The storm that rolled though here last night was just nasty taking out power for close to 18 hours, leaving us in amazing hot and humid with no real ways to cool yourself other then being in the basement and cool cloths. We don’t have AC but I suddenly have a great deal more respect for the fans that we use.
Yesterday I picked up 28 pds of apricots and made Apricot Jam, Apricot Syrup, and Apricot Fruit, Now I was raised to put them into a mild Sugar Syrup, and to leave a certain head space on the jars, I was making Pints as that is the perfect amount of fruit for our little family in regards to a serving.
My jam and syrups turned out lovely and o the flavor! Moved on to the fruits and made the first batch without really even looking at the canning book, just doing it by memory, and then foolish me, I had a little time and decided to read my favorite canning book, it said I could in fact can them in water or ultra light and that I was in fact leaving to much head space, hmmm ok, so on the second batch, I followed their directions and measured out the new head space and into the canner they went..
I knew when they came out and were sitting there that something was wrong just looking at them, and sure enough they had lost some of the syrup in the cooking process and while the jars “were sealed” that it was a incorrect seal, and that left they would go bad and the fruit would not keep its quality but honestly, I was very unhappy to loose 12 pints of apricots, they are not cheap.. now what to do, the book says put in fridge and eat within X amount of time..hmmm
So after I got power back and had a cool shower, I needed to fix this issue before I could have a rest, I openned the jars, blended the jars together, measured the amount, figured out how much sugar was already in them, and then added the right amount of sugar and lemon juice and made it up into silky Apricot butter, cooked it and canned it back up.
The whole process is done now, and the end product sits cooling on its towel with all the lids sealed already. But was what I did a good thing or not? There is a line I walk when it comes to preserving my own food, I have info in my head of “how to do it” that often lacks the reason’s on WHY we do it that way, other then being told by grandma or mom, that is how its done. Sometimes this information fits in beautifully with what I read in my current canning books but sometimes it does not.
How to find the balance between this has worked in our own family without anyone getting ill from it for the past 60 plus years vs the new and informed work that swears up and down some of those very things are in fact iffy…
So I finally decided to do a little research on the “iffy” and what I have found out is that they make a recipe, test the results a number of times and then decide yes or no based on what fall’s into safe depending on if it meets their written rules.. This helps explain why there are so many older canning books that “meet the current guidelines” of the times just like our new books do 🙂
Do you see the catch? Meets the Current Guidelines which has been written to provide the biggest amount of safety for the general public, and those guidelines seem very flexable with time, what was safe, or healthy seems to be able to swing from one end to the other.. I will stick with a canning example, in N.A. they say that heating your clean jars in the oven is a unsafe thing to do, but in England, they do it all the time and its not considered unsafe..
Now I am not saying that to get into a debate on who is right or wrong, I am just using it to make a point.. In twenty years time, its possable that it will be considered safe here again if there is enough data to back it from being used in a different country.. When it comes to the offical line, its all about the data..
And really what is Tradional Information but Data that has been passed down a family line, shared from generation to generation on what works best in their climate, conditions and “food rules”.
A good example of this is that in the Alberta Dry air, water bath processing of jars is not often done in my own family, they use fresh out of the boiling water bath jars hot packed and open kettle canned, and have done so with no ill effects that I am aware of for years, however now living in Ontario, I can honestly say that if I was teaching someone to can, I would tell them they HAVE to do that 20 min waterbath, because I have learned the hard way in our hot and humid air, it is a required finishing touch to the process.
History is filled with folks that brought their knowledge and tradition’s with them, but they had to adapt that info to their new homelands.. I feel the same way with my canning, I want to honor my elders knowledge taught to me over many hours in the kitchen while using the “guidelines” to produce safe homemade food for my family.
What about you, do you follow the newest guidelines to the T or if you came from a canning family, are there still times you do it a certain way because that is how its been done for 3 or 4 or 5 generations within your own family and you want that certain taste that following that certain way of making or perserving will get you? This idea of balancing what you read vs how your family showed you how to make something goes far beyond canning.. do you have any good ideas or stories to share?
