Safe Canning Basics

September is National Food Safety Education Month and my contribution to food safety education is food safety and canning.  So this month is going to be a free training each week on canning for beginners and food safety.

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Safe Canning

Tune in to the podcast right here or read on to learn more.

 

Bad Bugs

Let’s talk a little bit about Clostridium botulinum, which is the scariest of microbes when it comes to canning.  These cause botulism and is why pressure canning is the only recommended method for canning low acid foods like meat, fish, seafood, poultry, and vegetables.  This is why you should never, ever use a water bath canner for low acid food.

These suckers form a spore which is kind of like a medieval suit of armor.  It protects the bacteria cell so it can survive and grow inside a sealed jar of food and produce a toxin that is poisonous.  It is this toxin that can be fatal.  Even just a taste.  They are destroyed by using a pressure canner at the proper pressure for your altitude and the proper processing time.  

Don’t Panic!

Now before you grab a paper bag and run to the corner to start hyperventilating and throwing out everything you canned, I want you to know that boiling food that was canned for 10 minutes plus 1 minute for every 1000 ft above sea level should destroy the toxin.  So if you are at 5000 ft boil for 15 minutes. That’s 10 minutes plus 5 for the additional 5 x 1000 ft.

Boil low acid and tomato-based foods like this, even if they do not show signs of spoilage.  This doesn’t mean to say you can ignore proper canning practices and processing times and your best defense is to follow proper canning practices and food safety to help keep you and your loved ones safe.

For low acid foods check that:

• Food was processed in a pressure canner
• The gauge of the pressure canner is correct and accurate – get it checked annually!
• You are using well-researched recipes for the jar size, hot or raw pack method, and the kind of food you are preserving.  Check out the National Center for Home Food Preservation for hundreds of recipes or the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.
• The jar lid is firmly sealed and is concave or dips in towards the ground and is not bulging up.
• There are no signs of leaking from the jar.
• Nothing spurts out from the jar when it is opened.
• You can’t smell anything off, unnatural or not right when you smell the food in the jar.

If in doubt, throw it out!

Properly canned foods should:

• Have a good proportion of solid food to liquid and the liquid just covering the solid food pieces in the jar
• Have the proper headspace
• Be free of air bubbles
• Be free of stems and cores etc
• Have good, tight seals
• Be packed quickly into hot jars
• Have fruit and vegetable pieces in similar sizes and shape
• Be uniform in color throughout the jar for example things shouldn’t be brown at one end and clear at the other.
• Have kept their shape.  Food pieces shouldn’t have broken down and gone mushy.
• Have been made from fruit and vegetables at the proper maturity and not damaged by frosts, insects or bruised.
• Be clear and free of sediment for foods canned in liquid or syrup.

 

Food Poisoning

Foodborne illness or food poisoning to you and me is caused by disease-causing bacteria known as pathogens that contaminate food.  Food poisoning cases are about 48 million a year, that’s 1 in 6 Americans each year.  Some people are more at risk than others like kids under 5, adults over 65, if you’re pregnant and people with health problems that are immunocompromised.

Contaminated food will usually cause you to be sick within 1 to 3 days of eating that food but sometimes you getting sick can happen within 20 minutes or in some people up to 6 weeks later!  Most of us have had food poisoning at some point in our lives, the improperly cooked bacon butty, the dodgy drunken takeaway, a gas station chicken sandwich maybe, or how about getting sick on that 18-hour flight after grabbing the last egg salad in the airport?

Most of us as adults can recall those symptoms of foodborne illness like vomiting, diarrhea, stomach or abdominal pain, or flu-like symptoms like fever, head, and body aches and none of us recall food poisoning with happy memories!

Other Contributions

At home, there are other contributing factors that can cause us to accidentally cause food poisoning in ourselves and others.  Contributing factors are behaviors, practices, and even environmental conditions that lead to incidences of food poisoning. Knowing them means we can stop them.  There are 3 types of contributing factors.

• The first type is contamination where pathogens and other hazards are getting into the food.  For example, not washing your hands when handling food or if you are sick and you have prepared food for others.  That’s a common way that people who get sick at a restaurant is from a sick worker!
• The second type is proliferation which is the microbiologist’s way of saying that pathogens or disease-causing bacteria in the food are growing faster. Food held in a refrigerator that isn’t cold enough is one example of a food preparation practice that contributes to proliferation.  Microbes like temperatures that we do too to grow and thrive!
• The third type is survival where pathogens are surviving a process to kill or reduce them. Canning food in the wrong type of canner or not cooked long enough or to a hot enough temperature are a couple of examples of food preparation practices that contribute to survival.

