Potted History: The canning of food | Hacker News Reader

Potted History: The canning of food

the-angry-chef.com

57 pointsshaftoe44428 comments

> Today, it is available in every food store, often looked down on as cheap, poor quality and low status.

> It would be of huge benefit to the safety, quality and sustainability of our food system if the snobbery surrounding canned produce could be stripped away.

Thanks for this article. I felt similarly, I "discovered" canned fish when I started working out as a great source of excellent fats and protein. They're among my favourite foods now, and I marvel at the ingenuity of making highly perishable foods last almost indefinitely in such a compact format, without requiring cooling, every time I open a can.

You probably already know this, but careful with canned tuna. Eating it daily for too long (weeks to months, judging from various anecdotes) leads to mercury poisoning. Same with non-canned tuna.

Canned sardines aren't for everyone, but I believe there is much less of a worry about heavy metal poisoning with those as they're closer to the bottom of the food chain.

Aren't they? (I mean, obviously not everyone, but I assume you mean particularly controversial like Marmite or the fermented fish products of the Nordics?) I (British) always thought 'sardines on toast' was pretty plain, standard fare. A step up from 'beans on toast' perhaps, but no less commonplace.

A lot of people seem to think they're a bit gross here (New Zealand). It probably differs by country.

I'm an American who has traveled a fair bit outside the US. I'd never heard of sardines on toast until a British person made a thread about it on the cooking board on 4chan, maybe a year or so ago. I guess it's not too common in North America, at least in the stars-and-stripes part.

Mercury in tuna is an overblown issue actually.

I also use canned fish as an easy protein source. Canned fish and canned vegetables can make the basis of an excellent, cheap diet, if, as the author says, you can get over the snobbery.

Canning food is pretty simple for those that can follow instructions. I've found the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving to be a good resource for anyone starting out.

A digression from tin cans:

Amazingly enough for home use of these Ball jars, I bought six "Ball Quilted Crystal Jelly Jars with Lids and Bands" to make Starbucks-style sous-vide egg bites. They were awesome-tasting, but the glass sides separated from the bottoms in three of them.

My hypothesis: I wouldn't blame Ball for this. It was probably a use that they didn't foresee or endorse.

The recipe tells you to only finger-tighten the lids, so the gases can escape during sous-vide'ing. This is error-prone, and if the gases can't escape, then you have an explosion waiting to happen. No explosion happens but the jar does fall apart.

dont let the glass jar rest on the bottom of the pan directly. Canners have a metal plate you put on the bottom for that; but toothpicks will work fine.

Thanks. With sous-vide you don't have a heat source below the pot, so does that still apply?

From memory, the water bath was 161F. The pot most likely is not much hotter than that, if it's hotter at all.

From what I understand, in addition to the problem of the heat differential between the jar and pot, steam will form under the jar and cause them to bounce. The bouncing can cause the jars to break.

but in this case, the temperature doesn't go above boiling, so no steam, and I would presume no resulting bounce.

You get steam (or vapor) below the boiling point. Look for example here:

https://www.straightdope.com/21343295/how-can-water-turn-to-...

Sous vide also circulates. I have done infusions in a ball jar and it does end up bouncing around a bit. I like the idea of a small towel mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

Glass to glass heat conduction is faster than water to glass. any difference in how fast the jar is heating will produce uneven stresses and possibly crack the glass where those meet. That's my theory.

Ive had jars fail because they were touching each other on the sides; but that i put down to mechanical battering.

There's also the fact that Ball jars have gotten thinner in the past few decades; after they became almost the entire food packaging industry.

Yeah this is probably the issue if they aren't using a rack or plate.

My family used towels, at least for water bath canning.

Thanks for all the ideas. I should mention that I do six jars at a time in the water bath, so they can definitely bump into each other.

I don't know if I'm going to try this again, though. It was a lot of trouble.

Interesting. I wonder if they were designed to fail this way. Even when canning you only finger-tighten the lids. You also have to be careful not to reduce pressure too quickly or you can break jars or lose liquid out of them.

Finger tighten (use just three fingers) then back off a half to 3/4 turn.

Canning food is pretty simple for those that can follow instructions.

It isn't too difficult (i've done it), but seriously: Follow the instructions, use tested recipes, and use the proper equipment. If it says to use a pressure canner, it is so you do not get botulism or another food-borne illness. Your chances of getting sick from canned goods is higher with home canning than commercial canning - following the instructions greatly reduces this.

If you don't have a pressure canner, you'll be limited in the things you can safely can - luckily, these will include jellies and tomatoes.

>> As the cans were opened, the smell was said to be so bad that inspectors had to frequently leave the room for air and had to be washed with lime at the end of the day to remove the stench.

I suspect what was washed was the room the inspectors where in, not the inspectors themslves?

While the early 1800s story is almost certainly directly connected to the modern canning industry, there are references to tin can use by the Dutch navy by the early 1700s. And apparently there was a small industry around preserving Salmon in the Netherlands around that time as well.

Proper (15+ PSI) pressure canner has opened a whole new world of long term food storage for me.

I initially imported a canner from the US as I couldn't find any 15+ PSI / 104+ kPa canner in the EU. I bought it just for the purpose of sterilization of materials used for mushrooms cultivation.

But it came with additional canning tools and a guidebook that contained recipes including cooking times for different altitudes and overall, made a professionally-prepared impression on me.

I gave it a try and now I have two favorite methods of long term food storage, depending on food type: fermentation and pressure canning. This thing is awesome. I can store meat in warm place. Like unfrozen, undried meat!

Is it just me or is that article exceptionally well written?

I mean, I'm not fluent in English, but passively consume quite a lot of content in English on a daily basis, and I cannot remember the last time I found something so smooth to read. Usually I tend to skip the "fluff", skim around, get sidetracked in thoughts, backtrack from unexpected details (to parts skipped while skimming) and in effect just rarely read something in its entirety and often leave articles in the middle.

But this prose I was able to read it from start to finish without such "stutter" and felt it is such darn "well-crafted" piece text along the way.

Can you see anything special about it what makes more "accessible"? (Simpler language?) Or did it perhaps just "clicked" by sheer chance?

In Apicius there are recipes related in Book 1 where Romans would preserve different food items by sealing them in jars with plaster in water that had been boiled down to half its volume. While this isn't exactly the same as modern pressure canning the idea of sealing something in a jar and heating it to preserve the contents is 2000 years old, or older as some experts believe Apicius was written starting with Greeks as far back as perhaps 400BC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com