In the first episode of Season Two, Kendall and Rebecca discuss food preservation with Sean O'Brien, a home horticulture program manager at UNH Extension. They explore various methods of food preservation, including canning, freezing, and drying, and emphasize the importance of planning for food preservation needs. Sean explains the math behind calculating how much to grow for preservation, the benefits of growing extra, and the impact of conditions on yield. He also highlights the importance of using reliable recipes from trusted sources like UNH Extension and the National Center for Home Food Preservation to ensure food safety. The conversation also touches on the equipment needed for preservation, the significance of following proper canning processes, and the joy of experimenting with different preservation methods.
Show notes:
NH Department of Health and Human Services Homestead Food Operations: https://www.dhhs.nh.gov/programs-services/environmental-health-and-you/food-protection/homestead-food-operations
Legal Guide for NH Agricultural Producers - https://extension.unh.edu/resource/legal-guide-new-hampshire-agricultural-producers
Pressure Gauge Testing at UNH Extension: https://extension.unh.edu/sites/default/files/migrated_unmanaged_files/Resource002139_Rep3153.pdf or https://extension.unh.edu/resource/testing-pressure-canner-dial-gauges
Penn State University Preservation Recipes: https://extension.psu.edu/food-safety-and-quality/home-food-preservation-and-safety/lets-preserve
University of Georgia National Center for Food Preservation: https://nchfp.uga.edu/
USDA Complete Guide to Food Preservation: https://nchfp.uga.edu/resources/category/usda-guide
Drying Vegetables – NDSU Extension: https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/sites/default/files/2022-12/fn1588.pdf
Drying Fruit – NDSU Extension: https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/sites/default/files/2022-12/fn1587.pdf
Ball Blue Book: https://www.ballmasonjars.com/products/essentials-accessories/ball%C2%AE-blue-book-guide-to-preserving-38th-edition%2C-recipe-book/SAP_2194619.html
So Easy to Preserve Book: https://www.fcs.uga.edu/extension/so-easy-to-preserve
Shared Soil Food Episodes - https://extension.unh.edu/resource/shared-soil-podcast
UNH Extension Education Center InfoLine: https://extension.unh.edu/agriculture-gardens/yard-garden
NH Department of Agriculture, Markets and Food - https://www.agriculture.nh.gov/
Women in Ag Newsletter signup - https://unhoutreach.tfaforms.net/217751?CID=701G0000001AiKCIA0
Kendall Kunelius – kendall.kunelius@unh.edu
Rebecca Dube – rebecca.dube@unh.edu
Transcript
Kendall Kunelius 0:09
Welcome to the first episode in Season Two of Shared Soil, a podcast dedicated to creating community, honoring challenges and encouraging personal and professional growth for all people in agriculture. My name is Kendall Kunelius. I'm a field specialist for Agricultural Business Management, and I'm an Extension Assistant Professor for UNH College of Life Sciences and Agriculture,
Rebecca Dube 0:31
And I'm Rebecca Dube, providing technology and administrative support to UNH Extension.
Kendall Kunelius 0:37
Awesome. We're going to set the scene for this episode, Rebecca, and it's very timely. So imagine you're watching the snow falling outside, and you're sitting by the fire. Maybe you're sipping hot cocoa, but best of all, you're flipping through the seed catalogs that you recently got in the mail, and you're dreaming of all the spring farming plans or gardening plans that you have, but with so many options for seed varieties, how do you choose the right ones for the volume of food you'd like to eat or sell and still have extra to preserve? And that's the exact question we wanted to ask Sean O'Brien from the home horticulture Education Center.
Rebecca Dube 1:12
Sean, can you give us an introduction to you, your position at Extension, and anything else you'd like to tell us about yourself?
Sean O'Brien 1:19
Sure. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here today. So I'm a home horticulture program manager at Extension. I've been with Extension for about two years now, and I have a background in farming on a small scale, sustainable gardening or sustainable farming. And I have had a garden pretty much my whole life. I have been in the scene for quite a while, and I love everything about growing food and preserving food and all that. So my job at Extension revolves around educating the public. I'm a program manager, but really what that means is I'm an educator. I write articles and I give public talks and all the good things like that. And one of the things that I do, and one of the major things that I do, is that I teach classes on food preservation. So all types of food preservation, I do intro classes, I do canning classes, and all, all kinds of good stuff like that.
