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effika posted:Lab Sharpies work better than regular sharpies, but the physical scraping by the dish detergent still wears it away with time. Wish I'd known about those when I was actually working in a lab, they would have been handy.
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Jan 21, 2021 03:34
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Now that I have a pressure canner, I need recommendations for foods to can. So far I've done beef stew and chili, and they've both come out fabulously. What should I try next? I have a good supply of pint and quart jars.
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Jan 21, 2021 03:50
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In season, I put up a ton of green beans and corn pressure canning. Sausage tomato sauce is also really nice, pretty much a heat and go dinner. I used my Covid check to pick up an All American 925 pressure canner. They sold out this last summer, and I wanted to get a jump start. This thing is beautiful, the manual is very well written, with nice charts and instructions for commonly processed vegetables and meats. If I don't drop it or let it run dry, it should outlive me. Also, weighs 25lbs!
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Jan 21, 2021 15:28
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Hexigrammus posted:I might start doing that too - we'd like reduce our plastic use as much as possible. It would be a good use for our extra wide mouth jars. We use the standards first because the lids are significantly cheaper. I imagine a freezer only lid identified with a felt pen could be re-used for a long time. You could go with plastic reusable lids for your mason jars. These for instance: https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/ball-leak-proof-storage-lids/PRD121PE09L995O Now, that's in Soviet Canuckistan, but if you are elsewhere, they shouldn't be hard to find.
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Jan 22, 2021 10:00
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New-crop strawberries were available at the farmer's market, so I bought some for jam. Except I accidentally bought twice as many as I usually do, and filled my pot to overflowing, so I wasn't able to cook them down as much as I would have liked. They'll still be fine though. It's hard to screw up "strawberries plus sugar/balsamic vinegar/lemon juice".
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Feb 28, 2021 01:37
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Does anyone make jam/jelly from freshly frozen fruit? What was your experience? I tried to make preserves and it went poorly but my jelly turned out fine. Wondering how it will go if I try to make jam from frozen strawberries.
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Feb 28, 2021 07:46
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It begins. Pickled fiddleheads, second year doing them. The first batch last year was a little 'weak' so I upped the acid and salt a little bit this time.
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May 4, 2021 16:09
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Oh, fiddleheads, you lucky duck.
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May 5, 2021 01:06
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angerbeet posted:Oh, fiddleheads, you lucky duck. I've still got enough in my fridge to make about that many pickles again...and that was just what I got in ~30 minutes of picking in one of the fiddlehead patches I know about and foraged from last year. That patch has plenty left, and I didn't even check on the other ones, though I probably have enough anyway. My girlfriend doesn't like them that much, so if I do what I did last year, I'll just keep one jar for me, and trade the others to some friends of ours involved in various other industries around town...last year we traded some for things like fancy beer, gourmet sandwiches, and cheeses.
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May 5, 2021 14:08
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Glad I found this thread. I've developed a major sweet tooth in the past couple years which has segued into jam making. I haven't made a lot, but have had some interesting results. I've just done small batches that got eaten right away, and haven't canned yet - but I just bought supplies and am really eager to get to it. My first jam attempt was a pear jam. I macerated pears overnight. After cooking it, I ended up with pear syrup, but it was delicious. I ate most of it with a spoon. It was nice to learn that 'failing' jam and jelly making isn't a thing - you can't really go wrong in a cosmic sense with a big load of fruit and sugar. Next attempt was grapefruit marmalade. Not sure what I did, but this came closer to candy than marmalade. It felt more like tar. It was extremely tangy though, and was very good. Last attempt was strawberry. I actually repurposed some of the grapefruit marmalade into the cook, and it ended up really giving the jam an extra kick of flavor. It didn't set at first, but I put it back in the pot with some more sugar and pectin, and it ended up being just perfect. ---- I have a wonder: I think I want to try the pear again. I have a better feeling now for when it's ready, and also have a thermometer. I'm not opposed to using pectin, but I think if I'm able to make the jam without it, I'd like to. From what I understand, most pectin is in places like rinds and cores. Do you think it would work to put the pear cores and lemon skins in a mesh bag and steep it in the cooking pear mixture, and then just take that out at the end? Would that be a good way to add some pectin or would there be flavor changes do you think? I'm not against experimenting and finding out, unless it's absolutely a pointless idea.
