Trials and Tribulations of an MFPer

Don’t think I’ve been idle because I haven’t blogged since the first of this month. I have been canning like crazy. Actually, Verne would probably say I’m a crazy canner or just plain crazy. It’s true. I have a passion for putting food by, in general. But, it’s not canning that’s kept me from blogging.

Less than three months ago I graduated from the MFP training and was faced with the community service hours I’d agreed to complete prior June 2015. This thought ranked right up there with facing a dentist appointment. I fully intended to do it, but I wanted a painless experience with plenty of novocaine. Not being one to procrastinate, I wasted no time and agreed to assume certain responsibilities within the organization, including a co-coordinator role (Vera is my cohort) for 2014-15 public classes. I envisioned spending my volunteer hours at home in front of my computer working off my time by preparing handouts on food preservation. Right up my alley!

I volunteered for the position on the first Monday in August. By the second Saturday of the month I was standing in front of a classroom of strangers demonstrating water bath canning...this couldn’t be further from my plan. I’ve spent hours re-working class handouts and creating checklists to be used by the presenters. However, with September’s class right around the corner, I’m now being forced to interface with the other volunteers.  None of these people seem to check their email more than weekly…frustrating! I’m a “multiple-times-per-day kind of girl,” so by my third email, I’m no longer gently coaxing them to do their part, but I’m rather bluntly screaming (all caps does the job): “This is my third attempt to reach you. Will you PLEASE send me the DAMN RECIPE you plan to demo!!!”? My last line of attack will be to go low-tech and pick up the phone and call them. In fairness to these volunteers, they are just that: volunteers; and, I’m sure they don’t approach this assignment with the same sense of urgency that I do. As Public Education Coordinator (Top Dog), the buck stops here and I’m feeling the pressure! This kind of stress was not in my original plan to earn hours. I can already see this is going to be a thankless job and within a few short months everyone will hate me…the very reason I was hoping to stay behind the scenes. Double Damn! I may just let my much-nicer cohort do the calling. We’ll do the good cop, bad cop thing and see how that works. My hours? Let me just say 50 hours is laughable. I’ll have them by the end of October and by yearend will be so fully immersed in this program that I’ll never find my way out and have no time left for all of the things I so enjoy doing (alone). Goodbye canning. Goodbye quilting. Goodbye life as I’ve known it (and liked it).

On a more pleasant note, sometime in August I managed to find enough personal time to browse an email from William Sonoma and order a Kilner Jam Pot. I’d never heard of a jam pot, but based on the description I knew it was something I needed. Strike that last word…it was something I “wanted”. After using it a dozen times I now know that it is something every jammer needs! What an amazing pot! Here’s the sales pitch: “The Kilner Jam Pan is a hard wearing stainless steel pan featuring a pouring lip and carrying handle…it has an 8 litre capacity with an internal litre and pint measuring gauge with an encapsulated base for even heat distribution.” When I removed it from the box and saw its size I regretted not buying a smaller one, although it was only offered in the 8-litre size. It was huge! It only took one use and I realized that the large size (not a single splatter on my stove), the heavy bottom (no scorching), and the pint markings on the inside (great for reductions) were three of its best features. 

In addition to preserves, we’ve used it for blanching fruits and veggies and making extra large batches of sauces to be frozen. I recently received a Chef’s Catalog and they have a similar jam pot called the Maslin Pan in both a large 10-quart and a smaller 6-quart size. Both come with a lid. My Kilner is lidless. (:  Over 70 customers have left rave reviews of the Maslin pot giving it a near perfect average score of 5! Hmmmmm…I’m seriously thinking about ordering the baby Maslin for small-batch preserving and more.