Kendall Kunelius 2:17
Awesome. So it sounds like we have the right person to answer our questions today, because I have a lot of questions. So I mean, on a personal note, I am very familiar with a chest freezer, because I eat a lot of homegrown meat. So when I purchase a whole pig from a farmer, I have to have a large amount of storage space for that. But we're kind of covering the whole gambit today, from vegetables to meats, maybe to eggs, just looking at preservation as a whole. And it's no secret that the world of homesteading and preservation is in the public eye, because we kind of really rediscovered this idea of self-sustainability, small-scale farming, like you were saying your background is, during the pandemic. And I'm saying the term "rediscovered", because I actually think there's quite a few people who still do this. They knew their grandparents did it, and they were familiar with grandma's homemade jam, but, how does that happen, right? Where does that jam actually come from in those recipes? So really, what we want to get at today is looking at the fact that people still grow gardens. We still raise chickens. We still raise meat animals. But how do you plan to have enough to eat when it's fresh, so you're harvesting in, and then also make sure that you have enough to make those jars of strawberry jelly, or make sure that you have enough chickens to put away in the freezer, or a whole you know, are you raising an extra pig to freeze that kind of stuff? So, with all that said, Can you give us the nitty-gritty, kind of calculating how much extra you want to plant or to raise so that you can both eat from the garden but also have enough to preserve and store away?
Sean O'Brien 3:53
Yeah, definitely. So it does take a little bit of math, so prepare yourself for that. It's not too hard, though. What I like to tell people usually is you want to start from the end goal, like, what do you what do you want to see? If you want to - you like to have a certain number of, say, jars of sauce per week. Say, that's one jar of sauce per week. You want tomato sauce. If you want one jar of sauce per week, that means you're going to need four jars per month. And then say you want six months worth of tomato sauce, then you're going to need 24 jars of tomato sauce. Pretty simple stuff, right? Not rocket science, but it is helpful. It does take some planning, but I think most people are going to be able to do it.
Kendall Kunelius 4:41
Okay, wait, I have a question. So you're using the term jar as a unit of measurement. What is it? What do you mean by jar?
Sean O'Brien 4:50
That's a great question. Part of my job is really trying to meet people where they're at. So I'm so glad you asked that question. And if you're new to this, then you might say, I've got these little, tiny quarter pint jars, is that what you're talking about? Maybe not, probably not, right? So usually when I say jars, I'm talking about quart jars or pints, because those are the ones that have enough materials inside so that it's worth canning. And so I'm specifically talking about canning at this point, because that's the way to make food shelf stable. So you don't, you're not taking up freezer space. You're not taking up refrigerator space, although there's lots of preservation methods that are really great: freezing, like you mentioned, Kendall; drying is another great one that also doesn't take up refrigerator or freezer space. Traditionally, I think we think about food preservation as canning, either water bath canning or pressure canning. But there are, there are lots of ways, and we can, we can talk about those as well. So, yeah, jars, in terms of jars, I think quart jars are great because they're big enough so that you can get a whole meal of sauce or crushed tomatoes or something like that, that you can make other things with, where you could take some diced or canned or quarter tomatoes or something like that, and make a spaghetti sauce. You could make chili, you could make all kinds of stuff,
Rebecca Dube 6:14
Right. So then, now that we have established the size of jar, how many tomatoes then would you need per jar, as we're going along our math trajectory?
Sean O'Brien 6:24
Yeah, that's a great question. So that entirely depends on your recipe. So once, probably early on, when you're trying to figure out how to, how much food that you want to grow - well, let's rewind that a little bit. So you've got your jars, you know, you want quart jars of tomato sauce. Then you really want to start looking at recipes, because oftentimes recipes will tell you exactly how many pounds of tomatoes, or whatever, we're going to stick with the tomato theme. So we'll, we'll just keep with tomatoes.
Kendall Kunelius 6:54
I love a good tomato. I'm all about it.
Sean O'Brien 7:00
So oftentimes your food preservation recipe will tell you how many pounds of food you will need to process and then can. Now, again, this is specific to canning, but you might need for an eight jar full load of a canner, you might need 20 or 30 pounds of tomatoes. So if that's the case, that sounds like a lot of tomatoes, quite a bit. They reduce quite a bit as you process them. But then eight jars for eight quart jars of tomatoes, I'll need 20 to 30 pounds. Now, if you only want eight jars, that's one thing. But then you have to do a little bit more math and say, Okay, well, eight jars. I really want 24 jars. So that means I'm going to need a whole lot of tomatoes, maybe, like 100 or more pounds of tomatoes. And so that's a big consideration. So then you take that number, so I need say, I need 150 pounds of tomatoes. Then you have to look at your tomato varieties. And if you're trying to plan for how many tomatoes to grow, how many tomato plants to grow, you have to start thinking about, okay, so I need x number of plants, and that will give me x pounds of tomatoes, right? And there are so many variables at play here. So you can look at average yield for a tomato plant, and you can say, Okay, I'm going to get, maybe I'm going to get 20 tomatoes out of this. How many ounces or pounds per tomatoes am I going to get? Those big tomatoes that are half a pound to three quarters of a pound, or am I going to grow plum tomatoes that might weigh significantly less than that? So variety matters, conditions matter. Weather matters, soil conditions matter. It's really difficult to get a hard grasp on how many tomatoes you're gonna get from a single plant.
