YOU GREW MORE FOOD THAN YOU CAN EAT – CANNING - THE REST OF THE STORY I listed three ways to preserve food:
1. Dehydrating and packing for the long term.
2. Water Bath Canning.
3. Pressure Canning.
When I said you grew more food than you can eat, I’m thinking of a long term emergency, not today’s living. You’re in the long term emergency and have grown food and need to preserve it. Any preservation method that requires electricity is out.
DEHYDRATING: I said in my prior post I would use dehydrating as a method for preserving food. After extensive research, I have dumped dehydrating as a method because it requires an electric dehydrator. You can tell me you can dry food inside a hot car or dry it in the desert, or some other method, but then you need to store it so it will last four to six months, and a year is iffy, which brings me to another reason I dropped dehydrating. The dried food, if it is stored properly, requires vacuum sealing which requires electricity to do that and money to buy a vacuum sealer and should be eaten within four to six months and it might stay good for a year. “Might” is the operative word.
The National Center for Home Food Preservation reports this: “The Dried foods should be stored in cool, dry, dark areas. Recommended storage times for dried foods range from 4 months to 1 year. Because food quality is affected by heat, the storage temperature helps determine the length of storage; the higher the temperature, the shorter the storage time. Most dried fruits can be stored for 1 year at 60ºF, 6 months at 80ºF. Vegetables have about half the shelf-life of fruits.” If you have no power, your house won’t be cooled to 60 degrees unless it’s winter in the north part of the country. In the summer, the south will be hot up to 105 and higher. Inside the houses would be in the 90s or more.
If you want to dry food now that will last only four to six months, maybe a year, while we have power, you need to buy an electric dehydrator, and I suggest the best one without spending $200 or more, is the “Nesco/American Harvest FD-80 Square-Shaped Dehydrator” for $59.94, free shipping at Amazon, found here:
http://www.amazon.com/Nesco-Square-Shaped-Dehydrator-Frustration-Free-Packaging/dp/B0090WOCM6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1378219551&sr=8-2&keywords=dehydratorIn order to keep the food good for four to six months, possibly longer, you have to store it correctly and that requires a food vacuum sealer and heavy duty plastic sealer bags made for the vacuum sealer. This is more money to spend for the sealer and bags, and you can find numerous food vacuum sealers on Amazon that suck out oxygen and seal the bags. Some say put these bags into Mylar bags and put in a desiccant (removes/prevents dampness) and seal the Mylar bags with the food vacuum sealer. You wouldn’t need oxygen absorbers in the Mylar bag because the food in the plastic bag has already had the oxygen removed. A desiccant removes moisture and an oxygen absorber removes oxygen. You can put these bags in your freezer for longer life but you won’t have a freezer if there is no power and your vacuum sealer will be gathering dust due to no power.
PRESSURE CANNING:I have dumped pressure canning if there is no power. If you have used a pressure canner, you know the heat source has to be steady to keep the pressure canner at the right amount of pressure and you have to keep an eye on it throughout to make sure the pressure stays at the level you need it. Unless you will have a regular kitchen wood stove, you couldn’t keep the heat steady on any other emergency stove. Pressure canners are also expensive, starting in the $70s and up on Amazon.
WATER BATH CANNING – THE WINNER FOR NOW AND IN EMERGENCY:A water bath canner costs $19.97 with free shipping over $25. It is here:
http://www.amazon.com/Granite-0707-1-2-Quart-Porcelain-Water-Bath/dp/B0001UZL8A/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1D70WWXB7EG23&coliid=IRDJ80GJ8O3ZPIn an emergency and now, the canner needs to keep water boiling for maybe 20 minutes at the most and most foods only for 10 minutes based on the type food – that’s it. In an emergency, most any emergency stove could keep water boiling in this canner, even a camp fire would do it.
Shelf life of water bath canned food:Food canned with a water canner are good for two years, and best for a year. See why I dumped dehydrating – even if one had power, four months to six months to a year and a year is iffy, is the limit for storing and it requires another piece of equipment, the vacuum sealer.
What is the difference between canning with a water bath and canning with a pressure canner? The difference is, foods with lower acidity must be canned with a pressure cooker. Foods with more acidity may be canned using a water bath.
