tightly.
It's certain strains of lactobacillus, not yeast. Yeasts are probably-to-certainly present in small amounts in fermentation but they aren't critical to its success or failure either way.
The containers should be clean, no biofilms or visible grime obviously, but wash-rinse-air dry is plenty. Clean enough to eat off of. The fermentation lactobacillus are tolerant to salt and will dramatically outcompete everything else in a salty environment. The careful sanitization is for brewing where the yeasts don't have this advantage, or canning where botulism complicates it. For fermentation alone it's not a concern.
The vegetables on the other hand you don't want to clean too meticulously. You want them clear of dirt, debris, bugs obviously. But the bacteria you're using to ferment are naturally present on the vegetables and it is the only effective source of them. You can see this with ginger, a lot of which is irradiated, virtually bacteria-free, and notoriously inconsistent to ferment alone for that reason.
I taught myself canning ten years ago and found it pretty straightforward. I used this website and the Ball book, and have done many batches of jams, pickles, and veggies.
I think I only fully wasted the first batch of 8 half-pint jams I made, which were basically fruit leather, otherwise things have turned out pretty well. I give jam as holiday gifts, and in years where I haven’t made any I get people asking for it, so I take that as a sign I’m doing something right!
Not everyone who cans is necessarily scientists or chefs or writers, etc. Nuance may be lost when folk chefs try to write down their process, especially if they don't fully understand the process or which exact steps are important. This isn't because nuance is lost when you write this stuff down, it's because they aren't trained writers or don't understand the process enough themselves to explain in well enough in words.
I think learning this stuff from books is easy. It's not about the subject, it's about both your learning style and starting from good material. Preserving by Ginette Mathiot is good material.
Both. Especially fermenting often resulted in barely edible pickles. Nowadays the only fermentation I do is alcohol. I leave the rest to my wife who's picked it up more successfully than me. I help with pasturising although there's not much to do now we bought a pasturising cooker.
Right - my wording was confusing. I meant that I've tried other people's homemade lactic acid fermented food and didn't enjoy it very much so I haven't been inspired to try it myself.
That's because it is. The complex carbohydrates in whole fruit (as opposed to juice or candy) slows down your digestion and you don't get a blood sugar spike.
One imagines GP is more referring to oligosaccharides and polysaccharides, in addition to dietary fiber. Not all fruits contain excess fructose, and many contain basically trace amounts in reasonable servings.
maybe not your pancreas but not all sugars are equal, and the most common "added" sugar in the us is HFCS which is processed by the body differently then natural glucose common to fruit
Also they have the added benefit of being an excellent augmentation to 3D printing! My wife got the $400 Excalibur food dryer, used it once, and now I use it to dry out my FDM printer filament before starting up a print job. Dual hobby purpose!
I'm just rereading Katz' The Art of Fermentation, and it's an amazing book and encyclopedia about how fermentation is and has been used throughout the world. I highly recommend it.
I've always scratched my head about their recipe below for reduced sodium dill pickles. The 6 cups of sugar has to be a misprint, right? That's a heck of a lot of sugar, and almost double the amount of their reduced sodium "sweet" pickle recipe. But it seems to be replicated everywhere.
I'm hesitant to assume it's a typo because the process that puts a recipe in the official list of food preservation techniques is pretty rigorous.
I haven't tried this recipe but I wonder if the sugar is used as the preservative instead of salt- it functions in a similar way, inhibiting bacterial growth after a certain point because osmosis competes for the water that bacteria need to grow.
But then why is does their reduced sodium "sweet" pickle recipe have about half that sugar as their "dill" recipe? Anyway, I've got a recipe that I use that has no salt or sugar in it, but I treat them as refrigerator pickles as I don't want to trust that they'd stay preserved correctly with only the vinegar.
What's truly crazy is that I see Facebook groups for home canning regularly suggesting people do unsafe things, like water bath canning of low-acid food, things that are well known to cause botulism. Please, please follow recipes from good sources, like these university centers. You can do a lot of things at home, with modest equipment, but there are a lot of seemingly safe things that are actually very unsafe.
I see people saying to can low-acid foods in water bath canners for a really long time. There's no amount of time at 100C that kills botulism in low-acid foods.
Tomatoes are high acid. It's things like carrots or green beans and such that hard require a pressure canner.
Also you should answer this question by consulting a canning guide and not by asking a forum for technology & entrepreneurship.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadSide benefit of deposit jars for yogurt in Germany: basically free canning jars for jam, especially great for ones I'm giving away.
I do a stress test before getting underway by putting washed jars in the sink, then submerging them in boiling water. I leave them like that until the water is no longer scalding. In a decade of canning, I've only had one jar that cracked after filling, and less than one per batch that fails to seal (could safely be eaten, just needed to be refrigerated and used right away)
I worry that enormous amount of nuance is lost when transmitting skills through written down form instead of in person.
Canning is easy - it's a straight forward recipe and instructions. You just have e to ensure the recipe is from a good source. Occasionally you'll have a few lids that don't seal. Or you'll try a recipe that results in soggy pickles.
