 Welcome, everyone, to our next session of our 2021 Field to Fork webinar series. My name is Julie Garden Robinson. I'm a food nutrition specialist with NDSU Extension. I will be your host for today's webinar. So on the next slide, our upcoming webinars are going to be featuring two of my NDSU horticulture colleagues, Esther McGuinness, who's in Fargo, and Tom Kalb, who's in Bismarck in the following one. We hope you're able to join us for the entire series of 10 webinars. If you miss one, they will be archived. So in our next slide, we are just going to talk a little bit about our webinar function that we're using. So you all are in listening mode today without cameras or microphones. And people who are watching this live will be able to ask questions in the chat box so you can find the chat box on your screen. And if you have questions during Karen's talk today, we ask that you type your questions in the chat and I will pose those after a presentation today. Or if it's one that we need to answer right away, I'll pop in and ask her the question. So on the next slide, I have a special request for all viewers of the live talk and any of the archives to maintain our funding sources and offer these types of programs in the future. I ask that you take a very short survey and this will land in your email inbox shortly after today's talk. Or if you're watching the recording, you will see the link on the website. I will have some random prize drawings, so we have a little bit of sugar in it for you. So I'm not actual sugar, there's a prize that you may get in the mail if you win. So after you submit your survey, you will be redirected to a second survey to enter your name and mailing address. And I have a couple of acknowledgments first to the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service for our field to fork funding. And I certainly hope that you explore the wide range of resources that we have on the NDSU field to fork site. And for those of you who are in education, you can certainly print those off and use those as you'd like. And we also have a contribution from Purdue University through a grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. We thank all these entities for their support. So now it's time for our featured speaker. I am very pleased to introduce my colleague, Karen Blakesley, Extension Associate for Kansas State Research and Extension. And she's also my colleague on a North Central Region Food Safety Team. Karen is the coordinator of the Kansas State University Rapid Response Center. The center is a KSU Extension Agent resource for questions primarily relating to many aspects of food, including food science, food safety, food preservation, food preparation, and also nutrition. Karen teaches food preservation classes across Kansas and in many formats. She's also the assistant director for the Kansas Value Added Foods Lab. This program works with small food companies from across Kansas to test their products, create nutrition labels, and more to help the Kansas economy grow. So with that, I'm very grateful that Karen is sharing some time out of her very busy schedule to talk to us about hot topics and food preservation. So welcome, Karen. Thank you, Julie, and good afternoon, everybody. It's a pleasure to be with you today and greetings from Kansas State University here down in Manhattan, Kansas. So as Julie said, I'm going to cover what some of the things that we've seen here in the last few months that we consider hot topics in food preservation. Food preservation is something that's been around for a very long time, but there's been a lot of new things that have been showing up here recently, and especially with being in a pandemic that has created a whole another list of topics to talk about and to go through and try to figure out, are these really a safe, is this really a safe idea to do or not? So I'm going to talk about a few of those. So I want to get started with talking about the science behind home food preservation, and there really is a lot of science to this, and I want to just kind of show you this little video as I'm talking. You know, the main goals that we're looking at as far as safety behind home food preservation, especially with canning, is stopping the growth of microorganisms, such as spoilage microorganisms, that's your yeast and your mold, and then pathogens. And the one that we're primarily concerned about with canning is botulism. That is, it's a really, it can really be a deadly bacteria that can form when canned food is not processed properly, not made properly. The other thing we're looking at is inactivating enzymes. Enzymes are naturally in all foods, and they work within the food system, they can change color, they can affect the texture, the flavor, nutrition. Now this jar of salsa that I'm showing here was not properly processed, it was under processed, and as you can see, there is some kind of bacteria growing in here and gases forming, and that's why you see it kind of turning into this volcano coming out of the jar. You don't want to see this happen. So my goal here today is to try to make it a little smarter when it comes to home food preservation. I don't want to scare you too much, but I want you to be smart about what you're doing, because when it's done safely, it can, you can really create some really safe products. The other part, the