Rebecca Dube 9:02
Does it benefit someone then to maybe plan an overage of plants, saying, I may have a tough year, or also have a backup plan for, you know, those years when your tomatoes simply explode and you've got way more than you thought you'd have. Well, then you have a system to maybe more jars and you can preserve even more.
Sean O'Brien 9:22
Well I always think it's better to grow significantly more than you need. I would say 10 to 15 to even 20% more than you think you're going to need, because you will have some attrition. You're going to have maybe insect pests, you're going to have bad weather. There's lots of things. There are lots of things that can happen to your garden that will impact your yield.
Kendall Kunelius 9:42
So speaking of pests, here's a question I feel like I've heard before from a lot of people who talk about eating produce, right? So the produce that we see in the store is not necessarily a representative of what you might be pulling out of your garden. It's very selected to look perfect and look good on a display. If you have some insect damage, or, let's say you have an issue where the plant wilted and maybe things don't look the best, or even overripe, or an under ripe piece of fruit, like a tomato, could you still use that fruit? What is the condition of the plant or the fruit look like, and how does that impact your overall canning success?
Sean O'Brien 10:19
Yeah, totally. I mean, a lot of times you'll see at farms, they'll sell seconds for canning or processing in some way.
Kendall Kunelius 10:27
I was hoping you'd go here, keep going!
Sean O'Brien 10:29
I think that that's someplace where it doesn't matter if they're perfect. You don't want anything rotten, of course, you don't want anything bruised or anything like that. But tomatoes that aren't don't look esthetically perfect, are perfectly good for preserving.
Kendall Kunelius 10:48
I'm thinking like apples, like apple drops, yeah, at the end of the season, and cider and stuff.
Sean O'Brien 10:52
Well, yeah. I mean, there are so many things you can do with lots and lots of produce and fruit and vegetables. So, if you think you've got a little bit of insect damage, cut it out and use the rest of it. It's not going to hurt you. It's not going to hurt the quality of the product that you're making. So I'm all for using as much as you can of what you have. That's my philosophy. And I think that people get a little bit weird about, you know, especially when it comes to food safety things. I don't want to diminish the importance of food safety in any way, because it is really important. But I think that when it comes to the esthetics of food, especially when you're processing food into a form that's going to preserve for a long period of time, you've got some latitude there for sure.
Kendall Kunelius 11:37
Thinking back to our little opening there, as we were sitting and sipping our cocoa and looking through seed catalogs, which, by the way, that's a slippery slope. I got a seed gift certificate from my sister-in-law for Christmas this year. And I was like, oh, I'll just go on a website and get an - holy mackerel and like, $50 in seeds later, I was like, whoops, I'm not gonna do that again.
Sean O'Brien 11:55
It happens to all of us.
Kendall Kunelius 11:59
Oh my gosh, and doesn't it? And so that's the question, right? If I'm going to look at seeds, and I'm like, Okay, I don't want to spend $100 on seeds to try new varieties. And I'm looking at the descriptions and I'm looking at the pictures, how do I know? Because this could be tomatoes, it could be cucumbers, it could be anything, even carrots, if you do like pickled carrots or Dilly beans, like pickling beans. How do I know if that variety is going to work really well for me for both fresh eating and preserving? Or is it worth spending money and getting two varieties, one that you want to eat right away and one that you plan on using for preserving that's labeled as like a pickling cucumber or like a roma tomato, like a sauce tomato?
Sean O'Brien 12:39
Yeah, that's a great point. And I think that is exactly what I would recommend, is choosing different varieties that do different things for you. And I would recommend even trying to steer away from looking at the pictures too much in those seed catalogs. Because I know, I know it's tempting to just see these beautiful vegetables that have been professionally photographed, but at the same time, I think it's often more instructive to read the descriptions and to read what they're good for, because you can get a lot of good information from these seed catalogs, whether online or whether you've got a physical catalog, they often have a lot of good information. They will tell you, this is good for preserving or this is good for storage, if you're talking about root crops and things like that. So read those descriptions. Some things will be better for eating fresh. Some won't store as well. So read what the seed companies have to tell you and make your decisions based on that. I like to do that. I think for tomatoes, I think it's a great example. Like cherry tomatoes, I don't like to preserve cherry tomatoes. I like to eat them right away, like in salads or -
Kendall Kunelius 13:42
Warm from the garden.
Sean O'Brien 13:45
So I think that seed catalogs are a wealth of information, and you can learn a lot about the varieties, and just cover up the pictures if you can.
Kendall Kunelius 13:56
I'm giggling to myself thinking, I know those pictures are so beautiful, and to be 100% honest and transparent, my Achilles heel are flowers. I love perennials. I love planting the wildflower look. So as much as vegetables excite me, the flower thing is a whole other thing. And on a very side note, I'm trying edible nasturtiums this year. Trying different varieties of edible nasturtiums to kind of like pretty up my plate. Rebecca, this makes me think of the food episode we did with Kate and Amy. You talked about having a colorful plate is the healthiest way to go. And this whole conversation makes me think about that. Even in the winter, you can still access a beautiful, colorful plate because you've preserved everything that you were harvesting during the summer and during the fall. Speaking of preserving and Sean, I want to get back to what you mentioned earlier in the episode about different methods. Because, right, we were just talking about canning, but you talked about drying. We were talking about freezing. I want to ask you about water glassing eggs. And I don't know if you're familiar with this? I own chickens. And there are times of the year when I have a glut of eggs. What do you think about that? What do you feel about that?
Sean O'Brien 15:07
Yeah, so water glassing eggs is a thing that I am just beginning to do some research on here. It's really interesting, because this was a historical method back in the old days; this is the way that they used to preserve eggs. It involves placing fresh eggs in water with a - what is it, lime or sodium silicate? It's pickling lime, I think. And that would, supposedly, that would close up the pores of the membrane of the egg, and tell me if I'm if I'm not remembering this correctly, but it is a method that is now deemed to be pretty unsafe. So from from the research that I've done recently is that the USDA and the FDA do not recommend it. I think there's too much of a potential risk of foodborne disease, especially because there are things that can happen. If the temperature of the water that the eggs are in are different from the eggs, if there's too much of a temperature difference between them, then it will pull in water. There are lots of things that can go wrong there. And I know that there are lots of trends that are happening through social media, and people are trying to resurrect these old methods of food preservation that their grandparents did or their great grandparents did. I think that a lot of these methods are really interesting. Now, whether they're all safe is another question. I get a lot of people in the classes that I teach on canning telling me about the canning methods that their grandparents used to use. And they say, Well, my my grandmother never got sick. We never got sick from eating the food that they preserved. And, you know, they didn't, and they got lucky, because there are a lot of methods out there that are just scientifically unsafe. And so while most people won't get sick from it, there is still a chance of getting sick. So we have better methods now. If you have chickens and you get a lot of eggs, you can certainly refrigerate those eggs for a long period of time. You could also give those eggs to your neighbors and friends and things like that. If you're worried, or if your hens reduce their laying amounts in the wintertime, there are things that you can do to help them continue that, like giving them a little bit of light, right? Like so you don't have to worry about preserving those eggs for a year or two. You can kind of just keep it going using a little bit of light in their hen house, in their coop, and so you don't have to have your eggs preserved unsafely, so to speak.
Rebecca Dube 17:49
So then what are some of the other methods of preservation that you had mentioned, freezing or drying, or things such as that?
Sean O'Brien 17:57
Yeah, so there's certainly freezing. And if you're raising chickens for meat, for instance, then that is a great way to preserve food for the whole year. There are certain safety implications of that, of course, you don't want your freezer to be above zero degrees at any point. And there are calculations that you can do. If you lose power for a certain amount of time, then your freezer will stay safe for a certain amount of time. Normally, [we have] poor weather here in New Hampshire. A lot of people lose power. If you don't have a generator, then it's a big concern if you lose power for a longer period of time. And I get a lot of questions at the Education Center here. People say I lost power for two hours, do I have to throw away everything in my fridge or freezer? Obviously, like so many things that we talk about at Extension, it really depends. It depends on how full your freezer was, it depends on how long your power went out. It depends on how warm your - did you open your freezer? Did you open your refrigerator? That will cause a loss of of cold.
