Odds are fairly good that if you have a vegetable garden or any fruit trees in your yard that you know how to go about canning these items so that you can have them year-round. Whether you can tomatoes so you will have them during the winter or pickle cucumbers, growing our own food and preserving it at home has been commonplace in American culture for a very long time. Pickles, jams, jellies, marmalades, soups, or chutneys have been being made in homes across the country and the world for quite a while and it is still going on today because some people prefer home-made goods to their commercial counterparts.
There are benefits to both growing and canning your own food at home, even though a process that is similar is used by commercial food canners worldwide. One benefit is that you have the knowledge of just how sterile the equipment being used to preserve your food is. You know how clean the items are that you are using to can your food. When you purchase these items in a store, you do not know whether the equipment used was clean or not. You also have the benefit of knowing what pesticides, if any, were used on the fruits and vegetables that you are preserving. You do not have to be exposed to more pesticides and chemicals than you would use to protect your own garden from insects and different kinds of rodents.
One problem with home-canning, though, is that if it is not done properly, mold can start to grow inside the jars of food that you thought that you were preserving so well. Mold grows in everything that is preserved eventually, anyway, but it can occur much sooner if the food that you can in your kitchen is not properly preserved. Most home-canning guides suggest that you date everything you can and use it within a year to avoid spoilage.
Mold-contaminated jars can be a problem, but you can avoid this problem most of the time by making sure the equipment that you use is sterile. You can sterilize glass jars by filling them and your canning pot with hot water (not boiling) and bringing the pot to a slow boil for around 10 minutes. This should effectively remove all microbes and spores from the water.
Any food you can should be washed and thoroughly inspected. Questionable items should not be canned, but thrown away.
Food should also be packed loosely in the jars so that the food inside can be completely heated throughout. If the temperature does not get high enough, it will not be completely sterilized. Mold spores, bacteria, and yeast can continue to grow even in high temperatures.
Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of quality
damage restoration companies and
mold removal companies across the united states.
