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I have a massive quantity of peppers of various kinds: bells, shishito, "snacking peppers," jalapenos, habaneros, and weird hot crossbreeds that my farmers market guy hasn't named yet. Can I swap in these other non-hots into canning recipes calling for bell peppers, provided I'm using the same weight/volume measurements? This will be my first time doing proper canning and not just winging it (I'm gonna throw away the stuff I winged it with... Four jars of pasta sauce is not worth it) so I figure it's best to check.
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Sep 4, 2023 15:03
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thunderdome winner
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I have vacuum sealed bags of strawberries, blueberries, and rhubarb in my freezer waiting for the weather to cool down so I can make jams without turning the entire house into a sauna. Today my SIX MONTH OLD refrigerator decided that freezing is for suckers and everything is defrosted. Guess I'm making jam tonight.
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Sep 5, 2023 20:01
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Chernobyl Princess posted:I have a massive quantity of peppers of various kinds: bells, shishito, "snacking peppers," jalapenos, habaneros, and weird hot crossbreeds that my farmers market guy hasn't named yet. In salsa recipes, that’s a definite yes. https://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/usda/GUIDE03_HomeCan_rev0715.pdf If you have a huge amount of peppers, try this https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_salsa/choice_salsa.html My husband can’t have onions so I just make a straight tomato (or tomatillo) and pepper salsa with whatever peppers I’m getting from the garden. Made without onions it takes 9 cups of peppers. Besides using it for salsa, I use it to make chili. (Mr. Joburg also can’t have beans so his chili is just salsa, meat, and spices.)
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Sep 6, 2023 03:53
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So umm I got a batch of free apples in the northern uncivilized realm of Finlandia. Us barbarians don't know jack poo poo about canning and preserving food, so I kind of went quite deep in the rabbit hole eventually. The folklore apple jam recipe people use here goes something like this: - put empty jars to oven if you really want to - cook your apples, add some sugar. - add jam to jars, refigerate. "never died to it" Not a single jam recipe recommends boiling the cans in water bath after canning. I could barely even find any mentions about it after lots of googling. The only reason I stumbled upon the water bath boiling step was because ChatGPT said I must do it. Yeah... I don't know anyone who has ever boiled their jams after canning. Really I couldn't find a single person who has even heard about the concept. Anyways, I only found out about all this while making my first test batch, so I ended up boiling 2 jars for 10mins on rolling boil in my 5L pot. It was barely large enough, so I ventured forth and bought a 10L pot and more jars... In the larger pot the jars rattled, because there was enough room for them to do so. 5L pot was so tight they did not rattle. I found a steel wire pot pad and put it under the jars, and it helped. I learned I must pull the jars up straight, if they are sideways some pressure can uhh... leak... Anyways, I have now 7 jars of jam, which I have all boiled at least for 10mins on rolling boil water bath. I boiled the seals also for 5+mins, and kept the jars in oven at 125C for 30+mins.  After all this, I finally have time to read some guides from more civilized sections of the world, like this: https://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/publications_usda.html#gsc.tab=0 USDA recommends something called "mason jars". I think I've seen maybe one in a burger joint, they served soda and beers from them as a novelty. USDA also recommends boiling the empty jars in a water bath, adding jam, then boiling the filled jars in the same water bath afterwards... Then I found about these >antique wire clip top jars, which are not recommended, well they are in fact recommended against. What the gently caress, that's all they sell here  My recipe's ingredients were hopefully at least legit. 2 parts apple, 1 part jam sugar with pectin, some water to prevent the apples from burning. So I have made at least two mistakes already: - improper sterilization of jars before adding jam - improper jars used Should I just freeze the jars? And unfreeze them before consumption, maybe they last a week or two after being unfrozen? Or should I just ditch all the jam and try to find better jars? I have no idea where, at least no local shops seem to sell proper jars for canning. My original plan was to store them in our apartment's refigerator, it's constant 5C / 40 F all year round there.
