 Well good afternoon to those of you who are joining us for the Field to Fork program this afternoon. Our usual host Julie Garden Robinson is having some Zoom difficulties so I'm barbing them and I'll get us started today. The webinar today is brought to us by North Dakota State University Extension. If you missed the last one it's archived and on the Field to Fork site and I see some of you as I've noticed in previous weeks are already letting us know where you're from. This is the eighth year we've done the series and we are so glad you joined us today. We've archived all of the webinars from the previous years and the link is on the Field to Fork webinar page. So we've got two upcoming webinars on March 22nd which is next Wednesday. What does time temperature control mean for food processors and entrepreneurs? By Byron Chavez-Elzando from University of Nebraska in Lincoln and then in March 29th food safety considerations and organic produce production and that's Laund and Wadakey from Kansas State University and the University of Missouri. Most of you it sounds like from your participation already you're familiar with the controls but if you're new just so that you know we're actually going to be ignoring the the Q&A function but you'll find the chat function at the bottom of your screen and that's where you'll be able to ask questions of today's presentation. We're also asking you to try out the chat function and let us know where you're from and many of you have done that already today so thank you very much for that. Okay the next slide is our acknowledgement slide. This program is sponsored in part with grant funding from the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service. I'll ask that all of you are going to please complete a short online survey that will be emailed right after today's webinar as a thank you. Julie will actually be providing prizes to the winners of the random drawings so to be sure to complete provide your complete address on the follow-up form including city state and zip code. Some of us may have already gotten that that survey it will be for today's webinar and just hold it to the end of the presentation to get today. All right I'm Barbina I'm a food safety specialist and professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison and I'm delighted to talk with you today about safely using a steam canner to preserve the bounty of the harvest. This is work that we have done a number of years ago and we're just delighted to be able to share this research with you and to kind of get the word out with what we found in this research. So as you're working on typing in where you're from to let us know today if you don't mind also returning to the chat and letting us know what acidic food this might be pickles or sauces or something like that do you most enjoy canning at home kind of a good way for us to get the thoughts process going. I provided some pictures that I could find on the internet and we've heard some wonderful presentations over the last couple of weeks about vegetable varieties and and growing vegetables and so many of us are getting excited about getting into our gardens maybe within the next month. So we've got some pickles tomatoes all of it was a comment that we just saw that's probably my favorite comment and I totally agree with that. All right so we want to start off with today's presentation with a little bit of foundational information especially if you're new to canning but when you're canning certain types of food we look at two really basic concepts one is pH or is an acid value of the food products and the other is heat. Both of these work together and we must have both of these in order to have safe home preserved products. So foods that are acid or acidified are those that are high in acid and we sometimes also say low in pH so that pH is 4.6 or below and we know when we're at a pH of 4.6 or below this is going to prevent the germination of spores of clostridium botulinum and many of us have heard of clostridium botulinum or the disease that it causes botulism. So we're using acid as a really critical component of these food products and that helps us control botulinum and then we also need heat because there are other pathogens outside of clostridium botulinum specifically pathogenic E. coli that may be in our food products and we want to we want to prevent these from being able to grow and exist in the food products so heat is required to destroy what we refer to as vegetative cells of pathogens and spoilage organisms. Another advantage of heat it's going to destroy yeast and mold which would cause spoilage. Heat processing also removes air entrapped in the food matrix and in the headspace of the jar and helps us to get a really good seal on those home preserved products. So we normally and historically for acid foods have used a boiling water canner. In a boiling water canner probably many of you are familiar with these. We place the food in the jar we put on our two-piece lid and then we submerge those foods in water generally starts off warm and eventually we're going to be bringing that water to a boil and then timing the process. So we use boiling water canners for naturally acid foods which are most fruits and then acidified foods. These are things like pickles, salsa products that may not be acid enough without the addition of something like vinegar. In a boiling water canner the jars sit on a rack surrounded by boiling water and they're actually covered entirely submerged in water so covered by an inch or two of water. We use what we say is a tight fitting lid it doesn't have to be secured too tightly but it does need to have a