02281 Food Preservation

Pressure and Boiling Water Canning

Boiling water canning is for higher acid foods like fruits (including tomatoes, which botanically are a fruit) and anything incorporating vinegar such as pickles. Pressure canning is for low acid foods — anything with meat or vegetables. Vinegared pickles are an exception for vegetables, but there are no exceptions from pressure canning for meats.

Boiling water canning involves submerging the sealed jars into rapidly boiling water. It must be deep enough so that there are 2 inches of boiling water on top of the jars. One popular market item is the graniteware boiling water canner, which is a large kettle with a removable rack that holds the canning jars upright in the boiling water.

Every vegetable (except tomatoes and pickled vegetables), every meat, and every seafood must be canned in a pressure canner. It’s the only way to destroy the botulinum bacteria which can grow in jars of low-acid food. That’s because they must be heated to temperatures greater than 212 degrees (typically 240 degrees Fahrenheit or 116 degrees Centigrade). To do this you need a specially designed pressure canner. An ordinary pressure cooker is not quite as good for this purpose, if only because they are much smaller.

Ignore any claims along the lines that "My great-grandmother never used a pressure canner and she never killed anyone." Time distorts memories of what people actually did in the old days.

For boiling water and pressure canning, you need jars manufactured for the purpose of canning.

In the United States, canning jars come in ½ pint, 1 pint, 1-1/2 pint, 1 quart, and ½ gallon sizes. Most folks do not use ½ gallon canning jars because they have to be processed for such long times it tends to impact the texture of the food. Half gallon jars however are great for fermenting, about which more will be said in a moment. Don’t use repurposed mayonnaise and commercial pickle jars for home canning although they would be fine for fermenting.

You need the two piece screw band metal lid OR reusable canning lids.

See http://www.reusablecanninglids.com/ for info about the Tattler brand, which is the one commercially available. On one hand, they have no BPA. On the other hand, they are made of food safe plastic. On the gripping hand, they last a long time. On the fourth hand, they are small investments in plastic and there are much bigger problems in the plastics industry than the making of reusable canning lids.

The more traditional metal two-piece canning lid is readily available through commercial sources. They consist of a lid and a round ring that holds it in place. The ring can be reused endlessly. The lid, once used for canning, is a one-time resource expense.

Two more items of equipment are necessary:

Jar lifter, to put the jars into the boiling water and remove them.

Jar funnel, to make it easy to fill jars.

Besides Putting Food By, the Ball Blue Canning Book is a great source of reliable science-based information on boiling water and pressure canning. It includes many recipes. It is readily available at libraries and booksellers, new and used.

Sugaring

This is the process of preserving food with sugar. We know it best as making jam and jellies from fruit. Jam includes the fruit. It has a different texture from jelly made from fruit juices. Besides sugar, jams and jellies often require the addition of pectin so that they “jell” or a high pectin fruit like apples or quince.

A sub-category is fruit butter, like apple butter, where you cook a fruit for a long time to reduce its quantity to half or less the original amount.

Sugar syrup can be used to preserve fruits, often in conjunction with alcohol. Brandied peaches are a popular holiday presentation. The Putting Food By book has recipes for jams and jellies and illustrated instructions on making them.

Freezing

Freezing is a common way of preserving fruit, vegetables, and prepared foods. Many cooked items can be frozen for eating later. People use their freezers as convenience stores, since it is often just as easy to make several food items as it is one. The extras can be frozen for eating later.

One of the most important requirements for freezing food is to label the container. A frozen item covered with ice crystals is not easy to identify without a label. Most uncooked vegetables and fruits to be blanched before freezing. This involves plunging the cut up food item into boiling water for a short time, then into cold water to halt the cooking process. Putting Food By has a considerable amount of information on this subject.

Dehydrating

This is one of the oldest methods of food preservation. Many appliance stores have small home food dehydrators, with 4 to 6 trays, that work well. They are low power consumers, which is good since during the season you may be operating it 24 hours/day seven days a week.

It is a great way to make portable snack foods, like dehydrated apple chips, which are quite expensive when bought in stores. Plus in the store they come packaged in extra cellophane and plastic which is not very green.

You can find plans for various kinds of solar food dehydrators at http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Cooking/cooking.htm#Drying .

Mother Earth News has plans at: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/2006-08-01/Build-a-Solar-Food-Dehydrator.aspx

You could put a tray of food to be dehydrated on the dash of a car. Park it pointed south into the sun, and leave it there all day with the windows rolled up.