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Sep 19, 2023 22:17
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The recipes I'm familiar with for hot water bath canning all involve adding acid. Too little acid, and botulin spores in the food (which are not destroyed by boiling) will still be able to reproduce, creating botulism toxins as they go. Acid keeps the spores from reproducing; a sufficiently high heat (from a pressure canner) will destroy them outright. But pressure canning requires specialized equipment and is a bit more annoying to do, so most people don't bother. Sorry for your supply chain issues, that sounds like a pain and a half. Fridge jam is just fine safety-wise, you just have to eat it before it goes bad. In the fridge, that can take quite awhile.
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Sep 19, 2023 22:28
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USDA divides products to be canned to two groups, low and high acidic. Low acidic you must boil in pressure cooker, high acidic like fruits and berries can be done in a regular boiling water bath. They gave several tables also about the products and boiling times. Mostly I'm wondering that why these kind of wire clip top jars is all people use in Europe? How bad they can really be? I just wanted to make some jam, no one said to me before ChatGPT that it is a quite involved process if you want to be safe from death.
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Sep 19, 2023 22:32
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Ihmemies posted:USDA divides products to be canned to two groups, low and high acidic. Low acidic you must boil in pressure cooker, high acidic like fruits and berries can be done in a regular boiling water bath. They gave several tables also about the products and boiling times. Not all fruits and berries are created equal. Lemons, for example, are considerably more acidic than most other fruits. The applesauce recipes I've worked from have always told me to add acid...indeed, I don't know that I've ever done a preserved jam recipe that did call for adding acid. The prohibition on wire clip top jars is, as I understand it, a conservative food safety thing. Single-use lids are reliable: they're made to a high standard and only need to work once. The rubber-gasket clip-top jars, on the other hand, are designed to be multi-use, which means that the user is responsible for determining if a given rubber gasket is too old to use safely. The USDA rightly assumes that its users are gibbering idiots, and is doing their best to produce rules that said idiots can't gently caress up too badly. As for safe from death: it's all about risk factors. People haven't been making jam this way for, what, more than 20-30 years? Older methods are still around, and it's not that they don't work, but they aren't as reliable. See above: the USDA is trying to make rules that will work as reliably and consistently as possible, because if someone gets poisoned by their homemade preserved food, that's bad.
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Sep 19, 2023 23:32
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Ihmemies posted:My recipe's ingredients were hopefully at least legit. 2 parts apple, 1 part jam sugar with pectin, some water to prevent the apples from burning. As far as the sterilizing, you are good. USDA says that pre sterilizing isn’t needed if the processing time is 10 minutes or more. I think those jars can be used for canning. They are similar to a Weck jar. After 24 hours you are supposed to undo the clip and check the seal. If the seal holds, store them un clipped so it will be obvious if the seal fails later. Like TooMuchAbstraction said, the acid level is a problem. You can re-process the jam with a Tablespoon of lemon juice added for each cup of jam. (I make jam using pomonas pectin and they have a make your own jam page that gives the tablespoon recommendation. https://pomonapectin.com/create-your-own-recipe/) I’ve had to reprocess stuff before and it is a hassle but it’s all part of learning. If you don’t want to bother then your freezer plan will work fine.
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Sep 19, 2023 23:52
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USDA also tends to error conservative which is generally good. But many European countries regulators and the EU in general don’t and there are a bunch of places the ideological differences pops up, eggs, beer, wines, cheeses… etc.
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Sep 20, 2023 00:01
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Everyone here uses “hillosokeri”, jam sugar. I understood that it is used because of pectin. I looked at the ingredients and they have more than that mixed in: Finnish beet sugar, gelling agent (pectin), acidity regulator (citric acid), preservative (potassium sorbate), fully hydrogenated sunflower oil (0.1%). So it has some acid and preservatives apparently. I also added 2tbsp whisky to first two jars, and 0,5 dl which is around 3,5tbsp of lemon juice to the 5 later jars, for “taste”. Maybe people here don’t boil the jams in water bath because the sugar has added preservatives?  I’ll check the seal by unclipping the jars, although US sources say that is not a reliable way to check the seal. The rubber seals were intended to be one use only, according to instructions which came with the jars. E: maybe it is the magic sugar then: C. botulinum-caused food poisonings are very rare in Finland. Over the past twenty years, three individuals have contracted botulism. The sources of infection have been vacuum-packed smoked fish and roe. The likely cause of the food poisonings has been excessively high storage temperatures for the food products. The most recent outbreak in 2011 was traced to preserved olives. In this outbreak, two individuals fell seriously ill, and one of them died. Ihmemies fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Sep 20, 2023 |
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Sep 20, 2023 05:27
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Clostridium botulinum can't grow at a pH below 4.6, and both the bacteria and the toxin (but not the spores) are killed/destroyed by boiling. So in theory, as long as the jam is sufficiently acidic, even without processing the jars in a canner, it should be safe specifically from botulism. That doesn't necessarily mean it's still safe and shelf-stable. There are other bacteria, molds, etc., that can still grow in sufficiently high-acid foods, just not botulism. The method you described earlier is pretty much "open kettle canning"; which isn't approved by the USDA, but (if properly done) may be considered "ok" in countries that take a less conservative approach. Kind of like Prop 65 and "this only gives you cancer if you're in California"  .