lid on the pot that prevents too much evaporation and keeps the processing temperature at boiling and we're generally processing food at about 212 degrees which is the boiling temperature of water at sea level. Generally even in Wisconsin water we're not that much above sea level even at our highest point in Wisconsin water boils here between about 200 and around 210 degrees Fahrenheit different parts of the country as your elevation rises above sea level your boiling point drops and we then need to adjust our processing time for elevation. We'll talk about that with some recipe examples. So we adjust processing time for elevation and in everything we're talking about today we're going to base what we do in a boiling water canner traditionally or in a pressure in a I'm sorry an atmospheric steam canner we're going to use research tested recipes these might be things as found from the National Center for Home Food Preservation website. If you haven't found that yet it's a great place for you to look. NCHFP is the National Center for Home Food Preservation it's at the University of Georgia so nchfp.uga.edu. They have a wealth of information there including the USDA complete guide to home canning and many of the recipes on their website are extracted from that USDA research. So this is a boiling water canning process. All right I'm going to advance to this next slide here so um what so a boiling water canner might use about 16 or more quarts of water that's a lot it's especially with the cost of water and in an increasing situations of drought that we might find ourselves in. It also can take a long time for that amount of water to come to a boil. So what if we didn't have to wait for all that water to boil and we didn't have to use so much water. So in the top picture here on the left you see a picture of a traditional boiling water canner. So what about an atmospheric steam canner? We often shorten this to just calling them steam canners. So in a steam canning process it's a it's a much shallower base. It has a tall domed lid and I like this picture here because you can see there's a rack in the bottom of the canner where the jars sit during processing. We actually fill water up to the bottom of this rack here and then jars sit on the rack above boiling water. So you can see in the picture on the right here of a steam canner how this looks like something maybe like peaches that are jars have been placed in the canner. So as a sub award from the National Center for Home Food Preservation we were given the opportunity to actually research these steam canners to see if we could use those in place of a boiling water canner for acid foods. So that's exactly what we did when we had the research grant was awarded to us here in Wisconsin. Let's see oh we I'm sorry I just see Julie has rejoined us we're glad and asked her to take a deep breath because of computer problems we're glad she's back with us and she's reminding us to please post questions that we have in the chat. Anyway so when we're looking at comparing a boiling water canner and a steam canner the first thing we're looking at is we're going to look at is how do they heat the food that's in there one is using boiling water the other's using steam and how does the temperature distribute within the canner. So we used both a boiling water canner a traditional one and a steam canner like this and then in order to answer at least our initial questions you'll see some kind of just hand drawings that are supposed to illustrate first a boiling water canner and then a steam canner so the first part of our research what we did was we took what are called thermocouples these are like very very thin thermometers and we placed those at different depths within the heating medium the water that's boiling or within the steam we drill drilled holes within the top of our canner so that we could do this and then we're looking initially and I'll show you on our next slide we were looking initially at how does heat distribute within the canner because we need heat coming outside the jars to move into the jars to heat the food that we're using. All right so how to boiling water or steam heat the jars that are in the canner in order for us to first off answer this question we we used tomato juice we used tomato juice as a something more than water it's a it's a nice it's thicker and we were trying to figure out how jars of tomato juice were heating just based on what the temperature was within the canner either the boiling water canner or the steam canner so we had jars of tomato juice that we placed here in the canner there's normally water here these are of course just pictures that I'm showing you from the research and you can see here in one of these images you can see these are thermocouples these are very thin thermometers that are that are at different depths within the within the heating column and we're just trying to figure out initially how do these particular canners heat so that was the first question that we tried to answer before I move on because I think it's a nice illustration of a steam canner these domed canner lids here they have at least one vent hole in the side so here on the graphic the illustration that we created there's one sometimes these canners come with only one if you are actually going to use these for acid foods we recommend that you just take a drill or a knife I'm not a knife I'm a nail and poke a hole so that you have two holes that are opposite that actually is better for steam distribution within the canner so we had a vent hole on either side they're just above the where the lid the dome lid just fits into the base of the canner all