Fermenting

Fermenting is easy. It is so easy it wins the prize for convenience. You chop the vegetables and combine with whatever seasonings you want and pack them into jars. You add pure salt (not iodized) and some whey and top off with water. Put a couple of cabbage leafs on top and a small clean stone to keep everything under the brine. Screw the lid on tight, let sit for four days or so, and voila, fermented vegetables. Keep in a cool dark place (root cellar temps) or in your refrigerator. The best book to read is Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and the next best book is Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. http://www.wildfermentation.com/ Both are available at libraries and at booksellers everywhere.

Where would you get whey you ask? You would NOT get it from that powdered stuff sold to body builders. If you aren’t part of a food coop with local foods, you could just get some yogurt, preferably real yogurt without gross additives, put it in some cheese cloth. Set it up so its over a bowl. The whey will slowly drip out of the yogurt. You will end up with Greek yogurt (which is thicker than regular yogurt because some of the whey has been removed) and whey. The book Nourishing Traditions describes this process in much greater detail.

Pickling

Pickling is not quite the same as fermentation. You can use fermentation to make pickles, or you can make a pickling solution out of vinegar and make pickles. Besides whole pickles, you can make relishes (which involve shredding or cutting up the vegetables. Jars of pickles may or may not be processed in boiling water. If not, they must be refrigerated. Putting Food By and the Ball Blue Canning Book have lots of information on this kind of food preservation.

Curing and Smoking

Curing and Smoking are, for most people, more advanced home preservation arts. Curing of meats requires the ability to hold the products between 36 and 38 degrees. As with canning, curing and smoking meats lends itself to community endeavors. Putting Food By has a lengthy section on this subject.

Other Methods

This is where we put things like making your own ketchup, mustard, and other condiments. I think this is one of the more important areas of home food preservation, since commercial condiments contain ingredients that are impossible to pronounce, which is never a comfortable situation. As with any of the other food preservation arts, there is a short learning curve but it is easy to get up to speed. Home made condiments are often much less expensive than their store-bought versions.

Condiment Recipes

http://www.thekitchn.com/all-the-fixins-make-your-own-condiments-172567

http://www.saveur.com/gallery/Homemade-Condiments/

http://www.budget101.com/frugal/condiments-recipes-179/

A great book on the subject is Better Than Store-Bought, by Helen Witty. It covers much more than condiments.

The Importance of Home Food Preservation

Why should city people be interested in this? At first glance, home food preservation seems at once rural and antique. That’s yesterday’s thought. Here are seven good reasons for home food preservation in urban areas:

1. Quality of food. When you do home food preservation, you control the ingredients and the process. You know exactly what goes into the process. You don't have to guess or hope. You taste the quality with every bite.

2. You customize the process to your own tastes. Whatever tastes you prefer in condiments and pickles and etc., you can do it with home food preservation. You don’t have to accept the dumbed down tastes of commercial foods.

3. Supports local food systems. Most commercial food preservation is national-scale. It doesn’t support local food systems. Home food preservation supports local food systems when households produce food or buy from local farmers and preserve it for eating later.

4. Makes cities more resilient. Household food preservation shortens the supply chains that supports cities. It makes urban food systems more redundant.

5. Home food preservation is cost-effective. While it may not be less expensive than canned foods produced by national corporations and sold in national stores, it is a cost-effective method of preserving locally produced foods for eating later. Depending on the cost of the produce, home food preservation may be less expensive than commercial foods. The cost of canned goods continues to increase. Sometimes the increase is obvious — the price goes up. Other times the increase is indirect — the price remains the same, but the content decreases. The 16 ounce can has pretty much been replaced by 14.5 and 15 ounce cans. If you open a can of corn, half of the contents will be liquid. A home-canned pint is 16 ounces and it will be mostly food, not water.

6. Home food preservation can support community organizing efforts. Most home food preservation activities are more fun in a group, whether it be of your own family or household or your neighborhood. It provides a reason for people to come together and work on a common project that provides great value to the neighborhood.

7. Home food preservation cares for the earth and cares for people. It is a more sustainable activity than the national food processing system.

Our testing question is simple: How can we make home food preservation easier to access for urban folks?

You can readily see the advantage of doing food preservation in a group in a larger kitchen. Religious organizations, schools, and other institutions with larger kitchens can provide a great public service by investing in some large sizes of canning equipment and making their facilities and resources available for community use. A group of households in a particular geography could invest in one set of equipment. This portable canning infrastructure could either be passed around from kitchen to kitchen in season, or a larger kitchen at a religious organization or school could be borrowed during the big canning season and the group could work together to process a large amount of produce.

This kind of group activity works even better when partnered with one or more farms or food coops who would supply sufficient supplies of food to be processed.

Another structure that could support this kind of urban activity is the neighborhood service center. Such places could be equipped with larger kitchens and food preservation equipment for use by patrons.