Just another Day on the Farm 
I am new to canning, other than making jam back in the UK. I didn’t know anyone there who did anything other than pack jam into oven heated jars, often sealed with a piece of wax paper onto the jam surface and covered with a piece of cellophane and a rubber band that would shrink tight like a drum!!! There’s no big recent tradition of preserving other things in cans where I was from. Here in BC, I will follow the guidelines, especially for anything pressure canned or that I want to keep for many months, but am likely to get sloppier over time ( not known for sticking to recipes me 🙂 ). On the just in case book blog, Kathy was talking about the safety of canning, the statistic she found was 21 cases of botulism per year, attributed to in correctly canned goods in the USA. Now, allowing for the fact that some people do very stupid things and some are just plain dumb, I dont think 21 cases is a lot really and that suggests to me there’s quite a lot of leeway between sticking to the guidelines and reaching a point where there are risks. Guidelines are always written for the worst case scenario and the dumbest followers.
Hi Queen
Thanks for the insight and thoughts on this issue, I do agree that lots of folks are just plain dumb and don’t think things though, it really is very few folks that get botulism per year, I can remember my grandmother almost slapping my hand as a child for trying to sneak a plain canned green bean (now pickled would have been fine) but her telling me that you don’t “eat” them till they have boiled, at the time, I remember going.. OK, but now I know that it was a way to make sure that water bath canned low acid foods that “could” have made us sick was made safe by reheating and cooking it.
Of course I always thought that most canned veggies were mushy, and blanded, considering how much they were cooked but if you have a choice between mushy and safe or crisp and taking a risk, I know which way I would move towards as well.
Each jar of food was always carefully looked at, smelled, and generally feel tested, plus with the size of our families most things were used within a year of canning and they had a cold cellar or at least a cellar depending on what part of it, by the time I was a teen, Grandpa had a cold room in the cellar, plus the cellar.. they had hand dug it out under the house, or so I was told as a child, bucket by bucket over time.
The best way to avoid trouble with low acid foods, if you must use bottles, is to either pickle them (Dilly Beans are my favourite) or add an acid to make them safe (like when canning tomatoes you always add lemon juice to the bottle when you add your salt). If you don’t want mushy, overcooked veggies blanching and freezing are the best bet.
I’ve stopped using the water-immersion method since we got a microwave and use it to cook things like beans just enough to kill the enzymes that cause spoilage. They taste almost like they’ve just come out of the garden and keep a lot more of their nutrition. : )
Hey, I’m home. 😛
I follow the current guidelines pretty strictly. I’ve had terrible results whenever I haven’t. My mother taught herself to preserve jams, jellies and pickles back in the 70s, and she always did open kettle canning (hot food in hot jars, add boiled lids and let cool), but she always stored her food in a cold cellar. I’ve been recently making connections with Mennonites who Boiling Water Bath meat! But they, too, store it in a cold cellar that is practically fridge temperature.
Anyway, the apartment’s been hitting 88-92F at times over the past couple of weeks – that’s about as far from cold cellar temperatures as it’s possible to be. LOL
Welcome home,
I thought you were going to be gone for a week? Hope you had a great time and can’t wait to read about all the things you did and learned 🙂
I know that it falls into the “don’t do it for you” but I was raised eating boiling water Bath meat, my mom never had a pressure canner, and we put up hundreds of jars of meat, Deer, moose, pork, beef, chicken etc both bone in and bone out, and until I moved to ontario and started having more issues with our humid summers and keeping quality in my cold cellar (which I have fixed in different ways), I had just followed in her and grandma’s footsteps on how to can my meat.
I do use a pressure canner now, just to be on the safe side but “If” I didn’t have one, I would still be willing to waterbath process meat to have it keep, provided I had a cold cellar, I really see your point about the temp of your apartment.
As you know, we were home earlier because the trip was a flat out disaster. However, I did learn lots! LOL
Definitely, definitely, every time I tell people that I won’t do BWB for meat and such, and why I won’t open kettle jam, is because I’m in a hot, humid apartment. My mom’s pickles, which she always kept all winter in the cellar, bubbled and spoiled and popped the lid in just two weeks at my place.
By asking around and seeing what others do, I’m becoming pretty convinced that the old ways work just fine – IF you do it properly AND have the right way (cold, dark, undisturbed, fairly short term) to store it. However, the powers that be won’t advertise that information because people who live in hot urban apartments like me might be tempted to unsafely can for their environment.