right so we looked at heat distribution in a boiling water or a steam canner we use tomato juice and we hot filled it which is what you're supposed to do or we filled the jars at room temperature about 75 degrees Fahrenheit that's not what you're supposed to do but we were just trying to figure out how these different canners were comparing in terms of the heating medium we use quart jars pint jars and half pint jars and then we again had these probes these thermocouple probes at varying depths to see how these canners themselves are heating so something that we anticipated and that we were able to clearly demonstrate with this research is it takes a lot a long time to heat a lot of water to boiling regardless of whether we put in the tomato juice at room temperature so it wasn't preheated or if we put hot tomato juice into the canner itself so it took 22 minutes for the the boiling water to heat just to the initial temperature of 180 which would have been a standard temperature where we might load jars into a canner and then it took an additional roughly 10 minutes to heat from 180 degrees which is a good simmer where you have a boiling water canner ready on the stove and you're adding your jars to hot water and then eventually bringing that water up to a boiling temperature for us again here in Wisconsin that's 210 degrees Fahrenheit and then it took another 10 degrees again to go from a good simmer to 210 or boiling another 10 minutes for this entire process for the steam canner where I'm heating just two quarts of water and starting with that water being at roughly room temperature 75 degrees it took 12 minutes for that canner and for these temperature probes either in the boiling water canner or the temperature probes in my steam canner to say I am at boiling I am at steaming steam being created in the canner so the boiling water canner the the range of temperature for this simmer simmering temperature to 210 we said it was 10 minutes on average it ranged from six minutes to 11 minutes over 54 different trials for the atmospheric steam canner it ranged from nine to 12 so I put 12 minutes there they're about the same the way I had done these averages so the results from the first part of our study over lots of tomato juice that we put through the canning process was the time to preheat the water in a boiling water canner adds significantly to the overall process time it takes about perhaps 30 minutes before you can actually start you know that the water is actively boiling and you can start the process time itself the longest total process time was observed when each canner was operated at full capacity so sometimes we tried like seven quart jars sometimes we tried one quart jar and those types of things so we tried the canners full we tried the canners half full and then we tried them with just one jar of each size so it makes sense that it the longest times and the longer longest time it took for heat to fully distribute in each of the canners was when the canners were at full capacity so from then on out we operate we did all of our research at what we called full capacity we filled the canners regardless of the type of canner we were looking at all right so this is an example of some of the information that we might have gotten out of this particular first part of the study so we had four different thermocouples at four different depths within the steam dome for the steam canner and these were tracking temperature over time so we put canner quart jars in the canner and then so i'm just tracking that here i just put an indication we had the canner on the stove for a little bit we're adding our jars and then an indication that we're seeing the initial puffs of steam come out of those vent holes this happens to be in a in a steam canner about 200 just over 200 degrees around that point and we're seeing full steam at 210 to 212 degrees and we're recording all of this on the computer as we go so that's how this was our results were that heamed heat distribution within each canner whether we were using a boiling water canner or a steam canner when our thermocouples our thermometers read 210 to 212 boiling temperature we found that there was a good consistency there was boiling water um temperatures recorded throughout the the boiling water column in a boiling water canner or throughout the steam dome in a steam canner so um we got good consistency there so we knew that once we reached the processing temperature um that we could um that we would be able to um to then start our processing time and i've got some hints for you about that later so so we knew our canners were could we knew how to operate each of the canners certainly a boiling water canner from historically we've been using those and we knew then how to operate a steam canner um so that we were operating at boiling at at steaming temperatures so the next part of our research was we took four different food products and we said all right um if we're operating these two canners um each individually how do the how does food that's in the canner heat in jars within the canner um how is that food heating um so what we we used four food products at this um uh point we used tomato juice cranberries and heavy syrup um because that was a nice lots of little um pieces of particulate in the product um and then the heavy syrup helped us understand some heat transfer and apple sauce those were all in pint jars and then in half pint jars we tried chocolate raspberry dessert sauce and i will tell you that we did this in a lab where we use pathogens so of course we aren't able to ever eat anything in the lab or um although we do have food products in the laboratory