other two types of food preservation that we work with is freezing and dehydrating. These same factors here, stopping the growth of microorganisms and inactivating enzymes, those play into those types of food preservation also. So I get up to date, you know, especially with home canning, this has been around for a very, very long time, hundreds of years, and science has changed some of the things that we do as far as how we do food preservation, the methods that we use, the equipment that we use, the why, we do certain things the way that we recommend you do. And all of these factors here that I have listed, these all play a part as far as how safe that product is going to be in the end. What's the acidity of this food that you're canning? Is it a high acid food or a low acid food? High acid foods are low in pH. Those are like your fruits, jams and jellies, most jams and jellies, pickled products, those are what we consider high acid foods. Low acid foods are your plain vegetables and meat that you can. So low acid foods are the ones that could support the growth of botulism. Botulism, the clostridium botulinum does not like high acid environments, but it really does like low acid environments. But if we control everything else about that food and can it properly, we greatly reduce the risk of botulism forming. So the water activity, how the heat flows through the jar. This is a picture here of temperature probe inside the jar to test the cold spot and see how well the heat is penetrating through the jar. The size of the food pieces, the size of the jars, whether the food is hot packed or raw packed. Your altitude of residence really plays a role in this. And you really need to pay attention to that so that you are processing your products safely for your altitude. Time and temperature and even the head space. How much space is between the top of that jar and the top of the food? That's going to make a difference on the seal and the safety of the food in the end. So there's a lot of things that go into this. You can make any recipe that you want and eat it fresh or serve it at a meal. You can make anything and eat it that way. But when you put it inside of a jar and enclose it and pull a vacuum on it, it's a completely different environment that food is living in. So I want to show this video here. This just recently came out from Utah State University and this is a person that unfortunately she had botulism from improperly canned food. So I want to show this to so you hear her story. So watch this, listen to it and learn. There's a lot of learning that can happen with this video. It's about a 10 minute video. So sit back and relax and you might have to turn up your volume a little bit. She's a little bit quiet. I've got the volume as high as I can for this. So you might have to turn your own volume up on your computer. Now my name is Debbie Miller and I have a story to tell you. I'm here to educate some of you and to enlighten all of you about what reckless canning looks like. And I vowed while I was in intensive care, paralyzed and on a ventilator, to tell my story as often as I could in hopes that others would realize the seriousness of proper canning to their safety and the safety of their families. I had prepared jams and water baths but I had never ever pressure canned vegetables. My presto pressure canner was large. I have it here. I had raw packed six to eight, one and a half pint glass jars in a pressure canner that I had been given to by a neighbor. It was a well made presto pressure canner but there were no instructions for its use. That was my first mistake. I had no idea how to use this presto pressure canner. No idea. I did not have the gauge checked out and properly calibrated by the USU food extension team. I basically ignored their recommendation. I figured that I could just cook the beans longer and that would destroy any risky bacteria. But finally the day came to can. I bought kosher salt, I washed my beans, I cut my beans and began packing them. I was so excited and since I was working with my neighbor who had done some canning, I surely would not make any stupid mistakes. Well just recently, about a year after my near fatal illness, I watched a YouTube video produced by the University of Alaska food safety personnel. The instructor said to fill the pressure canner with three to four inches of water. As I heard her say this and watched her fill her pressure canner, I was alarmed to realize that out the gate I had failed to follow appropriate standards. What did I do in September of 2018? I filled my pressure canner to cover the one and a half pint glass jars of raw packed green beans. I had done that for jams in a water bath so I guess I would do that for my canned green beans. I knew nothing about the difference between high acid foods like fruits and jams and sugary you know bread and butter pickles perhaps and low acid foods like straight vegetables. I knew nothing about pH levels. All of these things I learned too late. I put too much water in the pressure canner. I filled it to the top of the one and a half pint glass jars. By filling my pressure canner with water, it would have never reached the appropriate temperature to kill the botulism. There was no room for the pressure to reach 240 degrees nor was there room to create the required steam. Also there was no weight on the vent pipe