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May 7, 2021 03:36
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What are some differences between home pickles and commercial, jarred pickles? My wife particularly likes to do fridge pickles but I find every odd recipe to have too tough of a vinegar flavor. They are not sour, they just smell like gym socks. I thought that commercial pickles might be using lactic acid but a lot of them are just listing vinegar too. I was hoping to work this out because we have a garden that's going to be making GBS threads out pickling cucumbers daily soon. I'll, uh, at least get some practice!
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May 8, 2021 22:53
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I’ve tried some home canned pickles and I find all the recipes are too sweet. I’m still looking for a better recipe. I also made some fermented pickles and those are FANTASTIC! I really recommend them.
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May 9, 2021 04:09
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:What are some differences between home pickles and commercial, jarred pickles? My wife particularly likes to do fridge pickles but I find every odd recipe to have too tough of a vinegar flavor. They are not sour, they just smell like gym socks. I thought that commercial pickles might be using lactic acid but a lot of them are just listing vinegar too. I was hoping to work this out because we have a garden that's going to be making GBS threads out pickling cucumbers daily soon. I'll, uh, at least get some practice! PH testing. Home pickle recipes OD on the vinegar because most people don't have a PH meter, and people that do probably have a $15 uncalibrated meter from Amazon Not sure what's going on with your gym sock smells. That ain't normal.
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May 9, 2021 11:13
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Vinegar just gives me that vibe. It's not like the food is spoiling into that. The brine is like that before and after. I have a fancy pH meter from awhile back that I can use to check these brines in general. It did not really occur to me to verify that even though a high pH on the other side would potentially be even worse and I'm taking recipes off the Internet.
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May 9, 2021 19:15
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Having trouble finding an answer: If a recipe calls for a brand of powdered pectin, can I use an equal amount of another brand? It's not clear to me if they're interchangeable like that. Like, I got the Bell canning book with some recipes I want to try, but have boxes of Sure-Jell in my pantry. All my searching for an answer results in suggestions about substituting liquid for powdered.
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May 20, 2021 04:28
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As far as I'm aware, pectin has no preserving properties in itself. It's purely to help the jam set up. So you can use other brands, or leave it out entirely if you don't mind liquidy jam.
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May 20, 2021 04:52
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The brand of pectin isn’t all that important: regular pectin is more or less interchangeable across brands (the end result may have minor differences in texture, but it won’t ruin it). What does matter is that you aren’t subbing low-sugar pectin for regular and vice versa, as they aren’t always interchangeable.
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May 20, 2021 12:01
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Thank you both! I'll take any consistency I get, but definitely prefer a stiffer jam - so just trying to limit test batches I guess.
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May 20, 2021 23:51
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Picking this back up:MisterOblivious posted:PH testing. Home pickle recipes OD on the vinegar because most people don't have a PH meter, and people that do probably have a $15 uncalibrated meter from Amazon Do you have a notion of a good starting and finishing pH? I'm going to overanalyze this because of the lag time before the flavor really develops and the batches I'm working with. I'm probably pulling in enough cucumbers for a jar every two days, and the Ball Blue Book calls for 4-6 weeks to develop flavor. So it looks like I'll be using this season to figure out what works, but I won't be able to do it as I go. So I am going to be trying a variation each time, labeling it, and marking down what I did for that jar. My wife particularly likes Clausen pickles, but I believe they are fridge pickles since they are also stored in the refrigerated section. We're hoping to get a shelf-stable copycat, which is hard to find. My take is to use filtered water augmented with calcium chloride and consider adding some food-grade lactic acid versus going all in on vinegar. Having a handle on the result to pH would be useful but I don't know my targets.
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May 25, 2021 16:48
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pH test strips are better than the meters cause one can’t really screw then up. That’s what I check my ferments with if I’m worried about it.
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May 25, 2021 16:58
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Sure but what's my target for the brine pH?
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May 25, 2021 17:01
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I have to look it up in my book every time personally.