but it really smelled good um when we were actually making up the dessert sauce and then doing the canning so we use pint jars and half pint jars um we used only pint we used pint jars as the largest size jars for the research and that's because when we did this when we're looking at circulation of heat within the jars we have to add a little um a fitment here that attaches the thermocouple the thermocouple you can kind of see it in this picture attaches the thermocouple and allows us to place that thermocouple at different places within that jar kind of slides up and down depending on how the food heats so because of this when we use quart jars and we added this extra part to the top our canner lid wouldn't fit so we only did research with pints and half pints you'll see later that you certainly can use either of these canners with quart-sized jars but our research was limited because of this extra because of the the way we had to do the research anyway so we used tested recipes approved for a boiling water canner and all of these were um that case um and then um while heating while we heated the food we measured the temperature of the heating medium in the canners canner so we continued to say is the water boiling when it looks like it's boiling is the steam canner when it's venting um and we're seeing venting happen is there actually um steaming temperatures or boiling temperatures within the canner and then we also measured the temperature inside the jar at the cold spot so we had to do some initial work to understand what the cold spot was for each type of food product and it varies on the way the food product heats and then um so we measured that and then we measured the temperature of the heating medium itself and then once we were done we tested to see did these um processes either in a boiling water canner or a steam canner do a good job of getting the air out of the jars and giving us that really good vacuum seal because a good intact vacuum seal is an important part of your product lasting on the shelf so if you process food and then want it hopefully to last you until your next harvest season we want that seal not to become loosened over time and if we have a very um uh if we have a seal but not a really strong vacuum it may indeed over time the seal may somewhat relax and the jars may open and then they'll they'll spoil over time so um this all allowed us to also calculate um with the help of a food engineer what we refer to as the process lethality and I'll show you a little bit about how we went about that as well um and that's on this slide so what we do to calculate lethality is are we able to kill off those bad bugs that we need to um as a result of the process what we did is we looked at our our temperature within the jar that's on this y-axis here the one that's the vertical axis and then on the horizontal axis we looked at time and in order to calculate lethality we can actually um consider the amount of heat the computer is recording over time and we kind of create a sum of of their seat their seat their seat their seat their seat and we add all this heat together to create what we refer to as a calculated thermal process lethality so process lethality was appeared compared across runs across different trials that we ran to determine how to adjust tested recipes for use in an atmospheric steam canner so we did again this at both types of canners and then we're doing some calculations to help us compare those numerically um as a result okay so our research results um and the student paula wilmore who did this work she just did a really great job i should have acknowledged her at the very beginning i would like to say this was her master's project um and she was very dedicated to this work and just did a really nice job so some overall summary about our research and then i'm going to give you some particulars about a steam canner per se so canner temperature is important to process lethality we need to have the water uh actively boiling or we need to have an atmosphere of pure steam in our steam dome and this is important to make sure that we have both spoilage organisms and pathogens destroyed inside the food product the rate of food product heating um was not different in a boiling water canner or a steam canner so both boiling water and steam that are circulating in the respective type of canner are easily able to transfer heat um into the jar and then that that heat is able to transfer within the jar so that we can get the food to heat in all parts of the food within the jar interestingly enough um this is something that was new to me um as a person who's um been a home canner for basically all my life if I consider helping my mom um but what I learned um was a significant portion of process lethality and this is how good this is at making sure we don't have spoilage organisms and pathogens in our final product is on cooling for these short processes now this would be different for if you're using a pressure canner um and you're heating at um under pressure so that's different but these shorter processes that we have for acid foods or acidified foods because they're they're often much shorter when we take that product out and and out of the canner and then allow it to sit to cool on the counter there's still um things happening within the jar itself and those are contributing to the lethality that we need and so this is really good for us um either process yielded strong vacuum seals so 20 20 to 25 psi across 87 jars that we tested so this is a good indication that either type of canner either a boiling water canner or a steam canner for acid or acidified foods um is going to give