which if it were properly placed would have allowed the pressure canner to build up the pressure and we'll get to the vent pipe in a minute. So I locked the pressure canner and I had no idea what to do next. I didn't consult the dial gauge because it didn't work. It remained at zero. I never got steam out of the vent port nor did I look for steam to come out of the vent port. I did not even know what that thing was sticking up from the lid of the pressure canner. I just turned off the flame after five to six hours. I never reached the level of pressure to allow the vent port to release steam for ten minutes as would have been industry standard. Like I said, I didn't even know what a vent port was nor what it was used for. Then there was this metal thing about the size of dice. What was that for? How could I know? It was the dead weight that was to be placed on the vent port after ten minutes. But I hadn't read the instructions so I didn't know anything about about a vent port or a dead weight. After I turned off the gas burner I think I did leave the pressure canner cool. I did let the pressure canner cool for a couple of hours and I believe at about midnight I opened it. I don't remember if I took the green bean jars out of the water then or waited until the next morning to take them out. When I went to the kitchen the next morning I checked the canned green bean lids after I had taken them out of the can the pressure canner. Okay get ready this is worthy of a shocked hand gesture. As I ran my finger across the top of the lids some were concave and others were not. So I pressed down on those that weren't an applied pressure and suddenly they were concave. There was evidence of improper sealing that I ignored and I even altered and told myself they were properly sealed. The canned green beans stayed on the kitchen counter for a week or so and I was so proud. Here I was living the life in Utah canning just like my grandma these beautiful jars of green beans adorning my countertop. In about November I pulled out a jar of my canned green beans and served them for dinner. I don't recall whether I boiled them in water or simply microwaved them but we enjoyed them with no ill effect. In January I finished the jar of green beans. I ate them on January 1st and on January 2nd. On January 4th I woke up with double vision. Something was seriously wrong. I went to the emergency room at Salt Lake City Regional Medical Center as I was in Salt Lake at the time. There was no explaining it. I was rushed in to have a brain MRI to rule out a stroke. The MRI came back clear. I was sent home and told to call in if my condition worsened. The next morning I woke up with a swollen tongue and continued double vision. I could barely hold my head up. The emergency room doctor had actually called me the second morning. I answered and it said almost inaudibly, my tongue had fallen. I need to come back. He said, come back in. I was again admitted and he asked me, what have you eaten? Like a ton of bricks it hit me. I had eaten canned green beans that I had canned. I had botulism. He immediately got on the phone to the CDC. Blood samples for serum testing were taken. I laid back in that bed in the emergency room and literally watched and listened as the team determined a diagnosis of botulism. Everything was in full swing and within 10 hours the anti-toxin was flown in from California and administered to me. All coordinated by my emergency room doctor and the CDC. I went from the emergency room to ICU later that morning. I believe but time was beginning to stand still. I was sedated and I fell asleep. When I woke it was daytime. Arm restraint for being applied because I had been intubated. I could no longer breathe on my own. I could not move any part of my body aside from my hands. And I had a nasal feeding tube inserted into my nose to my stomach. I would be in the ICU for nine more days and move to South Davis Community Hospital for 82 days of recovery, including rehab, included physical, occupational and speech therapy. I had to be tricked. I did not eat or drink for two months and had to learn how to drink, eat and swallow again. Not to mention to be weaned from a ventilator and be able to breathe on my own again. Lessons learned. Do a dry run before actually canning low acid vegetables. Find an instruction manual for your pressure canner. They exist online. It would not be that hard to find one. Read your instructions. Watch videos from universities on proper canning techniques. Learn about all of the components of your pressure canner. Assure that each can is properly sealed. No pressing down on those that aren't concave. But the final thing I focused on was telling my story and thinking of venues that I would use to tell it. And when I returned home, I did call Charlie McCollum, the editor of the Herald Journal, and I pitched my story. I said, Charlie, there is a story here. California Transplant comes to Utah. Gonna live a prairie life. Start canning food and living off the land. And I almost killed myself trying to do it. I hope my story enlightens all of you on how at risk as urban dwellers are who come to these wonderful agricultural regions thinking we can just jump into canning. And if I can be a poster child for what not to do in canning, I'm happy to step up and help wherever I can. Thank you. All right. So as you can see, she