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Sep 20, 2023 15:39
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Well the jam I made should be acidic enough, and be processed so thoroughly that nothing lives there anymore. Only question is the seal. My jars are not USDA recommended, but hopefully they work. The seal felt “good enough” in my opinion. I just have to keep buying new seals I guess.
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Sep 20, 2023 16:13
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I figured out that Le Parfait sells mason jar style 2 piece lid jars. They are quite affordable from Amazon.fr. I will be using those in the future. Do you have any pro tips on how to store lingonberries? - I've stored them in freezer, but I'd like to explore some other alternatives. Freezer space is limited and I can't increase it very easily, while refigerator space is basically infinite. I could not find good-looking recipes. Finnish recipes recommend raw packing them into cans, mushing some berries so they release their juices and are covered in them. Then they're good to be stored, no processing required. Is that really safe? Any other alternatives? --- I am also getting more apples. I'll try to slice them, cook them in light syrup in 5 mins and boil the cans for 20 mins. I don't need more apple jam. Ihmemies fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Sep 20, 2023 |
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Sep 20, 2023 16:48
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A thing that startles me about my European cookbooks (one French, several British) is how they finish jams. Put a disk of waxed paper on top of the hot jam, wait for it to cool, put it down in the cellar. I grew up in the exciting era when you poured molten paraffin on the molten jam, so I know that standards change slowly.
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Sep 20, 2023 17:55
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Arsenic Lupin posted:A thing that startles me about my European cookbooks (one French, several British) is how they finish jams. Put a disk of waxed paper on top of the hot jam, wait for it to cool, put it down in the cellar. I grew up in the exciting era when you poured molten paraffin on the molten jam, so I know that standards change slowly. I got a Swedish/Finnish cookbook as a gift in 2004. Nearly all the canning recipes instruct to use paraffin wax to seal the cans…. Ihmemies fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Sep 20, 2023 |
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Sep 20, 2023 18:33
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Saw this post claiming that some companies have reduced the acidity of their vinegars from 5% to 4% (I guess as a form of shrinkflation? idk). This has obvious implications for canning. Be sure to check your labels!
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Sep 25, 2023 17:56
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? In Finland all we have is 10%. Why you have only so diluted vinegar? I figured these wire bail jars are perfectly functional. I can store them with the latch open, only vacuum keeping the lid shut. I can’t open it with my own hands. I have to pull the seal’s tab with significant force, and then it makes a huge SMACK sound when vacuum is finally is released. If that is not enough then I will gladly die.
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Sep 25, 2023 18:11
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Heads up y’all apparently some of the bulk vinegar being sold has been changed from 5% to 4% and extension services are sending out notices to look out for it. https://gardening.org/vinegar-warning-pay-attention-to-vinegar-labels-for-pickling-and-preserving/
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Sep 26, 2023 01:57
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Why USDA recipes always say to peel apples, if canning apple slices? Same source said lots of bacteria live on top of the fruit, and they are hard to remove. Is that the reason - remove skin, remove bacteria? For me the skin of an apple is like half of the actual product. Peeling them makes them really unappealing for me.