My mom made a few jars of jam, but was not heavily into canning, and by the time I got interested in canning, Grandma was gone, unfortunately, so I have been teaching myself. My Mother in Law did a lot of canning, and Hubby’s grandma, so I am now starting to get a lot of tips and pointers, but I started out learning from books. I try to understand WHY the rules exist, so that I can bend them, or invent my own recipes. I have to admit, I would not water bath meat, I am just too paranoid. Someday I might try pickling it, though 😀 However, with fruit that is acid enough, I will experiment quite a bit. As far as headspace goes, I err on the side of a bit extra over what the books say, especially when I was back in Alberta (does not seem to be such a big deal here in Saskatchewan) – I had a lot of problems with things boiling over and not sealing properly in the water bath. I think altitude might have something to do with it.
Hi JJ
Good Point, reading and getting a grasp on why the rules are in place is very good idea, however I do agree once you get the basic’s down, you can create your own recipes.Well they do have pickled sauages so I guess some folks like pickled meat.
If I follow my family’s headspace that works in alberta, I never have a issue at the different places that I have lived across Canada. Sounds like you have found some help in your canning journey from your hubbies side of the family, enjoy those family recipes.
When what you’re doing has been passed down through the generations, I’m thinking that’s pretty safe knowledge. The “new” rules that say you need to do a waterbath for everything are just plain stupid. Dill pickles, sauerkraut, kimchee, etc. are all pickled through lactic acid fermentation – just the same as yogourt is made. To use a canner not only defeats the whole process, but renders your food dead.
Paranoia reigns supreme these days and sometimes you just have to ignore it… Grandma knew best!
LOL, I do have to agree that the whole point of pickling though lactic acid fermentation means that you don’t then boil it.. Of course I drink my own hand milked raw milk yogurt and other products, I figure if I control the process,from seed to plate and am careful and use common sense, then I am really quite blessed in my food.
Hi FarmGal, lInitially, I left this over on StoneHouseRoad where we were talking about your wild Plums – but thought you might not see it there. (Hope you don’t think this too presumptuous of me.)
“OMG! Could I possibly get a piece of it from you? We had one of these at the farm when I was a kid and the only reason we knew what they were was because there had been one at my Mom’s childhood home. She was totally overjoyed when the spindly old tree at our “new” (130 years old when they bought it in 1970!) house bore a bumper crop of Green Gage Plums. (It also unfortunately turned out to be one last hurrah before the poor old thing gave up the ghost after decades of neglect. So, to be able to resurrect this tree at the farm would be wonderful!
Hi Deb
Its ok bringing it over, I would have gotten over to read it on Stone House Road but might have taken a day or two to happen. I can certainly get you lots of plum pits, do plums come true from the pits or at least true enough, I can most likely get you a cutting but would not be able to get you more then that, and it would most likely be better to give you a dormant cutting then trying to send one now. But Pits, I can send you dozens or more if you want to give that a go and see what comes.. Any chance that would work, I know that in that area, there are only that kind of plum, I will double check it carefully to be sure, and I can certain take the cameria and take some photos for you to be sure its what you want?
Thank you so much! Yes, I agree completely; it would be better in every way to wait for a dormant cutting… There’s no telling what you’d get from pits, cloning is the only way to stay with the original (bees will fly for miles sonetimes) and, if we waited until pruning time, it would suit the tree’s normal growth cycle better too. I’ve always wanted to do rooting with willow whips (apparently they have high levels of rooting hormone/thank you Ed Lawrence) and this would be perfect time to try it! I could do up some Forsythia, Burning Bush, Mulberry or other things we have around here too, if you’re interested in a swap? ; )
Ok, dormant cuttings in the spring sounds good, we can take it off-line in regards how to get them to you etc, I think I might still give those pits a try myself, never know what might come, maybe I will get a very interesting outcome. I have rooted willows out by just cutting and planting a whip but I had not heard that they help root other whips, that is interesting, and don’t you just love Ed Lawrence, I would certainly be interested in Mulberry, or any other for eating, I hate to admit it but I don’t plant much that does not help feed us in the long run. I will still take photos in the next while and when the fruit is ready so we can confirm that is the right one.
Sounds great. Thanks!!