made a lot of mistakes. And unfortunately, she kind of paid the price on it. She's very fortunate that she survived this. And as you can see here, they've listed several things to prevent these kinds of mistakes. And it all starts with education. And that's what we are all here for. We're here to help you learn and become better at preserving your food at home and doing it safely. To start with, here at Case 8, we have a series of publications. And we have two that we call How-To Guides. One on water bath canning, which also includes steam canning. And then another one on pressure canning. Both of these are also in Spanish. So these are pretty uniform guidelines for any kind of equipment that you're using, whether it's water bath or pressure canning. But as always, especially on your pressure canners, read the instructions for that particular canner so that you really understand how that piece of equipment works. And like she mentioned in the video, doing a dry run, just putting water in the canner and practicing with it. If you've never done this before, that is an excellent idea to do that dry run. So you understand what the steps are, how the canner works, and how it works with your stove also. So take a look at these and make use of those to help educate yourself. Some other things I'd like to talk about is recipes. We highly recommend that you use what we call tested recipes. And this will get you on the best path to preserving food safely, whether that's using the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning, which is the basis for all of our university publications that we have. Here at K-State, we have 10 publications on 10 different food groups. One of them is vegetables, which includes several different vegetables in there. The University of Georgia has an excellent publication. It's a book called So Easy to Preserve. You can order it directly from them. Or some of your local extension offices may have copies of it that you can purchase it from them. This is a really great book. They also have a companion website. It's the National Center for Home Food Preservation. And that's also where you can find the link to order this book. It's well worth the investment. It includes canning, freezing, and dehydrating. So those are all really good. The Ball Blue Book, the ball company's been around for a long time. It's a very standard book. A lot of the recipes that are in there actually come from the USDA, especially the pressure canning side. So there's that. The instructions on the SureGel packages are really good. Again, on all of these, pay attention to the altitude adjustments that you need to make. These books, especially So Easy to Preserve and the Ball Books, the recipes are written for processing instructions for altitudes of 1,000 feet or below. So you have to read the general instructions, the introduction chapters, to understand how to adjust for your altitude. For water bath canning, you would add time. For pressure canning, you add pressure. So do your homework. It's really going to pay off in the long run, and so please encourage that. And then if you still have questions, contact your local extension offices. If you have your own favorite recipes that you think, oh, it'd be fun to save these and can these for later use. For home canners, we do not recommend that you just randomly take a recipe that you've made up and use some other instructions to apply to that made up recipe and think that it's going to be safe. Every food is different. Every mixture of food is different. So we do not recommend that you do that. The best option is to freeze that. So for example, salsa. Everybody likes to make their own favorite mixture of salsa. So if you want to preserve that your homemade special mixture, we highly recommend that you just freeze it or eat it fresh, of course. Any recipes that are older than 1994, if you're finding resources like that, I know everybody has their favorite family recipes and things like that. We recommend that you not use those. Those could be risky. So please update. It's time to get updated into the 21st century. A newer publication that the Ball Company came out with here in the last three or four years is this one. And one thing that we've discovered with this is they have some recipes in here that call for fresh lemon juice. And we called them about this with a lot of concern because fresh lemon juice has an inconsistent acid content. While it sounds really good to use fresh lemon juice for any kind of fresh recipe that you make, when it comes to canning, we do not recommend you use that because of the inconsistent acid content that it has. You really should use recipes that call for bottled lemon juice because that has a standard consistent acid content. If you use fresh lemon juice in place of that, your product is likely going to spoil and I've seen it happen. So please pay attention to that. There are a few recipes in here and they recognize that and they've told us that they're going to make those changes and make it accurate. I don't know if that's come out yet. But anyway, I just wanted to bring this to your attention about this cookbook. Something that's been coming up here within the last year or so is dry canning. This is not something we recommend at all because it's really not canning. Even dry foods contain in some amount of moisture, dry flour, dry