Curing is pretty easy too. Using equilibrium cures and leaving it refrigerated removes a lot of concerns. Curing for room temperature storage is a little trickier but is mostly about having a good environment to store it in.
Dehydration is easy - basically just slice things and pop them in the dehydrator at the recommended time and temperature.
Fermentation is the one that I've wasted the most food with, which still isn't that much. I've made a few bad batches of beer and wine. I've also had a batch or two of sauerkraut turn out bad. These are usually due to bad quality ingredients, like cabbage that wasn't that fresh, or to waiting too long to bottle beer.
The big thing is to try stuff in small batches and learn. Ensure that you follow the directions from a reputable authority so you don't get sick. When in doubt, throw it out.
Stuff that I ferment regularly: sourdough bread (for example, pizza dough -- for up to two weeks in the fridge), cabbage (sauerkraut), cucumbers, beets (I love good borscht, what can I say), jalapeno peppers (I love to add them to scrambled eggs and always have a batch in the fridge), and habaneros (I make mean habanero sauce and it is best when I use my own fermented habaneros for this).
Some reasons for fermentation failures:
- too small concentration of salt. You need to count water both in the liquid and in the thing you are fermenting. And yes, you need to weigh your salt and use calculator to figure out how much salt you need exactly. And a scale that allows you to weigh it precisely enough.
- not enough sugars. Fermentation needs to run to a point where the liquid is acidic enough to stop other things from invading your food. This usually means there needs to be enough sugars so that fermentation can run its course and stop after the solution is acidic enough and it ideally should coincide with all sugars being depleted. This is the perfect stopping point, if you have too little sugars it will stop before it is acidic enough and if it has too much sugars some bacteries might still be able to live on it. Out of two, it is better to have too much sugar than too little.
- wrong temperature. You want correct temperature so that your choice of yeast can invade the food faster than anything else. If it is too warm or too cold, some other living thing may be more efficient than yeast and your food will spoil.
- Oxygen. You want Oxygen out of your fermentation liquid. You want to use airlock . Use super salty water in the airlock to prevent contamination by liquid splashing back. I am also using using carbonated water to make sure right from the start there is little or no oxygen dissolved in the liquid, and as it bubbles out it also removes Oxygen above the liquid.
- once fermentation runs out, keep in a cool place. I keep it in the fridge. My jalapenos last for a year in a jar I open from time to time. I have not tried for longer because I just replace it with a newly fermented jar of jalapenos every time there is season.
- cleanliness. You want to keep stuff clean, as much as possible. Make sure you get your fermentation glass to 100C for some time (don't just flush with hot water, actually submerge in a pot of boiling water). Try not to use plastic that is scratched and can harbor bacteria (although I am using PET bottles frequently with good effect, but I am not reusing them afterwards). Wash your food well and maybe even wash with boiling water if it makes sense.
- slow start. If your food is in large chunks and not releasing sugars to the liquid, it might take for too long for the fermentation to start which gives time for it to spoil. Mash/crush some of the food so that some of the sugars can be released and start fermentation.
- too much liquid. It really is not enough sugars point, but for some foods that do not have much sugars in them in the first place, you may want to consider really pack them tightly.
It's certain strains of lactobacillus, not yeast. Yeasts are probably-to-certainly present in small amounts in fermentation but they aren't critical to its success or failure either way.
The containers should be clean, no biofilms or visible grime obviously, but wash-rinse-air dry is plenty. Clean enough to eat off of. The fermentation lactobacillus are tolerant to salt and will dramatically outcompete everything else in a salty environment. The careful sanitization is for brewing where the yeasts don't have this advantage, or canning where botulism complicates it. For fermentation alone it's not a concern.
The vegetables on the other hand you don't want to clean too meticulously. You want them clear of dirt, debris, bugs obviously. But the bacteria you're using to ferment are naturally present on the vegetables and it is the only effective source of them. You can see this with ginger, a lot of which is irradiated, virtually bacteria-free, and notoriously inconsistent to ferment alone for that reason.
I think I only fully wasted the first batch of 8 half-pint jams I made, which were basically fruit leather, otherwise things have turned out pretty well. I give jam as holiday gifts, and in years where I haven’t made any I get people asking for it, so I take that as a sign I’m doing something right!
I think learning this stuff from books is easy. It's not about the subject, it's about both your learning style and starting from good material. Preserving by Ginette Mathiot is good material.
Fructose says hi.
Sugar: THE BITTER TRUTH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
It's a presentation by Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology.
https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_06/reduced_sodium_dill.html
I haven't tried this recipe but I wonder if the sugar is used as the preservative instead of salt- it functions in a similar way, inhibiting bacterial growth after a certain point because osmosis competes for the water that bacteria need to grow.
Are they canning raw products?
My parents can (well, they use weck jars) a lot of spaghetti sauce.
* Cook ground beef/pork.
* Add tomatoes.
* Simmer until desired consistency.
* Put in jars.
* Seal.
* Boil the hell out of it
Is this a risk?
Tomatoes are high acid. It's things like carrots or green beans and such that hard require a pressure canner.
Also you should answer this question by consulting a canning guide and not by asking a forum for technology & entrepreneurship.