In my last post I confessed to several failures in the kitchen. While we haven’t achieved perfect success, our failure rate is certainly on the decline…leaving me few bloopers to blog. No one wants to hear about the successes. The good thing about less than perfect results is the research it prompts and the stories I have to tell while I do public demos. (Yes, I’ll be doing more of them. I got through the last without fainting or vomiting, so I’m thinking they will just get easier with more experience.) Our only problem this month was again with peaches. We had planned to make another trip to the Fruit Bowl to buy more peaches. This time, O’Henry’s. I’ve been hearing about O’Henry peaches from a couple of my friends since I began making jam in 2013. I missed their season last year and was determined to time our trip appropriately this year. The O’Henry peach was developed in the 1970’s by UC-Davis as the perfect canning peach and I’ve been anxious to compare it to the Elberta. Well, our trip to buy O’Henry’s was planned and then, unfortunately, it had to be postponed a few weeks. I’m learning that the window of opportunity to purchase various varieties of fruit and vegetables is often as short as two to three weeks. By waiting those couple of weeks, we nearly missed the season. The day we went, the last of the O’Henry’s had been picked that morning. It was a near miss. However, being a positive person, I just took our timing as a good sign (and a reminder of the time-sensitive nature of canning from buying to preserving). We went home with almost 30 pounds of peaches and got busy in the kitchen. This time we did it by the book: read the recipe, staged our canning paraphernalia, blanched the peaches and promptly placed them into a cold water bath with ascorbic acid, filled the wide-mouth jars with the peeled peaches, and processed according to the recipe...just as I was taught. Sue, my food preservation teacher/guru, would be proud of me.

By the book, and yet the peaches boiled over during the processing turning the canning water to a pale shade of pink and they continued to spew out simple syrup for five minutes after being removed from the canner? And, why did I get an inch of frothy white bubbles at the top of one jar? I didn’t panic this time and refrigerate them all after canning (to be used in peach margaritas). The seal was good, even though the liquid was well below the ½ inch headspace line. Here are a couple of possibilities for boil over or siphoning, as it is sometimes called. Too little headspace (clearly not a problem now), rings may be too tight or not tight enough, or the jars may be packed too tightly which can start a siphon. I suspect the latter. I like to tightly pack the peaches knowing they will reduce in size during processing leaving them floating about 1-1/2” above the bottom once they cool. As for the frothy bubbles? 

I don’t know the answer to that one. They are obviously tiny air bubbles that occurred after the jar was removed from the canner. The question is why? I’ve spent over two hours on the web reading self-taught canning experts’ theories and am no closer to an answer. I did accuse my helper of leaving soap in the jar, but he assured me the jars were rinsed twice and then spent over 30 minutes in the water bath canner heating. So, I crossed that off my list of possibilities. If you have a scientific explanation or a truly original idea, send it to me. I’ve got to get to the bottom of this. One last thing, I’m looking for a new assistant. After accusing the last one of leaving soap in the jar, he got mad and quit, so I’m kind of in a bind here.

More Confessions from the Master of Mess-Ups

When the girls were in elementary school they would occasionally do something that was not quite to their liking and they would say, “I made a mess-up.” (Probably all kids say that, but it was especially cute coming from our two precious daughters.) I like the term and use it, not only because it conjures up sweet memories of our children, but it also helps soften my true reaction to a failed project, which is to scream, “S**T, another failure!!!” Most of our attempts at preserving food have been successful and go unmentioned. It’s these less than perfect results, these failures, which haunt me a bit. So, I need to use this forum one more time (providing there are no more failures) to consider and hopefully explain why each one of this month’s canning mess-ups occurred.