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Sep 26, 2023 20:39
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I think it's for bacterial reasons yeah. The wax from the store might be a concern too, unless you're picking your own. You could try to give them a quick dip in boiling water whole to sanitize them and melt off the wax if you really want the peels but I'm not a food scientist
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Sep 26, 2023 20:44
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Heads up y’all apparently some of the bulk vinegar being sold has been changed from 5% to 4% and extension services are sending out notices to look out for it. Thank you for the heads-up. Yipes.
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Sep 26, 2023 21:35
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PokeJoe posted:I think it's for bacterial reasons yeah. The wax from the store might be a concern too, unless you're picking your own. You could try to give them a quick dip in boiling water whole to sanitize them and melt off the wax if you really want the peels but I'm not a food scientist The apples are grown in trees, freshly picked. Not treated in any way. It is really a downer to realize I can’t can unpeeled apple slices. I guess I should discard all of mt my unpeeled apple jam too. It didn’t even come into my mind to peel them.
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Sep 26, 2023 21:51
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Ihmemies posted:The apples are grown in trees, freshly picked. Not treated in any way. It is really a downer to realize I can’t can unpeeled apple slices. I guess I should discard all of mt my unpeeled apple jam too.
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Sep 27, 2023 01:26
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Apple peels are a really good culture starter for ferments as well. You could pickle the apples too...
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Sep 27, 2023 02:04
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Hmm. What makes apples and crabapples different? Like why Ball's blue book, guide to preserving (37th edition) instructs just to wash crabapples, cook in whatever syrup strength you like for 5mins, process cans for 20mins..? Why regular apples must be washed, peeled, cored, sliced, and crabapples only washed? 
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Sep 27, 2023 09:56
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I think it’s a presentation preference. My experience with peaches is that the peels start to pull away from the fruit and it seems weird if you are just expecting canned peaches like you can get from the store. I don’t see any safety issue.
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Sep 27, 2023 10:45
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  I hope I live to see next spring. I don't recommend this recipe, but I hope it will be ok! I canned 8 jars of apples in sugar syrup. 5 parts water and 1 part sugar. I washed the apples, chopped them, and removed the cores. I first boiled the sugar syrup and then added the apples to it. Boiled for 5 minutes. At the same time, I boiled jars in another pot. Emptied the jars and added the contents, leaving just over 1 cm of space. Closed the lids and put them back in the pot to boil for another 20 minutes. Those Le Parfait lids are two piece, like Ball - the difference is that the outer cap is solid, instead of having a hole. It can be removed after 12 hours. The apples should be acidic enough, and with the sugar syrup and cold storage, it's a combination where botulism shouldn't grow. If I had a pressure cooker, I'd probably just cook everything in that, to definitely kill any botulinum spores. They are very expensive though since proper models like All American must be imported from USA. In the first batch, I misjudged the capacity of the jars, and some contents were left over. I put them in a container and into the fridge; they need to be eaten within a few days. Ihmemies fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Sep 27, 2023 |
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Sep 27, 2023 16:02
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There are definitely some situations where parts of the plant need to be left out because they can compromise the canning process. Or where exactly how you prepare the food matters. For example, it's OK to can...I think it was squash? in a pressure canner, but only if you cut it into chunks. If you puree it, you can't safely can it. It has something to do with the insulative properties of the plant and needing to guarantee that every part of it reaches the target temperature long enough to kill toxin-producing life. Whether something like that applies to apple skins, I couldn't tell you. Information about canning is depressingly short on the why, it almost entirely focuses on "follow these narrow steps to be safe". Which, I get it, people who think they understand what they're doing will want to take risky experiments. But that's still frustrating for someone like me that wants to build mental models of the mechanisms at play.
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Sep 27, 2023 16:52
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Thanks. Of course since some additional mistakes had to be made, I forgot to de-bubble the jars after packing. That doesnt' seem to be neccessary with jams, jellies and juices... and I forgot. So much stuff to do when you are doing it the first time. RIP
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Sep 27, 2023 19:50
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If nothing else, they ended up looking nice, and the lids hold. Seems I also filled the first four too much... I get why people just buy their drat food from the grocery store these days.
