National Center for Home Food Preservation
nchfp.uga.edu
nchfp.uga.edu
I worry that enormous amount of nuance is lost when transmitting skills through written down form instead of in person.
Canning is easy - it's a straight forward recipe and instructions. You just have e to ensure the recipe is from a good source. Occasionally you'll have a few lids that don't seal. Or you'll try a recipe that results in soggy pickles.
Curing is pretty easy too. Using equilibrium cures and leaving it refrigerated removes a lot of concerns. Curing for room temperature storage is a little trickier but is mostly about having a good environment to store it in.
Dehydration is easy - basically just slice things and pop them in the dehydrator at the recommended time and temperature.
Fermentation is the one that I've wasted the most food with, which still isn't that much. I've made a few bad batches of beer and wine. I've also had a batch or two of sauerkraut turn out bad. These are usually due to bad quality ingredients, like cabbage that wasn't that fresh, or to waiting too long to bottle beer.
The big thing is to try stuff in small batches and learn. Ensure that you follow the directions from a reputable authority so you don't get sick. When in doubt, throw it out.
Stuff that I ferment regularly: sourdough bread (for example, pizza dough -- for up to two weeks in the fridge), cabbage (sauerkraut), cucumbers, beets (I love good borscht, what can I say), jalapeno peppers (I love to add them to scrambled eggs and always have a batch in the fridge), and habaneros (I make mean habanero sauce and it is best when I use my own fermented habaneros for this).
Some reasons for fermentation failures:
- too small concentration of salt. You need to count water both in the liquid and in the thing you are fermenting. And yes, you need to weigh your salt and use calculator to figure out how much salt you need exactly. And a scale that allows you to weigh it precisely enough.
- not enough sugars. Fermentation needs to run to a point where the liquid is acidic enough to stop other things from invading your food. This usually means there needs to be enough sugars so that fermentation can run its course and stop after the solution is acidic enough and it ideally should coincide with all sugars being depleted. This is the perfect stopping point, if you have too little sugars it will stop before it is acidic enough and if it has too much sugars some bacteries might still be able to live on it. Out of two, it is better to have too much sugar than too little.
- wrong temperature. You want correct temperature so that your choice of yeast can invade the food faster than anything else. If it is too warm or too cold, some other living thing may be more efficient than yeast and your food will spoil.
- Oxygen. You want Oxygen out of your fermentation liquid. You want to use airlock . Use super salty water in the airlock to prevent contamination by liquid splashing back. I am also using using carbonated water to make sure right from the start there is little or no oxygen dissolved in the liquid, and as it bubbles out it also removes Oxygen above the liquid.
- once fermentation runs out, keep in a cool place. I keep it in the fridge. My jalapenos last for a year in a jar I open from time to time. I have not tried for longer because I just replace it with a newly fermented jar of jalapenos every time there is season.
- cleanliness. You want to keep stuff clean, as much as possible. Make sure you get your fermentation glass to 100C for some time (don't just flush with hot water, actually submerge in a pot of boiling water). Try not to use plastic that is scratched and can harbor bacteria (although I am using PET bottles frequently with good effect, but I am not reusing them afterwards). Wash your food well and maybe even wash with boiling water if it makes sense.
- slow start. If your food is in large chunks and not releasing sugars to the liquid, it might take for too long for the fermentation to start which gives time for it to spoil. Mash/crush some of the food so that some of the sugars can be released and start fermentation.
- too much liquid. It really is not enough sugars point, but for some foods that do not have much sugars in them in the first place, you may want to consider really pack them tightly.
It's certain strains of lactobacillus, not yeast. Yeasts are probably-to-certainly present in small amounts in fermentation but they aren't critical to its success or failure either way.
The containers should be clean, no biofilms or visible grime obviously, but wash-rinse-air dry is plenty. Clean enough to eat off of. The fermentation lactobacillus are tolerant to salt and will dramatically outcompete everything else in a salty environment. The careful sanitization is for brewing where the yeasts don't have this advantage, or canning where botulism complicates it. For fermentation alone it's not a concern.
The vegetables on the other hand you don't want to clean too meticulously. You want them clear of dirt, debris, bugs obviously. But the bacteria you're using to ferment are naturally present on the vegetables and it is the only effective source of them. You can see this with ginger, a lot of which is irradiated, virtually bacteria-free, and notoriously inconsistent to ferment alone for that reason.
I think I only fully wasted the first batch of 8 half-pint jams I made, which were basically fruit leather, otherwise things have turned out pretty well. I give jam as holiday gifts, and in years where I haven’t made any I get people asking for it, so I take that as a sign I’m doing something right!
I think learning this stuff from books is easy. It's not about the subject, it's about both your learning style and starting from good material. Preserving by Ginette Mathiot is good material.
Side benefit of deposit jars for yogurt in Germany: basically free canning jars for jam, especially great for ones I'm giving away.
I do a stress test before getting underway by putting washed jars in the sink, then submerging them in boiling water. I leave them like that until the water is no longer scalding. In a decade of canning, I've only had one jar that cracked after filling, and less than one per batch that fails to seal (could safely be eaten, just needed to be refrigerated and used right away)
Are they canning raw products?
My parents can (well, they use weck jars) a lot of spaghetti sauce.
* Cook ground beef/pork.
* Add tomatoes.
* Simmer until desired consistency.
* Put in jars.
* Seal.
* Boil the hell out of it
Is this a risk?
Tomatoes are high acid. It's things like carrots or green beans and such that hard require a pressure canner.
Also you should answer this question by consulting a canning guide and not by asking a forum for technology & entrepreneurship.
I haven't tried this recipe but I wonder if the sugar is used as the preservative instead of salt- it functions in a similar way, inhibiting bacterial growth after a certain point because osmosis competes for the water that bacteria need to grow.
Fructose says hi.
Sugar: THE BITTER TRUTH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
It's a presentation by Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology.