The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: All About Canning

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

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Welcome back to the Matterfacts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping, guns, and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mofpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravele. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. So you know what's really annoying is when you remember one thing and you forget something else, and I actually changed the intro for the audio podcast, but I completely forgot to change it

here. And now I have to change the whole roll-in video because it's all like me and Andrew and you're not included. I can get you some B-Real eventually. Yeah, it's just... This whole podcast producing thing is a pain in the behind. I don't know why in the world anybody would do this willingly. I mean...

It's kind of fun. Yeah, it is fun. I have to keep reminding myself the fact that I really do enjoy doing this. I mean, I wouldn't have done it for eight years if I didn't. But every now and then I think to myself, I'm like, oh, I could kick my own butt. The funny part is when I screw something up on the other show and Gillian threatens to fire me, and I'm like, I don't know who else you think is going to work for a kiss every now and then. You're definitely her cheapest option.

I am absolutely her cheapest option. I work cheaper than anybody she knows. At least until Piper figures out computers real good. You know, my daughter has no interest in this podcast whatsoever or raising values. She is totally happy to be like, you know,

silent in the background unknown. That's the beauty of being a producer. If you're a producer and not a host, you can be a silent background. Yeah, but she would want payment. And for some reason, roof over her head, bed, food, none of that seems to count. No, no, that doesn't. No, for sure. Well, okay.

So it's Phil and Nick on this evening. We're going to talk about canning because I don't can. I know nothing about canning. My family has never done canning and you know a lot about it. So maybe by the end of this, you can smooth talk me into getting into it. But before we do. I've got a grandma that knows a lot about it. Okay.

Well, compared... Me and your grandma could swap notes. I could tell her all about night vision and she could tell me all about canning. But she's not here

and you are. Fantastic. First, though, I do have to give a shout-out to all the patrons. Thank you for supporting the show. You make this not be a financial drain

on my pocket, which I deeply appreciate. It's not like we make money doing this, but it's really nice not to have to cut checks for like you know five hundred five six hundred dollars in a month to pay for bandwidth and stuff like that so it's really cool that y'all chip in a couple of bucks and listen

to us ramble on also merch we've been talking about merch merch has finally arrived so for those of you who are listening to this in audio you'll just have to deal with watch looking on instagram but the first proofs from the batch that we can send out to southern gals are done the apocalyptics warlord shirt is kind of a riff off a street fighter i personally think it's hilarious because if you're into my humor then that should resonate with you and then there's what would bert do if you don't know who bert is i question your life decisions and you know maybe i'm just the only weirdo that grew up thinking that a guy with a rec room full of guns and a cute wife was like something to aspire towards in my older age but i'm halfway

there i mean you know i don't have an elephant gun. I should fix that. Actually, I know a gal that's got one for sale. Yeah. That's the last thing my checking account needs to find out about. 460 Weatherby. No. Your shoulder doesn't need it either. Neither my shoulder, nor my checking account, nor my daughter's college fund, nor my reloading bench. None of those things need to know anything about a 460. I still have this weird urge to build like a 458 SOCOM upper, and I'm cringing at that already.

Yeah. You know, if you have a purpose for it, they make sense. Hog hunting, fantastic. But how many hogs are there in louisiana right now honestly honestly yeah i almost got a i almost got a call from my wife's uncle to go out there with my night vision rig and smoke a whole pack of them several months ago well it sounds like you have justification yeah well the problem is like he told me about this and i was like okay i gotta really quickly gonna get a hunting license because in louisiana they changed

the they they did relax the laws thankfully but they they've deemed hogs to be outlaw quadrupeds so you can take them in like there is no season there is no bag limit you find them you burn them down period in discussion daytime nighttime doesn't matter night vision no caliber limitations it's like shooting nutra on the levees out here like you find a hog burn them down the only problem is you have to have a basic hunting license and at the moment i didn't have one because i didn't grow up in a family of hunters and by the time i got by the time i got the hunter safety course and the hunter and the hunting license i called my wife's uncle and he was like yeah my neighbor put a trap out

for him and got like the whole friggin the whole bunch of them yeah unfortunately for him you know we do have a hog problem around here so they they'll be back sooner or later. And when they do, I got a PBS 14 and I mean, he burnt, he burnt down three of them, I think with a five, five, six. Nice. So they're not, you can do it for sure. Yeah. They're not enormous hogs, you know, like you can took, you can knock them down to the five, five, six, but if I had a four, yeah, but if I had a four 58, I'd be a little bit more enthusiastic about the proposition

I mean 458 will do everything but converting them to bacon right there in the field for sure also Prepper Camp is coming up in September it's just a few weeks away if you're interested you should go to PrepperCamp.com and you should find out about it it's probably pushing it a little bit to get in this year, like you could still get tickets, but I don't know where in the heck you would sleep at this point because it's getting

really close and the place always sells out. So if you're curious and you think you can swing it, it's worth looking into. And if you can't swing it, then myself and Andrew and my wife and my daughter will be out there this year, along with a whole bunch of other miscreants. And I'm sure we'll be talking about it afterwards. So, Nick, why canning? What is canning, first of all? All right. So everybody's familiar with canned food at the grocery store. So this is how you did it at home back in the day. Glass jars, lid, ring, a little bit of heat. The whole purpose

behind it is it gives you energy-free food storage. Once you're done with the canning process, the food is fully cooked. The food is shelf stable. So no refrigeration, no freezing needed. You don't have to cook it when it's done. I mean, it might not taste that great cold, but the stuff will last a considerably long time. I don't know if this will show up on camera. This is my uncle's batch of hot peppers from 2021. We're still eating through that because he grew,

I think like an eighth of an acre of just hot peppers and canned them all. They're fantastic, by the way. It's pickled garlic and hot peppers. This one, applesauce. So, essentially, what it gives you is it gives you food preservation at home, at scale, whatever scale you feel you need. Everybody's probably seen the ball mason jars. That's what I use. That's what a lot of people use.

They're one of your better branded ones and more reliable. I mean, it's kind of a low cost deal on the long term too. The jars are reusable. The rings are reusable. Some people argue the lids are reusable. I've never tested that myself, but there are people that claim that you can do it just fine for a few uses. You know, it just kind of, it extends the lifespan of whatever you're growing in the garden, whatever you buy from the local farmer's market or anything like that from days, weeks to years. And I'm assuming it's doing this by putting the food in a hypoxic environment or oxygen-free environment.

Essentially, yeah. Hypoxic or a high acid or a super high sugar environment. Yeah. That all makes sense. I mean, that's all going to keep bacterial growth to a minimum, and that's what you're really after. Yep. Bacterial growth, it's supposed to keep to a minimum. It tries to keep the nutrition value as high as possible, but you are clicking it, so you do see some nutrition degradation.

looking at. So you do see some nutrition degradation. And realistically, they're like, as far as from like taste perspective, at least over the course of time that I've had canned food on the shelf, I've never noticed any taste degradation over the course of like, I think the oldest home canned stuff I've had has been five years. That's not what the USDA recommends you do, but it works for me. To hell with the USDA. Yeah. Well, I guess my question is, and I'm sure we're going to get into this more later, but does

the shelf life and the amount of taste degradation change depending on what you're canning? Because I know that my food storage method has always been fridge, of taste degradation change depending on what you're canning like because i know that like my my food storage method has always been fridge freezer deep freezer and then dry dry storage is really a lot of where we have a lot of our stuff and that's like we've tried to expand beyond just beans and rice but that's a lot of our dry storage because the way i grew up you know we

didn't we always planned for the freezer to fail well not just that but like the way I grew up, you know, we didn't, we always planned for. The freezer to fail. Well, not just that, but like the way I grew up, you know, we grew up on the Gulf Coast. So it's never, it's never, if you're going to catch a hurricane, it's how many years are you going to go before you get the next one? Or the big one. Yeah. Or the big one. And you know, the big one can knock out power for weeks on it.

Sure. So you just automatically assume if you don't have a generator, everything in your fridge and freezer is gone. If you do have a generator, your days are numbered. We've tried to make that a little bit more robust over time,

but at the end of the day, if the power was out long enough, everything in our fridge freezer and everything in our deep freezer is going to go, and we're going to be back to dry goods, which is why I've always put the majority of my effort there but i know from dry good storage there's certain things you can get away with storing for a good long time in a bucket

with an oxygen absorber sure and there's other stuff that in the exact same environment oxygen absorber no sunlight no moisture it'll still go bad in say six months, whereas other things will last years. I have not found anything that I have home canned, either pressure canned or just water bath canned, obviously depending on what it is, determines whether you have to do water bath or pressure canning. And we'll talk about that later, but I've not found anything that didn't get better over the course of six months to a year. And I've not found anything that I was disappointed by after two years. Five years, peppers and pickles, they get a little soft. That's basically what it is.

You lose the crunch on your pickles, in my opinion. Potatoes, the two times I have tried that, they didn't last that long because it was really easy to make mashed potatoes out of them. It's basically you just chunk up potatoes in a slightly briny water, pressure can that, stick it it on the shelf the great thing about that is along with a lot of canning methods everything is entirely cooked so when you take those out instead of having to boil the potatoes then mash them you can basically pull them out mash them heat them up and you're ready to go you know it saves yourself a lot of time later yeah i mean that also sounds like, especially, especially given like what I imagine most people are going to use canning for

is going to be like, you know, beyond the pantry food preservation, like in an emergency. And in that situation, if it's already cooked and may not be the greatest taste, but you could eat it straight out of the can, then that's saving you wood,

propane, fuel, or whatever else you need to make fire to heat up the food. I mean, that makes sense. And even then, you're not cooking it. You're warming it. So like your canned green beans. You get green beans fresh out of the garden, you got to boil them, right? Soften them up a little bit.

You don't have to do that with canned green beans. soften them up a little bit. You don't have to do that with canned green beans. You take them out of your home canning jar, dump them in a pot, warm them up till they are slightly above lukewarm or whatever your family likes, a little bit steaming hot, but you don't have to boil them for five or 10 minutes. You're ready to go. Sweetcorn. We do sweetcorn fairly often. A few years ago, one of my coworkers, associates, an old family friend of his grew way too much sweet corn for any sane family to eat. So they were giving it away in the big Rubbermaid tubs full and just dumping those Rubbermaid tubs in the back of people's

cars and trucks to get rid of the stuff because it was going to go bad sitting in the field. So I got two or three Rubbermaid tubs, went ahead and blanched it, cut it off the cob, threw it in the jars, pressure canned it, and we're still eating that corn. It's been three years. Granted, we don't eat a whole lot of corn, just me and my wife. The little half pint jar or whatever of it is good for us for dinner, but I haven't had to buy sweet corn in three years and it tastes just the same. It doesn't take up any freezer space. To me, that's the real gem, though, is because, like, I've got, like, a can rack, and I've made a point of, like, trying to reserve freezer space for things that have to stay frozen. Yeah.

So it's tons and tons of, like, bacon and sausage and beef and chicken and butter. You can can most of that, too. Can't do butter at home. But if you want to, you can do like say your stew meat. You can can that at home in a pressure can. It's not

the easiest thing to do because you got to cut it all up, season it all, pack it. Not a lot of people like dealing with large quantities of raw meat. And you do have to have a pressure canner. I mean, you know, it kind of can up the danger factor a little bit, which is another thing I wanted to talk about. Some of the stuff that can go wrong with home canning. Look, you're dealing with hot things.

You're dealing with glass. You're dealing with a lot of cutlery because you've got to cut up all of this stuff. So, you know, obviously your normal safety precautions for boiling water, normal safety precautions for having glassware around, normal safety precautions for having heavy-duty cutlery around. When my family does applesauce, this is one of the, that jar there, we'll usually do a couple bushels of apples at a time. So it's a half a dozen people at my grandparents' house and all playing around

with knives, slicing up apples, cutting up apples, and a couple of people boiling applesauce. Now you ever been scalded by boiling water, Phil? Yes. On several occasions. Alright. Unlike boiling water, boiling sauces and stews

burn you much worse and longer. Better or worse than boiling hydraulic fluid, do you think? Probably about the same. Probably about on par, especially because like there's a lovely memory from my army days. Thank you, Nick. Yeah, you do not want that.

So there are two different methods of canning. One's a little bit safer than the other. Neither one of them is extraordinarily dangerous. There's water bath canning, which you can do with any of your high acid foods. So think tomatoes, think some types of preserves like jam, jellies, stuff like that, that are really high sugar also kind of count. Hot peppers absolutely count. Pickles absolutely count as high acid. But when you start getting into things like meat, potatoes, soups, and stews and stuff like that, especially denser stuff like stews. High protein, high starch, in other words. High protein, high starch, low acid.

The key is low acid. And if you're worried about is this high acid, is this low acid, go to ballmasonjars.com. They will have a recipe there for anything you're looking to can. And I do mean anything. There's also a national food safety website that you can go to, but the ball recipes are far more all-encompassing. When you get to the low acid foods you move into it what's called a pressure canner so it's like a uh like a pressure cooker basically just way way bigger you know there's there's a couple different kinds um the american they're all american or american clad i think makes a a 100 cast aluminum with a metal on metal seal. That's kind of like

your gold standard of a pressure canner. It's got a dial pressure gauge so you can read how much pressure you're building. Then there's what you'll find at like your local Farm and Fleet, Menards, Home Depot, anything like that is a stainless steel vessel with a like little wobbler weight system that you set the amount of pressure in there based on the amount of weight you put on that little relief valve. If you follow the instructions on those and you keep them clean, they're perfectly safe. Obviously, the ones with the dial pressure indication are a little bit more accurate, but I've never had a problem with mine. I bought one of the cheap

stainless steel ones with a little wobbler pressure valve system so when you say keep them clean i'm assuming you're referring to that pressure relief valve clean because it sounds to me like if that gets coked up things run away from you it can it can especially if you have a jar fail in the canner say like you've got a jar of beef stew in the canner and it cracks open and tries to force some beef stew out of that vent, it's not going to work the way it should. Okay. So we've gone from dealing with boiling water with a hot,

with a hot water bath to a high pressure vessel to bait, to basically, to basically a pressure cooker bomb sitting on your your your range if you do it wrong enough yes oh the age old if you do it wrong enough right now if you follow the instructions that come with your canner they are very simple if you are at x elevation you require y weight to achieve Z pressure. And it's all spelled out in a table there. I think it's 5,000 feet it changes or 3,000 feet it changes.

I don't remember how mine was in the book. But they do tell you if you're outside of one of these ranges, you will have to go to their website and obviously the additional details but it went up to i think 10 000 feet or something absurdly high like that so you know well above the elevations you're probably going to be encountering you me we're within a thousand feet of sea level we're just going to use their generic system within 100 feet of sea level, but I get your point. Well, yeah. But the point is air pressure doesn't change that much within 1,000 feet. There again, as your elevation changes, your cooking times change. So you do need to know a little

bit of your local geography. Because the point at which water boils changes depending on your elevation due to the difference in air pressure so the temperature you're getting in a water bath canning situation is going to change a little bit depending on your elevation same with pressure canning assuming that you followed all the instructions and assuming you don't fumble a jar full of hot contents into something that causes it to shatter and throw itself all over you it should be relatively easy process but there is one key thing you have to remember if you are going to go away from proven recipes, your cook times may vary drastically.

The density of what you're cooking is going to directly affect how long it takes to heat it all to the point where you denature the bacteria that cause, say, like botulism. Botulism is a real danger in home canning um that's why uh home canning and store canning they've got these little buttons on the top as you notice this one no matter how hard I push on it it doesn't move that means this is safe and it will continue to be safe until this pops up same as checking the jelly jar at the at the grocery store yeah if you can push that little button that means that jar is not sealed and it at some point was opened now i've never gotten sick from home canned food i know people that have i'm sure it happens but it's it's all about mitigating your risks through following the procedures.

So, for instance, tomatoes. Tomatoes is a super easy one to do. All you got to do, blanch the tomatoes. So you get yourself a pot of boiling water. Excuse me. Sorry,ies are terrible this season. You get yourself a pot of boiling water and you get yourself a bucket with a ton of ice in it. You stick the tomatoes in the boiling water for 30 seconds to a minute. That loosens up the skins on them and it kind of starts the cooking process.

You take them out, throw them in the ice bath to shock that skin get the rest of that skin off then you can take it over to your cutting board dice it up throw that and all their juices into jars as you go once you get the jar a jar full up to within i think it's you know a half inch of the top of the jar you take your ring or you take your ring and your lid that the lid you've already. Well, OK, so you do have to warm the lids up a little bit to soften the rubber on them. So usually in a pot of like simmering water, just take the lid out, throw it on top, throw a ring on it, tighten that down. And then you put it in your water bath for I think it's like 15 or 20 minutes. I don't remember the exact amount because I have the recipes sitting with all my canning equipment.

And I try to keep those handy at all times. I'm sensing lots of parallels to like ammunition reloading, which I think you're also into. Yes, absolutely. The more you talk about this, the more I'm sensing parallels developing. It scratches the same itch. And if you are diligent about your reloading, it's perfectly safe. If you are diligent about how you do your home canning, it's perfectly safe. And if you do either wrong enough, it can explode. Yeah.

So, you know, it's people have been doing it for a long time. have been doing it for a long time. In fact, home canning in glass jars, I think, predates tinned food sold in supermarkets and the like, but I'm not 100% sure. The other big danger of home canning is the sheer weight of all the canned goods. I think I figured... All right, so a two-by-four-foot shelf, one layer of quart jars, is going to weigh about 144 pounds. Okay. So I'm sensing more power loss to reloading where people don't take into account the fact, you know, the structural integrity of a shelf when you have boxes and boxes and boxes of lead sitting on them. Exactly. One full quart jar weighs around two pounds. integrity of a shelf when you have boxes and boxes and boxes of lead sitting on exactly uh one full quart jar weighs around two pounds you know give or take depending on what you put in it yeah i

mean the proportion of whatever's in it to liquid i'm assuming but still that and the way of the glass jar all right the glass jars aren't that heavy but you know it eight pounds to the gallon four quarts in a gallon quartz about two pounds even if it's just full of water so two pounds and up so you know make sure your shelves are sturdy make sure your shelves are bolted to the wall because if you have yeah if you have your shelf loaded front facing like a grocery store so all your oldest stuff is up toward the front. And as you eat through it, you move more of that weight to the front. All it takes is a little tot climbing up on that shelf and putting a little more weight on the front to start pulling it over.

We've all seen how that can go. And then you've got hundreds of pounds of glass and whatever miscellaneous food coming over along with the shelf on top of whoever was messing around on it so i mean if you build your shelves like i build my shelves it won't be a problem but i build my shelves mostly with four by fours two by fours and three quarter inch plywood because they also double as my reloading lead storage. So they're overbilled. Yes. Yes. But, you know, if, like anything else, if you follow the established instructions, it should be fine.

And you can find any recipe you want on ballmasonjars.com. You know, they've been in the business for probably over a hundred years and they don't publish anything that they have not proven in a lab. The one time that the liability lawyers are working on our behalf. For sure. I mean, a lot of these recipes, some of the recipes are 50, 75, 100 or plus years old. I mean, we do a homemade barbecue sauce that my great grandmother made the recipe up herself on the farm. And it's not an approved recipe by any liability lawyer standards, but it's been working well for our family for four generations, three, four generations. And nobody's gotten sick off barbecue sauce so we got that going for us so what i'm hearing is the first time somebody does get sick you'll extend the cook time by five more minutes five maybe yeah or we'll blame it on the meat that'll work too so like what do you need other than jars lids and rings and just

just for the uninitiated because like i know this because my wife goofs around with ball jars. Not for canning, but for other things. The lid is the thing that sits on top of the jar. The ring is the part that screws on. So the lid is this flat part right here. That is separate. You might be able to see if I turn this sideways. This little seam right here this outer portion is the ring that is reusable as many times until it gets rusty

so if it starts to degrade it no longer tightens down good or you smash it they are just made of like a thin tin so you can crush them if you try really hard. The glass is reusable until you shatter it. The lid, again, some people claim it's reusable. I don't reuse them just because they're extremely cheap. I can buy them for, I think it's 10 or 20 of them for a few bucks. So I just have a few thousand of them downstairs on the shelf. So I just have a few thousand of them downstairs on the shelf. It kind of sounds like the potential in lost food is not worth trying to save a couple of pennies.

Currently, yes. You know, maybe in a situation where the supply chain was crippled beyond anything we've ever seen, it could be worthwhile. But, you know, to me, it's not worth worth it another really important thing you need is a funnel like i'm talking like a big funnel they make canning funnels that are sized exactly to the various jar sizes this is a wide mouth jar so it's almost as wide as the entire jar i prefer these it's easier to get food in and out of them especially if you got stuff like peppers pickles asparagus if you're going to can that the longer stuff is there any justification to not use a wide mouth jar other than maybe caught huh cost cost the narrow mouth jars are ever so slightly cheaper it's like a dollar a pack cheaper or something like that at least last time i bought them i have not bought jars since oh gosh it's probably been five years

since i've had to buy any jars uh when me and my wife first started planning a garden at our first house we bought a bunch of jars the year before we started the garden we knew we were going to start the garden i knew we were going to have access. So in the middle of winter, once all the harvests are done, your local hardware store will have a sale on their glass jars, their lids, their rings, their funnels, you know, their, their, uh, water bath pots, their pressure canner pots, buy all that stuff then. Cause it's about half the price. What time of year you said? Winter. Winter to early spring.

I think I know what I'm getting myself for Christmas. Watch for the clearance on that stuff. It usually starts to happen after Thanksgiving, after all of the major harvests are done, when the farmer's markets are starting to shut down, that kind of thing. Now down by you, it may be a little bit later than up here by us just because you're longer growing season. Maybe a month later, maybe like November, December or something like that. But yeah, it should happen. And what I'm thinking is me living in suburbia hell, I might have to make the trek up to the farmer's market on the edge of town. You'd be surprised.

Every hardware store in my county carries them. Even the little local mom and pop hardware store carries them. They might not have a lot, but if you've got a Home Depot or a Menards or something like that, they absolutely do.

Even if you have to order them online, they will probably have them online. So aside from the jars, the rings, the lids, and a good size funnel, you're going to need either a water bath of some kind, which is basically just a large stock pot, like a really big stock pot with a lid a lot of them are enamel they'll be in variety of colors they will have when you buy them new they will have a wire rack that's that keeps the jars up off the bottom of the pot so they're fully immersed in water all the time and not directly touching the metal that is being heated that's important um a lot of times right by those water bath pots you will find a a hanging panel of these little jar grabbers it's basically just a wire pair of tongs that is got kind of like two half moons on it that open and shut around the neck of the jar and that's

what this handy little ledge and notch here are for. So you grab them right with that so you don't have to stick your hand in the boiling water to pull the jars in and out of there. I recommend having one of those little retractable magnets that you find at the auto store for getting your jar lids out of the simmering water when you're warming them. So then you can just stick it in, grab one or two lids out, separate them, drop the ones you don't need back in, take the one you need, throw it on the jar. So in other words, they need to stay warm until you're ready to actually make them to a jar. Warm but not hot. Yeah, warm but not hot.

You know, you want it, you know, above body temperature. You know, probably not more than like 115, 120 degrees, definitely not boiling. Because you just need to soften the rubber so that it'll sit down over the glass. You're going to need a ladle to pull stuff up out of the pot, dump it in the funnel. I recommend also having a bunch of garbage beach towels now the ratty ones that your wife won't let you take to the beach anymore that you used to dry the car with those work perfect lay those on top of say like a folding table your countertop whatever just to catch all the mess because you're going to be taking so if you say, the quantity of tomatoes that I usually do when I do it, it's like four gallons of tomatoes at a time.

Cut up and thrown in a pot and warming up. You're going to make a mess. You're going to spill stuff on your counter. You're going to spill stuff on the sides of the jars. The jars are going to be hot, especially once they come out of the water bath or the pressure canner. And that towel just acts as a nice insulating layer so that you don't shock the glass or shock your countertop. I have heard of people cracking stone countertops, putting a bunch of jars that are hot out on them because it creates so much heat that it gets like a thermal shock in the stone. I haven't heard of it happening with Formica.

the that it gets like a thermal shock in the stone i haven't heard of it happening with formica um the other thing i recommend is a temperature probe so there are canning thermometers that you can just stick over the side of the pot into whatever liquid you're making up for the canning in the case of like tomato sauce um you want to go ahead and make sure that is as hot as pop you know up to i think shoot i can't remember the temperature i should have brought that i should have brought my recipe book with me but i didn't think about it do you think an ir thermometer would substitute because i know for some things it doesn't behave itself very well i don't know i've never tried to use an ir thermometer on liquid i don't own one and see i haven't either but i mean i have one for like my coffee roasting.

Because you can check bean temperature really quickly. Yeah, the black beans would probably work pretty well. I imagine it would depend on the color of the sauce. And see, my thought is almost more of like sometimes with highly reflective things, it really pisses off that IR thermometer because

outside of the pot might be a problem then, unless you have like a like a black stock pot or something yeah just just had that thought because I'm trying to think around what we're saying you know you could some people use like uh like for jellies and jams like a candy thermometer that's a really fine thermometer but canning thermometers are are $4 or $5, and they'll be in that same aisle. There's a little metal clip on the side of them. They'll clip right over your pot. It makes it nice and easy.

Buy once, cry once. Exactly, and it really isn't even that expensive. When we got started on it, I think I put $75 or $100 total into canning stuff. We didn't start with pressure canning. We just did water bath canning garden vegetables. So that was going to be my next question was you've been talking a lot about like what's necessary to start with hot water bath canning. But since we already,

since we already said that there were certain things you had to pressure can, is there a justification? Like if you know, this is what you're going to do is there justification not to just go straight to pressure canning and pressure can everything or there's certain things you really have to hot water bath can and other things you pressure can pressure canning takes longer for things that you would that you can get away with water bath canning okay so in other words if you reasons if you wanted to you could just pressure can everything but you're going to be you're going to be i don't think that's i i don't know of anything that you couldn't pressure can but if you're going to do like four or five bushels of applesauce it would

take you many days um because you so days. So the difference between pressure canning and water bath canning is that you just keep the pot of water boiling all the time on a water bath canning system. All right. You load it up full of your jars. You let it boil for whatever the time is that the recipe requires. Then you pull the jars out. Well, the water's still boiling. So you just stick more jars back in. And it's almost a constant process that you can keep going. With pressure canning, you have to have a certain amount of water in your pressure canner based on the amount of jars you're going to have in there. It'll be in the instructions. Most of them have an engraving on the inside of the pot too,

so that you can't really screw it up. There's a max and a min. As long as you're between those two marks, you're okay. If you're not, pull the jar out. With pressure canning, you got your pressure pot, you've got your adequate amount of water in it, you put all your jars in it, you close it up. Now you have to build pressure. The time that it has to be in that is determined by when the pressure hits the adequate PSI rating or when the little wiggler starts to do its thing and dance around. That's when you start the timer. So once, so you've got to build your pressure, which adds a few minutes, then you've got to hold at that pressure rating for a few minutes. Then you have to release all of that pressure, which takes a little bit of time. Then you got to disassemble your pressure canner, either some of them are like screw tops, some of them are twist

lock, either way way i don't know what you're gonna have but it'll be self-explanatory um you can take that off then you can take all the jars out put new jars in close it up and you got to build pressure again start the clock all over again so water bath canning you can do a higher volume in a shorter amount of time. You can also use larger vessels. So I think my water bath canner is a 30 quart, so I can fit, I think it's nine or 10 quart jars in it. My pressure canner, I can fit four, four quart jars in. So it's more of a matter of efficiency, I suppose, why you would largely choose one over the other when safety is not a factor. I mean, it makes perfect sense.

I'm just I'm thinking around the corners because inevitably someone is going to ask. Well, you can use a pressure canner without the lid on it and use it as a water bath canner, but it's just smaller and more expensive. the lid on it and use it as a water bath canner, but it's just smaller and more expensive. Like a water bath, you can use almost anything for a water bath canning that has a rack to keep your stuff up off the bottom. So if you've got an old stock pot and you've got, say, a cookie tray, a cookie mesh cooling tray that you can stick down on the bottom of that and you can set your cans on that, you can use that. You got a one gallon pot that you make your soups and stews in and you've got some kind of rack you can stick down inside of that, that's perfectly fine too.

But a pressure canner, you need to have a pressure rated vessel. And those go up quite a bit in price. I think the one I bought was 75 or 100 when i bought it the really nice ones are in the 500 range four to five hundred dollar range so you know a lot of people will try to tell you in the prepping forums and the prepping groups that if you don't buy one of the metal on metal seal pressure canners you're doing it wrong one of the metal on metal seal pressure canners, you're doing it wrong.

I have had the same seal in my home pressure canner the entire time I've been doing canning. So four or five years. So I bought five of those seals. I haven't had to use any of my spares, which means I'm good for theoretically 25 years of the type of pressure canning that I've been doing and the scale of pressure canning I've been doing. So I'm not worried about the end of days, Mad Max.

If that happens, all right, fine. I'll deal with it when it gets here. I don't have the finances to prep like that. I just flat don't. What I can do, though, is I can make my life as easy as possible with the inconveniences we see all the time and one of those things is like i like to have a garden i like to have fresh vegetables if you know anything about gardening you know when it does poorly you get nothing but when it does good you get more than you could eat most of the time canning lets me enjoy that throughout the

year the entire without spoilage well the food preservation is always going to be the bane of a lot of people that are into the preparedness mindset because like it's i find it's infinitely easier to convince a person to go out and spend money than it is to get them to go out and spend their time and effort so that the things they bought are useful. You know what I'm saying? It's like – take guns, for example. Tell a guy, new gun, and he'll usually whoop out the credit card before you finish the rest of the sentence. But the minute you say, go get training so you can use a new gun and then the interest goes down he'll really quickly for most people.

Well, that's because there is a chance that you will not perform like Steven Seagal. Oh, we had to use that example didn't we? Oh yeah. Steven Seagal is a fantastic law enforcement officer. If no one's ever seen

his videos of him actually in the field, that is a treat. Fantastic. Our country gave him a badge and a gun. Actually, no, my state gave him a badge and a gun. Yeah. Thank you for that reminder, Nick. You're welcome. Maybe not our finest moment.

Eh, you could do worse. We do, frequently. They just don't get TV shows. That's fair. So as far as what else you need, that's about it. When you do it, harvest time. That's easy. But just circle back around.

You did say, like, if you're thinking about doing this for next year, the best time to buy this stuff is winter. Kind of like buying bathing suits. The perfect time to buy bathing suits is winter. Kind of like buying bathing suits. The perfect time to buy bathing suits is at the end of the summer. Winter jackets, spring. End of the season is always your best time to buy. I mean, if you're really serious about getting into it,

you're probably looking at $100.50, $200 to get into it. That would get you a serious supply of jars. That'll get you water bath. That'll get you one of the less expensive, smaller pressure canners. And you could start. I don't recommend you start with pressure canning just because that's an extra investment that you don't need. And most people are going to be doing

stuff like dill pickles. A really common one to start with. Everybody likes dill pickles. You're going to eat those things anyway. You're going to put doing stuff like dill pickles. A really common one to start with. Everybody likes dill pickles. You're going to eat those things anyway. You're going to put them on a sandwich anyway. You don't like pickles. I'm not a pickle person. I've never been a pickle person.

There's something in the tape. Now my wife is cringing as she's listening to this. I should send you some homemade pickles. You might like them better. My wife will eat them happily. Next time I do a batch, I might like them better. My wife will eat them happily, but yeah, I'm going to do a batch. I'll send them down. I've never been able to make peace with,

with pickles. Applesauce. Applesauce. Your kid likes applesauce. All right. Not so much. Now I am married to a Sicilian lady who will make, who makes some of the best fricking homemade spaghetti sauce you've ever

had. That you can can for sure. That's high acid. Anything with a tomato base works really well for water bath canning. Oh, I know. Ask my cast iron after she gets done with it. I mean, like, an evening's worth of sauce and a little bit of leftovers?

I don't know. Not too long. Well, less than 45 minutes. Yeah. half hour? Yeah, about that. You can make a year worth of sauce in about three or four hours. And then there's no 30, 45 minutes of getting it ready beforehand. You pop the jar open, you warm it up, It's just like you got it out of the store. Okay.

Now, how does that work with the ground beef that we usually brown and throw in there? Like it'd be it. So you would have to brown the ground beef separate and then throw it in afterwards. Okay. Because I know earlier you said that meat can't. That I don't know. You'd have to see if you can find a comparable recipe. And then what I would say is try it at a small scale first. Because worst case, you know, if you make a jar of it, all right, you wasted 15, 20 bucks in time.

And you just dump it, clean it out, get rid of it. If like, it doesn't, it doesn't, um, if, if it seems like it's creating gas or something like that, that would pop that top up. Um, you know, do you, do you guys have a farmer's market nearby you? Quite a few actually. Yeah. Okay. So when the farmer's markets are in season, that's a good time to start with canning. Find out what's harvested in the spring around you guys. If it's asparagus and you guys like asparagus, pickle some of that. Pickled cucumbers as far as for pickles, great, great thing to start with. That's all water bath canned.

great thing to start with. That's all water bath canned. If you want to do say quicker pasta sauce and you've got some tomato plants or maybe neighbors that always grow way too many tomatoes and you can get them for free, grab those, crush them up, sauce them ahead of time, put the sauce in the jars, throw that jar on the shelf. Then you don't have to worry about having fresh tomatoes in the house. I mean, I do most of my canning when I do have a garden. We don't this year. I do most of it from like June, July, when some of the early stuff starts coming in to like Thanksgiving. By Thanksgiving, most of it's usually done.

You know, you can largely get away with canning pretty much anything you're growing in a home garden if you find a recipe for it. I don't know about pumpkin. I did see something recently where they're saying you probably shouldn't home can pumpkin because of the density of like pumpkin puree for like pumpkin pie. I can see that and the fact that I don't think pumpkins especially acidic it's not you I believe you have to pressure can it and I don't know for sure if people are finding out that it's unsafe recently so I would look into that one but like apple pie filling you can absolutely can that ahead of time but like apple pie filling, you can absolutely can that ahead of time. You can do any of your fruits, you know, anything like that.

So based on your recipe book, like is, is there a lot of call for adding sugar or salt or anything like just as an extra preservative? Sometimes. So pickles heavily on the salt. Makes sense. A lot of vegetables heavy on the vinegar so like these pickles or these uh pickled peppers and garlic here this is i think 50 50 water vinegar and then i think there's a i want to say per jar there's like a teaspoon or half a teaspoon of salt added to it. But the vinegar, the salt's there for flavor. The vinegar is there to get the acid up in the environment, just like with cucumbers for pickles, just like with asparagus for pickled asparagus.

One big thing that you're going to want to make sure you do, don't use table salt. The iodine in table salt will discolor your food and it will look weird and it will taste different. So kosher salt is your friend. If any canning recipe calls for salt, kosher salt. It's the only thing I keep kosher. It never even occurred to me not to use eye dye salt or just table salt. Yeah,

it's, it does. It does make a difference. Now, would it like, would it ruin it? No. Is it going to look kind of funny?

Absolutely. It's going to have more of like an orange tint to it, which if you do say like, well, a classic recipe is pickled onions and cucumbers for sandwiches. You put a lot of turmeric in that anyway, they're going to have a slightly orange tint to them anyway. So would it matter so much? Probably not. But, you know, I've never I've never tried it. I've always just used kosher salt. But, you know, I've never, I've never tried it. I've always just used kosher salt. And a lot of times you can get that kosher salt in the same exact aisle that you buy your ball jars in. It, cheese is not safe for home canning. That as far as I am aware, there may be recipes people are doing that they claim are safe.

I don't know of any safe recipes to do so. In fact, most things I see say explicitly not to add it. So like if like doing chicken Alfredo sauce at home, probably not a great idea. That's mostly dairy. Yeah. And a lot of butter. You can do, shockingly, French onion soup. I have seen canning recipes for French onion soup, but you have to swap the butter that you saute the onions with for like a vegetable oil or an olive oil. Oh, it's I've tried it. It's not as bad as you think. It uses a lot less oil than

you think. I can go for the olive oil. I have an aversion to vegetable oil. Yeah, me too. I tried the olive oil version. It was good. It was not good enough that I made a bunch. So like if I had to, sure. But when am I also going to have that many onions that I need to make five gallons of French onion soup? Okay. So all dairy is off the menu. Pretty much. Sounds like vegetables, meats are okay. Fruits, if you're making like jams or jellies.

And actually fruits even without jams or jellies. I believe you can like peaches in their own juice and a little bit of water, you can can at home. That would be a pressure canning, I think. Yeah, that'd be a pressure canning situation. But with the amount of sugar and applesauce, that's a water canning situation. And that stuff, I mean, basically, you're trying to desiccate the bacteria or heat the bacteria to death. Those are your two options. That makes perfect sense. You've made this sound too easy. Perfect sense.

You've made this sound too easy. It's not complicated. It's really not. It's following a recipe. If you can bake cookies, you can can stuff in the water bath at home. You had to go to can you bake cookies knowing I'm a baker, didn't you? I did. Also, I have to make snickerdoodles now.

So you're welcome for that. I sent you the recipe, didn't I? Yeah, I have all the things. Like I said, for that recipe specifically, the amount of sugar or cinnamon they tell you to make is probably overkill. In my experience, you could half it and still have plenty to

roll your snickerdoodles in. And I personally skipped the cream of tartar, and I just double the baking soda in the recipe. Yeah, because that's in the baking soda, isn't it? Yeah. Well, what happens is that the amount of cream of tartar that they're telling you to add, doubling the baking soda does not replace that much cream of tartar.

So it comes out a little bit less tangy, which I prefer, and it makes them a little fluffier because you're basically putting in more baking powder, less cream of tartar. Yeah, you're double rising them. Yeah. I mean, I love them that way. My daughter got a wild hair up her behind one time and asked me to add chocolate

chips to the snickerdoodles. Huh. I don't recommend it because they weren't bad, but the... It's not snickerdoodles. Well, the chocolate chips totally obliterated the taste of the snickerdoodles, so they just tasted like chocolate chip cookies when they were done.

Which she wasn't really bad about, but they weren't snickerdoodles. I love chocolate chip cookies, so... Yeah, but there are easier ways to make chocolate chip cookies. But anyway. You know, if your wife wants to get into canning, if you want to get into canning, your daughter wants to get into canning, you can even can some of the stuff that she harvests in her wild edibles. You know, it.

see and this is why i need to get her on the show to talk about this because like a lot of the stuff she does she's actually making like tinctures out of so she's basically like basting the stuff in like very highly refined vodka for a week at a time or so and then once she jars that up of jarring yeah yeah and once she's done with that it, it's basically shelf-stable forever, because when does vodka expire? When you drink it. Yeah. But no, I mean, canning has always been one of those things that I've never dipped my toe into, because I've always been... You know how sometimes we get into a comfort zone? And my comfort zone has always been can rack and dry goods because it's what I grew up.

It's what I've been doing for years. It's low effort. It is. And for hurricane prep for down south, you guys, it is the easiest way to go. The only downside to canning is it's glass jars. And if a hurricane knocks over your shelf, your tin food might be a little bit banged up, but it's probably going to be okay for a week or two. Glass jars are not. No. Although, quite frankly, I mean, given where all of our food storage is, if that

gets knocked over, the whole house is on its side and we have new problems. You're going to be having some serious problems either way. Yeah. So is there anything else to chuck in here, you know, at the end of this conversation? Cause like, I feel like you you've given us that canny one-on-one deep dive that I kind of wanted.

You know, if, if you have questions about it if you want to see something more particular there's a million youtube videos out there i mean youtube you're an adversity for the win on everything you know um worst case call up one of your grandmothers i guarantee somebody in your extended family has done it, man. Well, at least around where I live. If you don't do it and your mom doesn't do it, I guarantee your grandma does. Down south, I can't imagine it's much different. I mean, you guys aren't that far removed from the back bay you having to having to settle mostly for yourselves yeah and

around here my grandpa well my great-grandparents didn't get indoor plumbing until like the 1950s or 60s there's people down here that still don't have indoor I know that's what I'm saying man you know somebody that does it you just might not know they do it. Yeah. All right. Well, I guess, I guess from here,

like me specifically, I just need to keep an eye on the sales at a home Depot and Lowe's and just surprise my wife, my wife do what she does to me all the time where she's like, babe, it was on sale and I just grabbed it. Look at how much money i saved yeah i was trying to go all the money try to see if i can pull off some uh some

women math yeah well you can do that or you know just uh add it on to her stash for her tinctures just bigger jars ooh that's how i sell this to I mean, once she tries home canned applesauce, she will refuse to buy it in the store. If you need a recipe, I'll send you one. Not a lot of applesauce in this house, but if I can convince her to whoop up a big old batch of homemade spaghetti sauce. That's a perfect place for her to start because you can you can do it i mean these jars are obviously on the bigger end they sell them in a variety of sizes down to little little teeny tiny jars up to full gallons so whatever size you want they have them well and i mean the

best part of it is is that the end of the world has not gotten here yet. We still have fridges for leftovers. We do. That's true. Alright. Well, I guess we'll go ahead and punt this one out the door. I don't know if you've heard over the mic, but there is a thunderstorm out there that is banging really loudly. No, I have not. There's been once or twice I looked over my shoulder

like, alright, Mother Nature, chill out for just a second. For the listeners i saw one or i saw one or two people drift in and out of the live stream while we were here doing this like we are we are going to do this show we're going to stream it out on youtube and rumble and facebook from now on thursdays 5 p.m is kind of the time 5 p.m central unless we get like tons of feedback that 5 p.m central is too early we could back it up an hour but i think this is going to be the time slot for a while and as usual matter of fact's podcast will go out on all the audio platforms uh friday tomorrow so i'm going to be doing editing this evening. Oh no.

It is what it is. It is what it is. I'll pour myself. You picked Thursday. I picked the time. I mean, I'll pour myself like a fourth, a fourth 32 ounce coffee, you know, and I'll get it done tonight. There you go. That's the spirit.

But Matter of Facts podcast going out the door. If you want to know more about canning, you should look us up. And I'll point you towards Nick. And maybe we'll be having this conversation with my wife about all the stuff I can convince her to can once I embed the thought in her head. All right. We're out. Talk to you all in a week. Bye, everybody.

Later, guys. alright we're out talk to you all in a week bye everybody later guys Thank you. Outro Music