Creativity Forbidden

I’m all bummed out because I learned a sad fact about home canning.

Before I got into it, I read stuff on the web, and I got the impression that I would be able to can my own recipes. I put up seven pints of chili. Then I learned that using your own recipes is a huge canning faux pas.

I thought home canning was a technology that had been perfected in basements, by millions of mothers and grandmothers. But it turns out there are food laboratories that put recipes together. They put temperature probes into jars full of food, and they process them, and they record the results. Then they come up with approved pressure and time guidelines for the recipes they use. If you deviate substantially from those recipes, you may not heat all areas of your jars enough, and then you get botulism, which takes months to go away. Meanwhile, people tell you how much younger you look.

This means you have to find USDA-approved recipes and use them. What good is that? If I wanted other people’s bad recipes, I wouldn’t waste time putting together my own wonderful recipes. Imagine how badly food scientists cook.

I’m going to see what I can do to work around this. Sometimes it’s possibly to use an approved recipe and then add your own stuff when you open the jar. But if the approved recipes are so bad they can’t be fixed, that won’t work.

My chili has cheddar cheese melted into it, so I’m sure it has much more fat in it than the USDA recipe (which is probably boring and bland). Adding fat can throw off processing times. I have to study up on this and see what I can do.

Luckily, pork sausage is approved for canning. For some reason, they don’t tell you to cook it through. That seems odd. Maybe it cooks through when you put it in the canner.

I also read that if your canner drops below the required pressure, you have to start over. You have to raise it to the right pressure and set the time to zero again. The processing you did before you lost pressure doesn’t count.

Here’s good news. You can destroy botulin by boiling your food for ten minutes. I’ve also seen twenty minutes mentioned, so take it for what it’s worth. Never trust me when it comes to food safety.

I stuck my remaining chili in the fridge. I’ll get rid of it fast enough to avoid problems. It’s probably fine, but botulism sounds like it’s no fun at all, so I’m not ready to take a chance.

I found out what killed my pressure canner. The gasket has a tiny hole in it. I’m going to have to go to Goodman’s and get a couple of new ones. Didn’t see this coming.

Today I’ll check out my picnic shoulders, and if they smell okay, I’ll go ahead and make sausage. If not, I’ll brine them in baking soda to kill the stench. Boar taint is the thing that ruins pork sausage, and you don’t have to tolerate it.

Hmm…will this upset the canning schedule because it reduces the acidity? Probably not. I don’t think meat is acidic enough to retard the growth of anything, so treating it with baking soda probably won’t matter.