Kendall Kunelius 19:04
I was gonna say, a label I was reading the other day - So I have a farm stand up the road from me that I love, and they buy a lot of fresh baked produce. They have an excellent gluten-free bread distributor, and it says very clearly on the front, this is baked without preservatives, so eat it within seven days, and in those seven days, after you open it, make sure it goes in the refrigerator; which I think is interesting, and where I'm kind of going with this is; you're saying we have different foods in our refrigerators, right? So you may have, oh, I don't know. I'm thinking, you know, a shelf stable item that has preservatives in it that then after you open, it goes in the refrigerator. But I'm thinking, if you're doing preserving yourself, you probably won't add preservatives, maybe something like a citric acid or something if you're doing a really specific recipe. But you know, I guess I'm thinking, Is there a difference between the food that you buy from the store that you know has added preservatives and the safety of the food that you've made, canning or preserving, or even like a beef jerky or something in your fridge, and does that matter about how quickly it will go bad?
Sean O'Brien 20:08
Yeah, absolutely, you're right. One of the reasons why we preserve our own food is because we don't want to add preservatives, right? So depending on which food preservation methods you're using, there are lengths of time that is generally accepted by the USDA, for how long food will last. So for drying things for vegetables and fruit, it's between three months and 12 months. For freezing, if things are kept frozen, then they'll last forever -food-safety wise. However, the quality will go downhill over a certain amount of time, after about a year for most things. So you have these generally accepted lengths of time for most things that you can - it's about a year, you want to use your food within a year. So yeah, things won't last forever when you preserve them. But hopefully, if you preserve them, and if you know you're going to eat them, then you don't really have to worry about that too much. It kind of goes back to the whole, the beginning of this conversation, where you really want to be planning your food preserving for what you want to eat. Don't preserve things that you don't want to eat. You don't want to end up with jars of jam that it's a flavor that you don't like, and it's been sitting on your counter for two, three years, right? And if it starts getting towards the end of that useful life, then maybe it's time to think about giving it to friends that you know will will eat it, friends and family and things like that. Use it up, make sure it doesn't go too long.
Rebecca Dube 21:48
And you could also plan for creating products to sell in winter markets, couldn't you? If you chose to have that additional income stream selling preserved items in the winter markets.
Speaker 1 22:00
Yeah, that's exactly right. There are laws about that. You can go on the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services website. Different products will, they will have different rules. So if you have a potentially harmful product, that will have different rules than something like a jam or jelly that is generally regarded as safe. So you might need a homestead license, and Kendall, maybe you can talk a little more about that.
Kendall Kunelius 22:27
Yeah, I would say, rather than getting into those specifics, we pointed at our last episode, we pointed folks to the Legal Guide for New Hampshire Producers. That's where I'd point folks in this case too. I will say I know one of the laws in there has changed. The last update that had was 2023 and there is one of the homesteading laws that has changed and updated since then. So I love your recommendation of folks going to the DHHS website. I think that's the first stop that I would go to. And then I would go to the legal guide for the labeling requirements. It has a really good section on how to label a jar for sale, and the exemptions that apply have to be labeled on there too, if you're a commercial farmer, or if you're a homesteader, and you want to be selling a little bit on the side, if you have extra, you're definitely going to want to take a look at those things just to protect yourself from liability. I mean, there are laws around it for a reason. And like you said, Sean, we don't want people getting sick. And even if someone's like, well, I don't want to, that's - yeah, yeah, make sure that you're protecting yourself by following the rules and regulations there. So the other question I wanted to ask about, Sean, was the actual investment and the equipment needed for preservation. So I'll give a quick example, and then I'll turn it over to you. One of the investments that my husband and I made was a vacuum sealer. My husband is a hunter, and we depend on having a freezer full of venison every year. That's our plan. In the fall he goes hunting, and then we process a deer. And I should say, we're very lucky, because he has a family member who used to be a meat cutter for 26 years. So we have a great resource who helps us get every bit of edible meat from that deer. But that means that we have to really have a good plan for labeling and for vacuum sealing, processing and then putting it away in the freezer so that we can eat all that for the winter and usually into the spring too. So my favorite tools for that are obviously the vacuum sealer and having good quality freezer bags. But I also got an attachment to go on my KitchenAid mixer that's like a meat grinder. So I don't know if you want to talk about your favorite pieces of equipment, how much you want to invest in that, and what's easily accessible for somebody who just wants to start trying any type of preservation method?