I got around this low acidity of veggies such as beans and carrots, broccoli, whatever, by finding recipes at one source, “National Center for Home Food Preservation”, for pickling all veggies. Anything pickled can be canned using the water bath. If I wanted them to taste less pickled, I’d rinse them after taking them out of the jar, and put some kind of sauce on them or sprinkled with Molly McButter or Molly Cheese sprinkles – any way to bring their taste back to more plain veggie than pickled veggie. Any more acid foods, such as tomatoes and fruits are canned now using the water bath.
What is pickling? Basically, adding vinegar is pickling. Vinegar has an acid content (5% vinegar), so adding it raises the acidity of what’s in the jar and that makes it able to be canned using the water bath.
Water bath canning of tomatoes:There is a controversy about canning tomatoes which are normally canned using the water bath. Recipes today include adding a bit of bottled lemon juice to the jar before canning. Why? Because we have bred tomatoes into hybrids that have lowered the acidity of the tomatoes so they would taste sweeter. There is no reason to argue with the two sides of this issue. Just put the required amount of lemon juice and it’s not much, into the jar and that’s it. Don’t use juice from fresh lemons, use bottled lemon juice.
To pickle veggies with lower acid to up the acid in the jar and use the water bath canner, use these recipes from the “National Center for Home Food Preservation”:
http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/veg_pick.htmlWhat equipment do you need to use a water bath canner?Go to the Ball website at this page:
http://www.freshpreservingstore.com/1. Buy the Blue Book Guide for Preserving, for $6.49, tells you everything you need to know about water bath canning (also covers dehydrating and pressure canning), and canning in general. There is no better book anywhere than their book. It’s the bible of canning. Recipes are there for canning foods. This is one time you don’t want to take short cuts or change a recipe. These recipes are made for canning and changing them might affect the safety of the food. Read the safety precautions about canned food there.
2. Buy the Canning Utensil Set for $9.99. The utensils are a jar funnel, a jar lifter, a lid lifter, and a bubble remover & headspace tool (Slide into the side of filled jar to release air bubbles and measure headspace).
The canning utensil set will prevent your burning yourself with the boiling water. Using the funnel to get your food into the jars prevents spilling the contents, the jar lifter lets you safely put the jar in the boiling water and out of it, the lid lifter is magnetic on the end so you can get the lids safely out of the hot water, and the plastic “stick” is used to put it down the sides of the jar to remove air bubbles and to measure the distance from the top of the jar to the liquid/food so the jar isn’t too full - the stick has a ruler on it for that purpose. I would call this set the “safety set” to prevent burns and make the jar safe by removing bubbles and have a safe amount of space from the top of the jar to the contents.
Canning jars: I plan to only can in pint jars, not quarts, and smaller than a pint for fruit preserves. If you have no fridge, you want to be able to consume the food in one or two meals in a day. A quart is a lot of food. If you need to eat more than a pint at one time, open another pint. You might want to can fruit preserves in jars made smaller than a pint for preserves. Look at all the possibilities for canning jars and make the selection right for you. You will use these over and over so you need to have plenty of lids. Once you use a lid that seals the food, you cannot use that lid again. Buy plenty of lids if you plan to can in emergency times.
Labels for canning jars:You could write on top of the lid with a black Sharpie type pen, or you could get removable labels to write on and stick on the jar. I did research on labels and don’t buy the Ball labels on their web site. When you take the label off the sheet, the sticky says on the sheet and your label has no glue to stick on the jar. Customers have repeated this over and over on Amazon where they are also sold. The best labels I found for the best price for the amount of labels and they stick and can be removed, are these:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000HJ9AB4/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DERExamine the canning recipes you are going to use and store what you need for them if power is out and one of those is gobs of vinegar (5%) and it’s cheap, and bottles of lemon juice. There will be other ingredients you will want to have and those are individual choices.
To “boil” down this article into one sentence is: A WATER BATH CANNER IS INEXPENSIVE AND DOES THE JOB NOW AND WITHOUT POWER. THE FOOD IS PRESERVED FOR AT LEAST TWO YEARS.