beans, even dried fruits, they can contain 11 to 30 percent moisture in there. So they're truly not dry to start with. And if you put these in a jar, put a lid on them, the idea behind this is to put them in your oven and heat them up in order for the lid to seal. Well, first of all, the jar company recommends to not put those jars in an oven because the glass is not tempered for dry heat and they could likely crack and they need to have a real mess inside your oven. An oven canning in general is not recommended at all for any kind of food preservation. And the other thing is you could, by heating up these products and if there's pockets of moisture in there, you could encourage the growth of any kind of bacteria that might be in there that likes to grow in this type of environment. Salmonella is one that's resistant to drying and this is one that could be encouraged to grow if you put it in this type of environment. Even botulism could grow in here. The quality of the product, you know, if you're putting like nuts or a grain product in there, there may be a small amount of fat and that could oxidize and cause rancidity and off flavors in there. So this is not something that we recommend. If you want to store dried fruits like nuts and beans and flour, use a vacuum sealer. Do not put these products in the oven. You can use a vacuum sealer. You could even use what's called oxygen absorbers. You put them inside the jar of food and store them at room temperature and those oxygen absorbers will basically absorb the oxygen. That's what they do and you should be able to find those at even Walmart. They might sell those there. So be careful about putting these dried products like this. Do any kind of so-called dry canning and putting them in the oven. That's the big thing we don't recommend. And along with that is something that we found out about people were doing last year was dry canning vegetables. They were taking raw vegetables such as corn, green beans, carrots, beets, whatever vegetable, putting them in the jars without any liquid and then pressure canning them. This is a really risky thing to do. That water is really or that liquid is essential for proper heat treatment to preserve the food safely. It helps circulate the heat through the jar. It gets the temperature inside that jar up to the proper temperature it needs to be to kill any micromorganisms that may be present. So please don't do this. This is really, really very risky to do and you'll end up with a lot of spoiled product and you could even make you or your family sick by doing this too. All right. Another thing that we've discovered in the last couple of years, white fleshed peaches and nectarines. While these may be delicious to eat, they are actually not the same as their cousins, the yellow flesh varieties. White peaches and nectarines have a higher pH content, which means they are actually a low acid food and you cannot use these for canning the same way that you would can yellow flesh peaches. There are no recommendations to can this variety of peaches, unfortunately. So our best recommendation is to freeze them or eat them fresh. I actually had a consumer call me and they can peaches. At first she didn't tell me what kind they were and she said a couple days later the lids were starting to pop off her jars and I just read something about this and so I asked her, I said, so were these yellow peaches or white peaches? And she said they were white peaches and sure enough that's exactly what happened because of the high pH content of this, the actual low acid food and using the traditional canning recommendations for yellow peaches, they were not safely canned unfortunately and her peaches were already, there was something growing in them already. So if you have these, freeze them or eat them fresh. That's our best recommendation for these. For those of you that like to use apps on your mobile devices, whether it's your phone or tablets, there's Oregon State and Colorado State had developed a couple of apps to use that you can download, they are free. If you just search your app stores, both of these are available for Apple or Android devices. So search for Oregon State's food preservation or Colorado State's food preservation app. Oregon State actually calls there's the canning timer and checklist and Colorado State calls their Preserve Smart. There's also available as a website, you can use that instead. I don't think Oregon's is available that way, it's only available as an app. But what's cool about these is they, especially for Colorado's, it forces you to put it in your altitude where you're located to start with. And it remembers that. And so it will automatically adjust your recipes for the proper processing that you need to do. And these will also step you through each step of the process. It'll make you checkmark them so that you tell it that you've done that step. So I think it's really handy and it helps you make sure you remember the steps that you need to do. So check those out. Like I said, they're free and so they're available for you to use. Another thing on recipes to be smart about, the popular press can be a little misleading. And they can put out recipes that may not be safe to use for any kind of canning. A recent example, I'll just put it out there, that Bon Appetit put out a video here a couple of weeks ago. They