you a product that should be able to stay um for as long as you expect it to stay on the shelf generally we say a year or two is a good shelf life for a canned food product I provide here a reference um just so you can see we publish this work we publish the initial part with heat transfer in a food engineering journal the the kind of research into action how would we use this to can food to actually can food products itself within a journal known as food protection trends okay so how do we take that research and then apply it to to information that those of us who are home canners might like so we have some general guidelines um for this and then I'm going to show you uh point you to and just a little bit and a few slides here um a reference that we've created that summarizes this and helps you with this process so some general guidelines for safely using a steam canner for home food preservation oh so a steam canner or sometimes an atmospheric steam canner those are consistent terms a steam canner may be used to safely can high acid foods so these that are naturally high in acid like most fruits or acidified things like pickles and salsa as long as all of the following conditions are met you choose an up-to-date research tested recipe you would do this with a boiling water canner as well you prepare jars and food according to the tested recipes so that's generally cleaning your jars and then warming your jars before filling you ready the canner which is either preheating optional for a steam canner so you might preheat some water and a boiling water canner and a steam canner you may preheat there's a little bit of water that's in the base of this canner if you wanted to preheat it you can certainly do that um it's optional but it you can do it if you want to so to ensure that you're processing at the correct temperature which is basically boiling wherever boiling is for your elevation what you're going to do is you're going to vent for one full minute before timing the process so you put your canner on the stove and you watch for a full column of steam in my experience this is about a good six inches um and I've got some recipes to kind of talk you through how this is going to work but we um we put the food in we're going to put that dome lid on we're going to turn the heat on high and we're going to watch for um the water to I'm sorry the steam to vent out of our of our steam ports and generally like I said it's best to have a steam steam vent hole on either side of that dome lid and they'll come with at least one and our recommendation is if it only has one then drill another opposite and you vent for one full minute and this is not just a little bloop bloop of steam which we sometimes notice when we're venting a pressure canner you'll see the same you're looking for the same a similar phenomenon but for a steam canner you'll see once you see a good six inches you're going to set a timer for one minute you want to vent it for one minute and that makes sure that we get all the air out and we're processing in pure steam once that happens we can start the process time you adjust your process time for elevation just as you would for a boiling water canner you are going to limit the process time to 45 minutes or less and that's because you only have two quarts of water and you cannot open that lid to add more water um and interrupt the the canning process and your canner will or can is able to boil dry I'm telling you we did it so that's how we came up with this recommendation is you don't want to process food for longer than 45 minutes um and if you're if you've got your heat really high it might boil um dry in less than that so limit process time to 45 minutes or less um it's certainly okay within a within a steam canner to have different sized jars you might have pints you might have half pints you might have quart jars again processing on the largest jar size uh or the longest time given in your research tested recipe but do not stack jars and that's because if you try to stack jars and then take the dome lid off you risk um um the jars tumbling out so we try different things and so don't stack them that's not an approved process and then after processing allow jars to air cool undisturbed so I'm going to put a uh a um a disclaimer here I guess our research results apply to only this type of um steam canner there are some companies that sell a steam canner that looks like a boiling water canner and you and they supply a rack in a boiling water canner and they just have you put less water in a boiling water canner and put your jars above that we did not study that type of canner we do not understand how steam distributes in that type of canner that doesn't have these vent holes at the base of the canner lid so our results do not apply to only applies to this type of steam canner with a dome style lid um and yes allow jars to air cool undisturbed means out on the counter um on generally on a cake rack or on a towel all right so I'm going to go through two uh quick recipes just to kind of see how we're going to mod it or take a boiling water canning recipe and make it uh into a steam canning recipe and then I'll be happy to answer the questions that might have come in okay tomatoes I love canning tomatoes all right and I love canning tomatoes in my steam canner so hot crack hot packed crushed tomatoes this is what something that I do every year so you select fully ripe tomatoes and I said yum there's nothing better than a fully ripe tomato right that's why we garden uh rinse trim and dip into boiling water to remove the skins this is somewhat optional you could leave the skins on I prefer not to do that