Sean O'Brien 24:44
Yeah, that's a great question. I think that a vacuum sealer is one of the best things that you can get, especially for freezing. Freezing meat is, like you mentioned, definitely, but vegetables and fruits too, because so much of the degradation in quality of food comes from oxidation, ice crystals, and being exposed to air when it's already preserved. What that food sealer does is it prevents oxygen from being around that food source. So that's great. Yeah. So the equipment you know, you can really dive into this in a serious way and spend a lot of money. But again, I think it should be really specific to the ways in which you like to preserve or the way in in which you want to have your food. So if you, if you want that tomato sauce, then you're probably going to need either a water bath canner or a pressure canner. You can get away for high acid foods by just having a water bath canner. Low acid foods, like things that are preserved in water, like vegetables that are preserved in water, if you're canning any meats or anything like that, or poultry or seafood, you're going to need a pressure canner for that. And those things aren't terribly expensive. Water bath canners, I think you can get for $60, $80 about. Pressure canners might be a little bit more because they're a little bit more specialized, with either a dial gage or a weighted set that go on top of those.
Speaker 1 26:12
So I'm sorry, a pressure canner?
Sean O'Brien 26:15
Yeah, a pressure canner. So a pressure canner, and thank you for stopping me there, because this is a great point to talk about here. So water bath scanning, let me, let me explain what that is first, because that's the kind of the basic thing. Water bath canning, you're submerging your filled jars with lids on them. Sealed jars, well, they're not sealed yet, but, with a band in the little metal metal lid, so a two piece lid. So you're submerging your jars of food in water, and you're processing them at boiling point for a given amount of time, depending on the recipe. In pressure canning, you are you're only using a little bit of liquid, but your canner actually will sit on your lid, will sit on the top, and it will lock in place, and that will allow steam to build up to temperatures above 212 degrees, which is the boiling point. So with a water bath canner you're getting to 212 degrees. But that's fine for high acid foods, because that will kill bacteria in your food jars. But for things that are low acid, you really have to make sure that you're getting that temperature above 212 degrees, because your food is not in a highly acidic environment where Clostridium botulinum can grow. So that's kind of the difference between water bath canning and pressure canning. It's really just about about temperature there.
Rebecca Dube 27:40
And if you have a pressure gauge already, am I correct in that UNH does offer a service in which they will calibrate your pressure gauge for you?
Sean O'Brien 27:52
So we don't calibrate them, but we do test them to make sure that they're active. So yes, you can send them to the Education Center in Goffstown 329, Mast Road, Suite 115. We also have - our Grafton office will do it, and our Carroll County Office will do it. So yeah, we'll test them to make sure they're within tolerances, but if they are off, then you can either send them back to the company where you got them from, or buy a new one and start over there,
Rebecca Dube 28:22
Because that way you have that confidence that it's doing its job correctly and your food is safe.
Sean O'Brien 28:28
Yeah, and that's a really good point, because, a lot of people who are new to food preserving and new to canning are really concerned, and for good reason about food safety right? They want to do it right. They want to make sure that they're doing it safely. They don't want to poison themselves or their family or friends, obviously. So getting your dial gauge tested for accuracy is a great thing to do every year, even if it's new. It doesn't hurt to know for sure that it's accurate. The other way that pressure canners work are they have these little weights that sit on top of the of the lid, and those will only release air or steam at a certain weight. So when we talk about the amount of steam, or the pressure of steam inside the canner, we talk about it in psi, pounds per square inch. Oftentimes, recipes will call for 10, 15, or 20 pounds of steam, or 10, 15, 20 psi. So you take your little weight and you put it on the top of the lid, and you've got a 10 pound weight, then it will build up pressure until 10 pounds, and then release that pressure after that. So it's actually a little bit easier, because then you don't have to adjust your heat on your stove quite as much. You can kind of just crank it up really high. And then the pressure gauge, the weighted gauge, will regulate the pressure inside for you. Where if you have the dial gauge, you have to play with it a little bit more. Both of them are perfectly safe and can be just as accurate.
Rebecca Dube 30:08
Interesting. What I'm interested in is hearing a little bit more about the drying method as well. Is that limited to fruits, or how can that be used?
Sean O'Brien 30:17
Yeah, that's a good question, too. So drying, you can do lots of different things with drying. You can do vegetables, you can do meats. Jerky is a great way to dry food. There are lots of different recipes out there. This is a method that I use personally. I dry a lot of things. I think some things dry better than others. There was a, I'm not going to remember where I found it, but there's a there's a great chart on which foods dry well and which foods don't dry as well.