The peaches…a special trip to Lodi to buy them and an afternoon of hot work in the kitchen to can nine quarts of the things, and what do we have? Nine quarts of over-processed, brown-tinged Elberta’s in the refrigerator/freezer. We managed to make every mistake in the book and then some. The first lesson in canning: Focus, minimize all distractions. Not only were we not focused and did not go over the recipe, but we were preoccupied the entire time with taking photos (remember Ann, the reporter who needed pictures for her article and the reason we were canning peaches in the first place?). Next, we either didn’t remember from canning peaches last year (yes, we’d done this before!), but once peeled they need to be placed in water with lemon juice or ascorbic acid, which minimizes the browning from oxidation. Like apples, peaches will brown very quickly if left exposed to the air. And they did! We were cold-packing the peaches, which means the uncooked peaches are put into a hot jar, a hot simple syrup is poured over them, a warm lid and ring applied, and then the jars are placed in a boiling water bath canner and processed according to the recipe. Verne had prepared several quart jars, both regular and large mouth. I grabbed one of the jars and attempted to stuff the peach halves through its “regular” mouth opening (kind of like stuffing a size 12 arse into size 10 jeans). Not a chance for those extra-large peaches to go through a 3” opening. It took a few jars of mutilated peaches before we went searching for additional wide-mouth jars, which then had to be thoroughly washed and prepared for canning. Time was ticking. When we were finally ready to process the jars, everything was room-temp to cold…the jars, the simple syrup, the lids. This has to explain our catastrophic results. They didn't seal! In fact, the syrup bubbled over reducing its level in each jar by a good ½” and creating a sticky bond between the lid and glass jar, which a less informed canner might consider a seal…not me, though. I was not about to be fooled by a false (sticky) seal and all of the jars went into the fridge. According to Lauren, an “epic fail” as the peaches were for her! Here's the $50+ picture...

I’m scheduled to teach a class on jams and jellies in the fall. My preparation has included several hours of research on the various commercial pectins available as well as homemade pectin and, of course, the slow-cook or reduction techniques to making a no-added pectin jam. Rather than just research the topic, I decided to test each of these pectins/techniques by using them to make a batch of strawberry jam. I chose that particular fruit because strawberries are plentiful and inexpensive this time of year. Also, if you remember reading my previous "canning mess-ups" blog, I had severe fruit float with my new Pomona Pectin and assumed (bad idea to assume) that it was due to the brand of pectin I was using. I ended the blog post by saying “the jury is still out (on Pomona).” Well, the jury has returned with a NG verdict, Not Guilty. Every jar of pectin jam I’ve made so far (four different brands) has had significant fruit float (solids at the top, jelly at the bottom). I have yet to make my no-added pectin strawberry jam, which is a slow cook reduction. However, I’d be willing to bet money that it will be perfect with no fruit float. My theory is this: the quick cooking time used with added-pectin jams does not sufficiently remove/release the air from the fruit making it lighter than the jelled liquid in which it’s preserved. It thus has a tendency to float to the top. A reduction jam is cooked for 30-40 minutes, constantly stirring, until the mixture has reduced by one-third to one-half. At the end of the cooking time, it is one cohesive glob (technical term) and (this is my theory…you won’t find it in a food science book) much of the air has been removed due to the constant stirring and the long cooking time. Secondly, the liquid has jelled sufficiently to keep the fruit particles suspended. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it!

We now arrive at our third failure in July: Pickles. I know this sounds like an excuse, but by reading past blog posts you know that I readily admit to my failures and shortcomings…It was a very bad recipe! I was so excited to be taking our second big step in our journey into home food preservation…Making Pickles. I was hoping for a pickle something like Claussen or Vlasic, but didn’t really expect perfect results from our first attempt. Sadly, they didn’t turn out to be like Claussen or Vlasic or any other pickle I’ve ever eaten and they were so bad, so salty they were inedible. No, I didn’t expect perfection, but certainly was not prepared for total Failure. We tossed the six-pint jars, spent an afternoon commiserating, and got up the next day with a mission to find the perfect dill pickle recipe.  We searched our cookbooks as well as the Internet. With few exceptions, all dill pickle recipes call for large amounts of salt. I’ve found one recipe by Ball that uses their commercially-available pickling concoction that we’re going to try next. If we don’t have better results, our plan is to put quick pickles on the back burner (pun intended) and move on to fermented pickles for now…a much longer and more intimidating process, but it does seem to use less salt.  For now, I’d avoid eating pickles at the Moser’s and just stick to the peach margaritas!