um I want a product that's a little more consistent with what I might find in the grocery store I remove the cores I quarter or slice these tomatoes and put in a kettle to quickly heat to boiling while crushing and simmer five minutes once all the tomatoes are added this is in my boiling water canner recipe I'm not deviating from that while the tomato simmer I'm washing and rinsing my jars I'm keeping my jars hot um I'll come back to a hint here I'm going to add um acid to my clean hot jars prior to filling I happen to use citric acid is what I prefer but you can also use bottled lemon juice for canning tomato products again I'm not deviating from my boiling water canner recommendations I fill my prepared jars with hot tomatoes I leave a half inch head space I apply my two-piece lids and place the filled jars on the rack in the canner above simmering water could be room temperature water too I'm one person who likes to kind of get the process going a little here so I tend to have my water simmering in my steam canner so what's a little different is what's in red once the canner is full I take that dome lid and I place it over the jars in the canner and I turn the heat on high as the water boils in the canner eventually you're going to see steam vent through the vent ports if your jars are hot you've got a hot pack product and you've pre simmered those this might take five minutes it might not even quite take that long so eventually you'll see the steady column of steam out the vent ports you vent for one minute and then I start timing my process um heat you can turn down the heat at that point especially if it's a longer process and you don't want to run out of water but you need to make sure that the canner vents during the entire timed process so if you've got a process like that's 25 or 30 minutes you're going to want to keep an eye on things to make sure that your canner continues to vent just as you would for a boiling water canner to make sure that the boiling water doesn't fall below the top of the jars in the canner all right I'm adjusting for elevation as I need uh pint jars I'm processing in my case for 35 minutes um because I'm just under a thousand feet 980 some feet here in Madison Wisconsin once I'm finished um I'm going to take that dome lid off and set it aside you have to do it carefully because there's a lot of steam that comes out I lift it away from me when I do that and then I removed process jars and allow them to air cool undisturbed and then as you would and we know to do we check for seals um um seals on our jars and the recipe that I am citing here is from the National Center for Home Food Preservation on how to can tomatoes and crush tomatoes again one of my favorite it's really a nice product and it's so similar to what my family might be expecting from the grocery store but better all right another one strawberry jam I think if the steam canner was invented for anything it was invented for strawberry or for jam in general and I always say that my family uh jam a toast is a jam delivery system and so I was so glad when probably about eight years ago the recommendations came out that allowed us to process jam in pint jars rather than half pint jars because we just uh pint half pint jars were not enough um so here I just included the ingredients four cups of crushed berries four cups of sugar two tablespoons of bottled lemon juice and a box of powdered pectin or a third a cup of bulk pectin and again the recipe steps as noted um in the recipe itself um once the canner is full again you place the dome lid on the canner turn the heat to high um wait to see a full column of steam vent the canner for one minute and you begin to time the process this is a really quick process especially as you fill a canner with maybe say eight half pints and maybe you've got another eight right ready to go it's it's a you can you can do a lot of jars when you're using a canner like this the recipe that I'm using actually that I referred to and I'm sorry I uh hadn't quite noticed that is from making jams jellies and fruit preserves if we go to the national center for home food preservation they refer you to um tested recipes on the the recipe that's included with the box of pectin well I don't buy boxes of pectin anymore I buy my pectin in bulk so I just use a third a cup of pectin when it says a recipe might call for one box so because of that I refer you if you're like me and don't have a box of pectin with the recipes in it I refer you to our bulletin making jams jellies and fruit preserves um which has all sorts of recipes um many of them um well absolutely identical to what you'll find on those boxes of pectin there also are recipes for making jams and jellies without added pectin so extracting the pectin from the fruit itself there's information in our bulletin for um remaking um what happens if it doesn't work and how to remake jam and jelly um and try try the process over again if you're stuck with syrup uh the first go round um so that link here is fyi.extension.wisc which is short for wisconsin.edu backslash say food this is one of the sites websites I have and then the page is actually a recipes page where we have other bulletins like this but I think this one might be particularly useful again if you're like me and don't buy pectin in a box but buy it in bulk uh and generally order it that way so not much of a modification it's really um this starting the processing time after venting uh for those recipes so a couple quick canning tips and we'll get to your questions don't believe everything you read on the internet if it seems to good to be true it probably is there are so many sites that