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May 25, 2021 17:17
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Fussing over the amount of vinegar and its pH turns out to be more of a second problem to what I found was something more fundamental. My wife would previously do quick pickles from nothing. That is, cut up whatever to be pickled, shove in jar, add brine, and boil up immediately. The Ball Blue Book method involves letting them ferment in the brine a few weeks similar to a crock pickle, and then you can it. I can see that producing some lactic acid and adding some more interesting flavors. We've never done that. I'm going to be starting something of a pipeline of pickles from the garden since we get a few a day. I won't be able to fully see the effect of the previous jar for awhile so I have to blindly change parameters to see how it effects things. I'm just going to write down how and when each was done and use that to compare and contrast for a final recipe next year. Something I do have to worry about right now is handling the different types of cucumbers I have. I am asking here if anybody has played with these varietals or similar: 1. Iznik: "mini cocktail" shape. Fairly small, thin skin, no warts. 2. Bushy: Pretty thick and spiky. 3. Market More: A pretty typical supermarket cucumber. 4. Lemon: Yellow ball, thin skin, slight spikes. I'm planning to try them isolated in various shapes. For example, I will try iznicks whole and also as spears. I might try Bushy in slices.
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May 26, 2021 17:37
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DrBouvenstein posted:It begins. Hey, did you do anything special for these pickled fiddleheads? Or just standard vinegar brine and processing? The fiddleheads at the grocery store looked good for once (not self foraged, alas!) so I picked out a bunch for pickling. I was thinking roughly: Clean them Cook in water for 10 minutes Drain Mix with vinegar brine and pickling spice Jar, process for 15 minutes
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May 27, 2021 04:41
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Jan posted:Hey, did you do anything special for these pickled fiddleheads? Or just standard vinegar brine and processing? Mostly the standard. I followed this recipe: https://extension.umaine.edu/publications/4198e/#canning The one called "Quick sour." I also added a couple other spices in addition to the mustard it listed (small amount of coriander, black pepper, and about 1 smashed garlic clove per jar.) I did the standard "half vinegar, half water" proportion last year but they didn't have much flavor. I'm hoping this one is better, since it's like double the vinegar (1/2 gallon to just 2 cups of water.) Haven't opened them yet, but I gave one away to a friend who couldn't wait to let them pickle any longer, and she said they were delicious. Edit: I've also seen mixed answers on if fiddleheads that are going to be pickled and processed need that first, initial 10 minute cook time, since they are essentially cooking in the jar when processed. But seeing the gross, brown, bitter-smelling water that results after I steam or boil them for ten minutes, I will continue to do so in the future because I don't want that nastiness in my pickles. But I understand it makes my fiddleheads mushy and not crisp. DrBouvenstein fucked around with this message at 19:39 on May 28, 2021 |
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May 28, 2021 19:37
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DrBouvenstein posted:Edit: I've also seen mixed answers on if fiddleheads that are going to be pickled and processed need that first, initial 10 minute cook time, since they are essentially cooking in the jar when processed. Yeah, parcooking fiddleheads from normal usage has led me to want a pre-cook for pickling as well, though I suppose maybe a 2 minute blanch might do most of the heavy lifting and leave the rest of the cook to the processing. I'll give that a go and trip report in a couple of weeks.
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May 29, 2021 19:53
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Has anyone here used an Instant Pot to do pressure canning? Any advice or instructions? I recently moved in with someone who has one and would like to try pressure canning for the first time. The Blue Book recommends specific pressures for specific foods, but as far as I can tell an Instant Pot doesn't measure exact pressures. So what can I do?
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May 30, 2021 17:49
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You can not use an Instant Pot for pressure canning, that's what you can do. Last I checked, they're not rated for it. Don't mess around with food safety, the risks aren't worth it.
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May 30, 2021 17:53
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They definitely do not get to a high enough pressure and explicitly tell you not to in the manual.
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May 30, 2021 18:43
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They only do 12 psi, which isn't enough.
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May 30, 2021 20:38
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Jan posted:Yeah, parcooking fiddleheads from normal usage has led me to want a pre-cook for pickling as well, though I suppose maybe a 2 minute blanch might do most of the heavy lifting and leave the rest of the cook to the processing. I'll give that a go and trip report in a couple of weeks. I ended up canning ~1lb of fiddleheads this weekend. I blanched for 3 minutes instead of 10, then processed for 15 minutes. I had to reprocess a second set of them for another 10 minutes when the seals wouldn't take--I should've done my research *before* getting things for canning and found out that the Great Canning Lid Shortage of 2020 is actually ongoing, and that small mouth lids are nonexistent in my area. So I committed the heinous sin of reusing lids, expecting none of them to hold, but only 1 out of 5 didn't and that went in the fridge. Anyhow, I'm not sure if it's just the fiddleheads still being full of particulate or if the kosher salt (Diamond) I used is not actually additive free, but the brine got super cloudy:  DrBouvenstein's pickled fiddleheads also look pretty cloudy even with a 10 minute boil, so I suppose it might just be a caveat of pickling fiddleheads.