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Sep 28, 2023 14:05
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Until you get the hang of it, the little headspace tool you get with most Canning tools kits is pretty useful for filling. Made my annual batch of candied jalapenos today, 9lbs of mostly jalapenos, with a lb or so of cayenne peppers for color. Picked themj no ps up at the farmers market, and found one stand with all red jalapenos too. However.... our oven fume hood is dead. So that's an hour or so of various batches of peppers boiling in sugar syrup, then a hard boil of the syrup afterwards. My kitchen is Spicy! My face is Spicy! Use these for tacos, nachos, meats, sandwiches, cheese boards... one of the things I just never see in stores, which is weird, because so many people love sweet stuff, and spicy stuff.    
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Oct 1, 2023 22:49
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It's (late) tomato season in California. Frustrated by the miserable yield of my balcony tomatoes this year, I ordered a 20lb flat of dry farmed tomatoes.  ...2 BLTs later, I have 19lbs of tomatoes. I'm planning to peel + can half of them, so I can have a good tomato base for the rest of the year. Canning tomatoes is super simple, just tomatoes + citric acid + water bath canning, so it should be simple to find a recipe... yeah? Except the Internet is officially useless now, consisting of more SEO garbage with vague directives like "one thimble of citric acid at the bottom of every jar before processing". I realize there's no fixed ratio of tomato-to-citric-acid because tomatoes vary in pH, but does anyone have a preferred, go-to proportion for safe water bath canning whole tomatoes with minimal additions, and no added condiments? Something like just tomato + salt + citric acid... Jan fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 20:32
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About all I can think of would be to do the math to calculate how much acid you'd need to add to a given volume of water for its pH to be safe, and then add that much acid to your tomatoes.
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Oct 8, 2023 00:03
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I would bet that all tomatoes are plenty acidic enough on their own, and citric is just a safety measure. Hence "some" additional acid. I am curious how much difference there can be in tomatoes. Like what the official pH range is.
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Oct 8, 2023 00:27
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Jan posted:It's (late) tomato season in California. Frustrated by the miserable yield of my balcony tomatoes this year, I ordered a 20lb flat of dry farmed tomatoes. My bottle of citric acid says 1/4 tsp per pint so that's what I do.
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Oct 8, 2023 00:43
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Soul Dentist posted:I would bet that all tomatoes are plenty acidic enough on their own, and citric is just a safety measure. Hence "some" additional acid. I am curious how much difference there can be in tomatoes. Like what the official pH range is. Tomatoes are being bred to be less acidic for easier harvesting and taste reasons. They can go up to a pH of at least 4.8 or 5 now, so to be safe always add acid. https://www.clemson.edu/extension/food/canning/canning-tips/27tomato-products-acidify.html
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Oct 8, 2023 01:11
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Soul Dentist posted:I would bet that all tomatoes are plenty acidic enough on their own, and citric is just a safety measure. Hence "some" additional acid. I am curious how much difference there can be in tomatoes. Like what the official pH range is. I’d think it could range quite a lot based on water content.
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Oct 8, 2023 02:11
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effika posted:Tomatoes are being bred to be less acidic for easier harvesting and taste reasons. They can go up to a pH of at least 4.8 or 5 now, so to be safe always add acid. Gross! And good to know, thanks!
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Oct 8, 2023 02:20
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If you don't have the Ball book or similar, you can't go wrong with the National Center for Home Food Preservation website: https://nchfp.uga.edu/tips/summer/home_preserv_tomatoes.html You'll notice there's no recipe there (or in other commonly trusted books) for diced tomatoes, just crushed/whole/halved/sauce. Following the whole/halved tomato recipe with diced is technically not approved. However...there are approved salsa recipes out there with chunky "diced" tomatoes. They pretty much all say you can reduce the amount, or completely eliminate, any of the low acid ingredients to your taste. Some people have taken that to the extreme and canned a "salsa" with no onions, peppers, garlic, cilantro...just tomatoes and added acid. I don't have one of those recipes handy, but that's probably the most USDA approved loophole to canning diced tomatoes.
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Oct 8, 2023 13:54
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Ran out of ideas for what to do with all my peppers and just ended up refrigerator picking the stuff I couldn't figure out. They're all pretty spicy varieties though so idk how useful they'll be as pickles. I can always just blend the jar into a hot sauce I guess
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Oct 9, 2023 01:56
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