are um purporting to be places where there's good canning information um but it's not worth your health or the health of your family and friends to rely on information that isn't tested and that we know is safe so please uh seek out um research tested up-to-date recipes for home food preservation stay up to date enjoy the bounty of the harvest um try a new gadget and use a steam can or to safely preserve again only foods that are high in acid sauces fruits pickles and jellied fruit products all right so where can you find some information the national center for home food preservation and i shared this url earlier um our net north central uh food safety network um and i've got the i think you just have to search i don't think i put the url oh i'm sorry i did up here i added it up here um it's a little bit longer but if you search online for ncf s-e-n for the north central food safety extension network um you'll find a lot of great information we have um a handout just two quick pages it's called steam can it right it's on the web page ncf s-e-n web page and what i did yesterday was i i created a just an image here and you have to scroll down the web page a little bit so keep going and you're going to see it's about like right there it says steam can it right and those are the ways the the hit the hints and tips for taking that boiling water canning recipe and uh safely canning that product using your atmospheric steam canner all right here's my contact information and i see i've i have left us about 15 minutes and i'm going to turn it over to julie to answer some questions just a reminder that there's a survey and i know we always need that feedback from you so if you'll please make sure you answer the um the survey all right i've i'll turn it over to julie oh thanks farbin can you all hear me okay we can thank you i'm glad your day is improving yes my my computer just melted right at the start um we have about a dozen questions barb so here's the first one does this research extend to the multi-use water bath slash steam canner so if i'm i'm going to anticipate that that's a victorio where um that model has a glass lid and vent holes in the top we initially looked at that but because of the glass on the lid we don't have any evidence to say that you can use it we don't have any evidence to say that you can't so for something that's not a dome style so a multi-use steam canner you would actually have to go to the manufacturer and you would need them to provide you the information i've been able to share with you today so that you could know how to use it safely um i'm going to do a follow-up because this one just came in and the question is did your research show that a single vent hole results in an unsafe product so that is a great question so the vent hole so like it's right here right so um the back to basics model that has this dome lid comes with a vent hole on either side the um victorio model only had one hole so we don't know um we do know that you have to get the air air is an insulator that's why we use it on our down jackets but that's not good for heat transfer to our jars so for more effective heat transfer to your jars we recommend that if your steam dome canner lid has only one hole in one side use a drill or a nail to put another hole on the other side you will get better venting um and we believe that that translates to um more effective processing okay here's your next question is it okay to use the steam canner on a smooth top stove so that is a good question and again it's gonna i'm gonna refer you back to sometimes you're a plant sealer you can kind of see they they have these ridges so um you can try it generally with a with a smooth top stove the biggest problem is where you have your canner extended beyond the burner and especially for longer heating times your stove top may crack and that's an expensive repair so size your canner to the burner and it would be a great question for your um stove manufacturer um but for shorter heating times there's a chance that this that they will work uh effectively while you're on that topic what diameter hole should you drill um i'd say it's gonna come with one uh and just about match it let's see it's about two centimeters three centimeters four centimeters hole or something like that quarter an inch diameter how about that all right that works um and another good question because everyone is usually a little bit afraid of pressure canners um what are the personal safety risks when using a steam canner can it blow up excess steam glass breakage yeah that's great it it can't blow up because you'll notice if you use yours like i do for tomatoes where it's a little bit longer process sometimes that dome there'll be a little pressure built up and sometimes the dome will tend to kind of elevate wants to pop off it won't do that it sits pretty snugly in a ridge on the base um probably the biggest risk is when you take the lid off um tilt the lid away from you without knocking the jars so that the steam initially goes away um we do know for a boiling water canner the more recent instructions say to leave the jars in the canner for 10 minutes prior at the end of the process time prior to moving them to the counter for cooling that's not a food safety reason that's a jar breakage reason and i will confess that i am way too busy to wait 10 minutes so i just moved my jars at the end of a process time even in a boiling water canner immediately to the shelf or to the countertop for cooling because generally there's more to go back in that canner um so um with a steam canner there's no reason to leave them in the canner you can if you want to um but there's