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Jun 3, 2021 20:57
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I have some pickles that finished their 3-week treatment c/o the Ball Blue Book. Does anybody have an idea of a good canning time if I intend to use these in canning for spears as well as relish? The Blue Book seems to treat those as separate things, but I was on the impression I could start from whole pickles, slice them up, and then can them. Also, I wonder if anybody's played with calcium chloride. My second batch got a 24-hour soak before brining, but these didn't and they're already a bit soft. I am wondering if I can pickle with a little bit. If so, how much should I add? I'll also accept comedy options for pickling cucumbers because we're getting 1-2 one-gallon bags worth from our garden every day now.
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Jun 17, 2021 08:02
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How many cucumbers did you plant? I need to know for next year.
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Jun 17, 2021 14:01
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~65 trellised and ~85 on the ground. We were originally going to do a lot of tomatoes, but we lost our starts in the Texas freeze. They apparently don't like propane so they were withering up despite having heat the whole time. The output from that is pretty low. My wife is gunning to be able to do a farm stand and we hit that mediocre zone of "too much for us; too little for others." However, we are giving ourselves a hall pass since: 1. This was the first year cultivating that land. So it's still going through the process of dirt turning into soil. I had to go through every 6-12 inches with a broad fork and heave the dirt over to remove all the huge-rear end rocks, and this was after we had dug up the whole area and mixed in mulch with an excavator. Unsurprisingly, nitrogen has been an issue. 2. We are pruning because we didn't have enough trellising to handle the sprawling suckers. 3. Planting this many was a reaction to the freeze and we had to kind of improvise. My wife just happened to start far too many cucumbers than she needed and we used that to shore up what we were lacking in tomatoes. What starts we did have for the freeze survived mostly intact. Still, our timings for going nuts on cucumbers were pretty off and the ones on the ground are just using up the leftover starts in pots that my wife couldn't sell. The ground output is really low. 4. We're doing this in Central Texas with very alkaline dirt to begin with and the same latitude as Cairo, Egypt. So we're still figuring out what seems to work well, and it's not stuff normally in the retail garden centers. Our Iznick cucumber output has turned out disappointingly poor. Our lemon cucumber output, on the other hand, is ridiculous. They're funny to put in the jars because they look like giant eggs.
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Jun 17, 2021 16:35
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Last year I took advantage of a modified drive through Farmers market, a stone dead social life, and got a bunch of canning done. Now, things are opening up, and stuff is happening, and... I miss all that free time. I have a new, fancy pressure canner. Now I need to actually USE it.
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Jun 18, 2021 18:56
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Roast more chickens and can chicken broth.
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Jun 19, 2021 07:52
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My house is a little warm to ferment sauerkraut right now, but I had lots of extra cabbage from making coleslaw: There is a glass weight in there, but it's hard to see. I stuck it in a quiet closet. I will put a fresh ice pack nearby once a day to try to keep the temp down a few degrees. Our AC is set to 75F right now, so it just needs a little help. Thinking of picking up a cheap foam cooler. If it turns out it is too warm, I'm only out time!
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Jul 3, 2021 21:38
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effika posted:My house is a little warm to ferment sauerkraut right now, but I had lots of extra cabbage from making coleslaw: This is going pretty well, actually! The closet stays around 70F with a twice daily change of cold packs. Fermentation has gone well, to the point that mold tried to grow down from the airlock this last week, and was stopped by the brine. Cleaned it up and put it back in its closet this evening. I'll sample it after 21 total days of fermentation, since that seems to be the minimum in literature for e. coli control. It smells like sauerkraut and looks pretty! Except for that mold stalactite, of course.    Scooped away the cabbage bit that had floated off as I moved the jar and the dot of mold that fell from the stalactite, and the rest seemed pretty good.
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Jul 17, 2021 03:58
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Hello canning goons! If I can ask, does anyone have a good recipe for raspberry jam?
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Jul 21, 2021 03:01
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I'm currently going crazy with pickling. Can I fridge pickle white onions, and will they be good?
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Jul 23, 2021 19:46
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