The good news is that we can keep ourselves and our loved ones safer from food poisoning with these steps!

Food Safety Steps

Wash your hands and surfaces often when working in the kitchen prepping and canning.  

Hand washing is super important but most people don’t wash their hands long enough!  At least 20 seconds of lather and scrubbing with soap and warm water helps to remove the bacteria.  You can sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or ABC or do 2 rounds of Happy Birthday in 20 seconds and your hands will have far fewer bacteria on them than if you were to just glance through running water as quickly as possible.

Wash your hands after doing things in the garden, harvesting, weeding, handling compost, and making natural fertilizers.  Wash your hands before and after handling food, and of course, after using the bathroom and handling pets.

Wash Produce Too

Clean your harvested or purchased fruits and vegetables under tap water including those with skins or rinds that are not eaten like squash, avocado, melon, scrub produce with a clean produce brush to help remove bad bacteria.  Wash leafy greens and fresh herbs with lots of clean running tap water.

Equipment

Cleaning your produce is important because they grow in and on the ground and the soil has lots of microorganisms in it.  Not all of them are bad.  But some are and we don’t want to introduce those into the jars and canned foods we are going to make at home.  The same thing for cleaning utensils like knives, spoons, canning jars, and cutting boards.  Wash with hot soapy water after preparing each food item and top food safety tip used by chefs is to use one chopping board for fresh produce and a separate one for raw meat, poultry, and seafood.

Clean your canning jars in hot soapy water and rinse thoroughly then, place them upright into a water bath canner on a rack and cover them with warm water.  Bring them to the boil and boil for 10 minutes.  If you’re at altitudes of more than 1000 ft above sea level, add an additional minute for every 1000 ft.  So if you live at 7000 ft you would add 7 minutes so your sterilization time is 17 minutes.  Keep jars in hot water until you are ready to fill them.

Why so long at altitudes?

Well, water boils at lower temperatures as the altitude increases.  Lower boiling temperatures are less effective at killing bacteria so increasing the boiling time (and also the processing time in the canner or the pressure if pressure canning) compensates for the lower boiling temperature to properly kill the bacteria.

How canning preserves your food

Fresh foods spoil very easily because they contain a lot of water.  They are great places for microorganisms like bacteria, yeasts, and molds to grow.  Fresh foods can go bad not only from these microorganisms but also from enzymes in the food, oxygen in the air, and losing water.

Microorganisms live, grow, and multiply faster than rabbits!  They are on food surfaces of fresh produce and inside bruised, insect-damaged and diseased food.  In the right conditions like temperature and available food and water levels, bacteria multiply every 20 minutes so 1 bacteria cell will become 2 in 20 minutes, those 2 in 40 minutes become 4 after 10 hours you’re looking at over 1 billion bacteria cells!  Yikes!

Proper Canning Practices

So some proper canning practices are to:

• Wash your produce and discard badly damaged and bruised fruits and vegetables.  Put them to work in the compost heap instead to feed the garden rather than risk getting you sick.
• Peel some fruits and vegetables.
• Hot packing foods.
• Using acids like lemon juice to tomatoes or vinegar in pickles.
• Make sure to use clean and sterile jars free from chips and cracks.  Using clean, new self-sealing lids where the gaskets are not crumbly or brittle.
• Processing jars in the right canner.
• Processing jars for the right amount of time.

Altogether, these help to remove oxygen from the food, destroy and denature enzymes, prevent the growth of microorganisms (those undesirable yeasts, molds, and bacteria) and help to form a good vacuum in the jar.  A good vacuum means a tight seal that keeps the food inside and microorganisms and air out of the jar to protect the food you carefully grew and preserved to enjoy later in the season.

Learn More In The Mini Training

Week 2 – How Canning Preserves Your Food

Week 3 – Canning Equipment You Really Need

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Always ensure to operate safely.  All projects are purely “at your own risk” and are for information purposes only. As with any project, unfamiliarity with the tools, animals, plants, and processes can be dangerous.  Posts, podcasts, and videos should be read and interpreted as theoretical advice only and are not a substitute for advice from a fully licensed professional.

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