no reason to do so and you might have covered this already but is there a particular brand that you recommend when purchasing a steam canner so we all i can say is um we tested the back to basics model most extensively back to basics i believe is no longer being manufactured unfortunately um but we also tested uh victorio um or vkp steam canner those are still available they're both this dome style um lid so those are the ones that our research clearly applies to because they're the same type of appliance um other types of steam canners we just we didn't have a chance to do work on those all right thank you so you mentioned a i think it was a chocolate dessert sauce yes and somebody wants the recipe and is it on the national center website yes so um that uh i think we initially picked that up from ball one of the ball blue book recipes or ball complete guide to home canning uh recipes again this type of recipe the the national center is also a great place to look it's really quite delicious it's like an ice cream dessert topping um yeah sounds good after months of tomato juice processing the lab smelled really really good when we got around to this chocolate dessert sauce it's chocolate and raspberries together it's really quite yummy okay now we're all hungry yes a couple questions and i think you might have covered these do you keep the burner on throughout the process yes you do you must keep the burner on so you can turn it turn the heat down um so as long as it's venting um it doesn't have to vent you know really really forcefully it does have to vent um we're happy to answer questions i think myself and any anyone who's used these we're happy to help you if you're if you're trying to figure out if you buy one of these and and want to um uh have some questions about that just let us know and we'll be happy to kind of work you through it i can't imagine my um home food preservation arsenal without a steam canner i'm so glad that we found out that they worked because i'm not sure i would have been able to give mine up all right a couple more about taking the jars out when you say cool undisturbed do you mean leave the dome lid on nope take them out of the canner just as you would a boiling water canner so take the lid off put it to the side and then move those can't those jars from the rack in the canner to some type of cool surface for cooling um either a generally i put a either a cloth towel i sit them on my counter away from um the drafts and those kind of things or i'll put them on a cake cooling rack um again and just happily listen to the jars um popping shut so kind of a follow-up when processing is done do i leave the dome on for five minutes before i move my jars or do i take the lid off for five minutes and then move you don't have to leave once your timer gives you the signal that your process time is done then turn the heat off so you're not continuing to create steam um and at that point you may take the lid off the canner and then take the jars out of the canner and move them to a rack or some other surface for cooling and then there was a question about using liquid versus powder pectin oh yeah so we say use the whatever your recipe calls for so right i don't know of bulk pectin that's liquid so i choose um recipes that call for dry pectin powdered pectin because i buy powdered pectin in bulk either way we say just use a tested recipe you'll have not only a safe product but it will also be delicious um when you do that and here's the next question it appears that the time is less for a steam canner than a water bath canner is that true so it's it is true with a qualifier the overall time with a steam canner is shorter because only because i'm not having to boil 16 quarts of water which might take 20 or 30 minutes however when a recipe says for a boiling water canner says your process time the time where you start your timer once the jar once the water is boiling when that time says 35 minutes it is exactly the same time in your steam canner it's the same 35 minutes it's just processing in steam not in boiling water and that's a really really great question and if there's follow-up questions that you have please ask because we would like to be able to make sure if if you're at all unclear just give me a call or send send me an email and we'll be happy to follow up with that two questions left and then we'll wrap it up okay is rhubarb considered an acid food it is it's got a different acid it's oxalic acid it's not a citric or malic or acidic um but yes it is and the last question and thank you so much barb for rolling with this when i was not on air um would this process work on a portable burner cooktop instead of risking a cracked smooth top it certainly could i think some portable units are induction burners and those require particular types of um of of of cookware right for for that current for those to heat um so it's certainly worth checking uh checking into um would be really quick and easy to do if you had a separate uh little burner um that could do this kind of thing so that brings us to the end of today's session and i hope that all of you continue to join us we have several sessions left including another presentation about food preservation a little bit later and thanks so much barb for a great talk and you got a lot of kudos popping in in the in the chat so thank you and thanks to everyone for being here yeah thank you and just let us know if you have questions we'll be happy to answer those um as we're having to conclude today's program thanks so much julie for helping us share this research that we were able to do and i hope all of you enjoy steam canning um as much as i do