Kendall Kunelius 30:48
If we find it, we'll put it in the show notes We'll do our homework.
Sean O'Brien 30:52
I'll find it, and I'll send it along. So yeah, some things are going to dry better than others. And there's different methods you can do, especially with fruit. You could do a fruit juice dip with your fruit, or a honey dip even, before you dry it. So there's lots of different methods. I mean, there's so many recipes out there, and maybe this is a great spot to talk about finding good recipes, in fact. This is a question that we get at the Education Center all the time about finding good recipes. How do I find good recipes? How do I sift through the really, probably millions of recipes online these days?
Yeah, and they're difficult to use. The canning recipes and just the general, gluten free, any recipe you find is hard to read and get through. So I don't know if you want to address that too. How do you pick a good recipe? But then, what are your resources that are just, they give you the facts, the straightforward and you get what you need.
Yeah, definitely. So I really recommend, and this is what I recommend anytime I'm doing a canning class, is going to either an Extension service, UNH Extension is great, but some Extensions do more canning recipes than others. The ones I'm thinking of are Penn State and University of Georgia, which runs the National Center for Home Food Preservation, which is an absolutely great website and resource. They are USDA-affiliated, so I really, really recommend checking out their website. So they're a great resource. Everything on their website is USDA approved, anything from an Extension service, an Extension website, a Cooperative Extension throughout the country, I would trust to find a good recipe that's going to be safe and tested by a lab, and that's really what you want. So all these recipes you see on either social media or blogs or anything like that, that you don't know where the recipe came from, you know, it could be great grandma's recipe, it could be something that somebody just created out of thin air because they like the flavors, those I really would steer away from because you just don't know whether they're going to be safe or not. The government labs or the private labs that test the food, test food for their safety, and test the recipes and the processes for safety. And if you don't know what you're getting, then it's kind of like hands in the air. You don't know. So Extensions, government websites, the USDA. The USDA has their complete guide to food preservation. It's all online. They make a print copy, but you can find it all online for free. And then there's, there's a couple of books that I would recommend. The Ball Blue Book is probably the go-to guide. This is the one that's been around for 40 or so years. They just came out with a new edition this past year, 2024 so I picked that up. They've got a few more recipes in there. That's a great one. You can find that at most stores, garden stores have that. Find that online as well.
Rebecca Dube 34:05
Ball referring to the brand of jars you usually use for canning, right?
Sean O'Brien 34:08
Exactly. Yeah. So it is the company, the Ball jar company. They've put out this canning guide for a lot of years, and they've been the go-to source for a long time. That's probably the most available book out there. There's also So Easy to Preserve, also by the University of Georgia. It's a thicker book. It's got more recipes. I think it's also quite a bit more expensive. All of those recipes that are in that book are also on the National Center for Home Food Preservation website, the University of Georgia. So you can find all those there. I like having the physical books. Some people are fine with just finding them online as well. So you know all that to say, I think I recommend folks be skeptical of online resources in terms of recipes now, especially especially with canning. When you're doing a process that you're making food products that can be shelf stable, if you're not canning correctly, if you're not following a good process, or if the ingredients are not appropriate, then you have to be careful about that. There are other ways of food preserving that are sometimes less rigid about what you have to do. You can change out ingredients sometimes in some food preserving recipes. In canning, you really cannot, except for dry herbs sometimes in canning. But other than that, you really don't want to be changing your recipe at all. Now, if you're talking about refrigerator pickling, which is something we haven't talked about yet, but that's one of my favorite things to do. I absolutely love it. If you're talking about refrigerator pickling, you're keeping - before I start getting into that, maybe I should define that a little bit. So pickling itself is- there are two methods to use for pickling, and the first is using vinegar. It's called a quick pickling process. It's kind of the traditional way of making cucumber pickles. You use vinegar in a solution with salt and water and sugar sometimes, and then you can can that up in a water bath canner. It's high acid because you're using vinegar. The other way of pickling is to use lacto fermentation, and that's blown up in the last few years, I think. We're talking about sour pickles, kimchi, sauerkraut.
Kendall Kunelius 36:34
I love kimchi. Oh, do I love kimchi.
Sean O'Brien 36:36
I've got like, three different kinds of kimchi in my fridge right now that I've made, so I'm pumped about it. So that's another process. Both are pickling because the lacto fermentation process creates an acidic environment. So with the quick-pickling process, you're using vinegar to create that acidic environment. With lacto fermentation, you're kind of harnessing bacteria to create that acidic environment. Now, if you are going to can those, obviously you need to follow those recipes and directions to a tee. However, if you're going to refrigerate those, if you're going to take your product and then put it directly into the refrigerator, you've got a little bit more wiggle room about what you can add to that. You can play around with it a little bit more. You can add different ingredients as long as it stays refrigerated, as long as you're not seeing any mold or anything on top. We usually recommend that you don't leave things in the fridge longer than two weeks. But you've got a little bit more wiggle room with ingredients on that. And I just wanted to stress that when you are canning, you really should be following the exact ingredient list and the exact processes, but there are other food preservation methods that you can get a little bit more creative with.
Rebecca Dube 37:52
Terrific.
Kendall Kunelius 37:54
Sean, we just covered a lot of information, so we have a lot of great sources. I really appreciate your in-depth knowledge about the exact vinegar, no vinegar, acid, the lacto fermentation, and then the specifics that you noted in terms of beginning of the episode, talking about calculating out how much you want to preserve, and the pounds of tomatoes and such. And we asked you a lot of questions, but is there a question that we didn't ask you that you wanted to answer, or anything else that you want to share?
Sean O'Brien 38:20
Well, I found a lot of joy in preserving food. A lot of people do it for the utility of it, because you can preserve your harvest, you can make it last longer, and that's great. And I think if that's something you're interested in, go for it. However, I also think that it can be a really fun way to create new things and try new foods and experiment with different ways of preserving that not only preserve food, but also change flavors and textures. And I recommend that folks try it out and I recommend that you do it in a safe way that you feel comfortable with. Look for good quality recipes. Come to canning classes. If you ever have questions about food preservation in any way, you can definitely reach out to the info line. I'm going to do a little info line plug here, because I have to do it. Do it. Yeah, yeah. So the UNH Extension runs a yard and garden info line, and we answer all kinds of questions for gardening and anything in that realm of of soils and gardens and trees and shrubs, and pollinators and all that good stuff. And food preservation is definitely in that realm. So if you have questions about that, please reach out to us. You can reach out to the info line at 877-398-4769. You can also find a web form on our website at extension.unh.edu. We have a question form that you fill out, and we have Master Gardeners and Natural Resources Stewards answering those questions for you. So if it's a food preservation question, chances are I'm going to answer it so you can fill out that web form or give us a call, and I will do my best to answer. We also have a staff of food safety field specialists that if I get stumped by a question, then we can push it out to them and we can attack it as a group.
Kendall Kunelius 40:14
They're a cool group of people. We don't talk about them often enough in Extension, but they are quite the team. I'm always impressed with their knowledge. Yeah, they have just a wealth of knowledge. And I did want to add in a quick plug too, for our local farms that have pick-your-own. So if you aren't producing enough veggies or fruits or even meat that you want to be preserving, there's nothing wrong with going to a big pick-your-own operation. We have a lot of blueberry farms, a lot of pick-your-own farms in our area. But I'm thinking blueberries, specifically, are an easy one to go and try different varieties. So getting back to our initial point of saying, Well, how do you know that you like the seeds you're going to order? You could always go to a pick-your-own farm, ask them about the varieties they have, pick some of those, and see how they can. I'm thinking, Sean, about what you were saying, like following specific recipes, or a recipe calls for a roma tomato versus a cherry tomato, you can find access to all of those different varieties of things in your local food system, probably in New Hampshire. It's safe to say people grow a lot of different things, so I would definitely say, go check out your local farms, ask them about what they grow and then use that to inform some of the recipes that you're going to try.
Sean O'Brien 41:25
Absolutely, the farmers in New Hampshire are such incredible sources of knowledge. Just go and talk to your local farmer, and you'll be amazed at what they can tell you. Really, it's amazing how much they know. I mean, you know, a lot of them have been doing it for a long time, and really know their varieties and methods of growing really well. So give them a chat.
Rebecca Dube 41:47
Great. Well thank you, for all of your information and knowledge and joining us here today, we really get a lot of great information. And we want to thank everyone for joining us for our first episode in Season Two, and we will be talking to you again soon on our next episode of Shared Soil.
Kendall Kunelius 42:11
Shared Soil is a production of University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension, an equal opportunity educator and employer. Views expressed on this podcast are not necessarily those of the university, its trustees or its volunteers. Inclusion or exclusion of commercial products in this podcast does not imply endorsement. The University of New Hampshire, US Department of Agriculture, and New Hampshire counties cooperate to provide Extension programming in the Granite State. Learn more at extension.unh.edu.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