were showing canning a shrimp product, which obviously is a meat product. Any kind of meat products must be pressure canned. Well, what they were actually showing was this product being processed in a water bath canner, which is a big mistake. And they got all kinds of backlash about that. And they immediately took this video down and they also got written up in the Washington Post. And so unfortunately, they got some unwanted press on their selves. So be careful about that. And I also show this picture here of newspapers. Newspapers like to have a food section, newspapers like to have a food section, which is really great. This one came out in one of the newspapers here in Kansas. It's also syndicated and it ended up in several newspapers, not just here in Kansas, but I think outside of Kansas. And it talks about canning salsa. And first of all, the picture of this, look at this big, huge headspace on there. It's way too much head space to start with it on salsa. It should be a half an inch. But the other big mistake they're showing here is using this in a quart jar. There are no salsa recipes to be canned in a quart jar. There are no recommendations for that. And it's because there's just been no testing done to can it in a quart jar, only in pints. That's the only recommendations they have. And the other thing about this recipe is down here in the instruction that says turn off the heat and immediately transfer salsa to the warm sterile jars and screw on the sterile lids, which is fine. But then it says they will seal as they cool on the counter. There is nothing mentioned about doing any kind of heat processing at all with this. So this is a really unsafe recipe to use. If you wanted to make this and just freeze it, it would have been fine. But they were talking about canning this. So be very careful about where you're finding recipes to can. All right. Another appliance that is starting to come out, this is put out by Presto. It's a digital pressure canner. I will say that in their documentation, they mentioned that it follows USDA guidelines for processing. But that does not mean that this appliance was actually tested in any kind of USDA laboratory and not even tested in any university research laboratory that we know of. So we can't really recommend this right now until we know the science behind it and whether it's really reaching the proper temperatures that it needs to for safe pressure canning. Now, Presto is trying to be ahead of the game on this. I know there's been a lot of requests for this kind of machine, but right now we do not recommend that. And also any of those like Instapot, those electric pressure cooking devices that have a canning function, we do not recommend using those at all because we don't know what temperature those actually reach either. All right. Canning supplies last year really created a lot of havoc on things. And there was a lot of pandemic buying, not just for toilet paper, but in the canning world. It was, if you did any canning, I bet you had a hard time finding lids. Even any kind of supplies, lids and jars were a big problem. From what we've heard, the Ball and Kerr folks are making things as fast as they possibly can to replenish supplies. Here in Kansas, where I live, I have seen a few starting to show up back in the grocery stores. I caution you on buying the off-brand lids because they may not be the right size. They may not function properly. This picture I saw on Facebook from the University of California. These are some off-brand lids that just did not function right. And you can see the bulges, the dents in these lids. They just didn't seal right. So be very careful about those. And there's also some scams out there too of people selling ball and kerr supplies, but they're really not those lids either. So be careful about where you're buying those. Be patient. The buyers, the Ball and Kerr folks, they are doing their best to get back and get the supplies back into the stores. I want to briefly mention food fermentation. This is something that's really become popular in the last couple of years. Well, fermentation has been around for thousands of years. This is a very old practice, but there still needs to be some safety precautions when doing these. Having good clean food, good fresh food. The quality of this product depends on the natural sugars and the desirable bacteria that you want to have there to form. Properly controlling the fermentation process, excuse me, really helps control any growth of undesirable yeasts and molds. And that really depends on using the correct amount of salt, especially for vegetables like this shown here. Keeping the air off of the surface, because that could attract, if you don't keep the air off of there, that could attract undesirable yeast and molds and undesirable bacteria forming. And the temperature that you're using to ferment really makes a difference on how slow or fast the fermentation process takes place. The optimal temperature for food fermentation is usually around 70 degrees for a vegetable type product. Fermentation also includes making yogurt and kombucha and kefir and kimchi. So it's fermentation covers a lot of different kinds of foods. While it can be fun and tasty, you still need to be careful about what you're doing. And it's best to store these in the refrigerator, and then some of the vegetable products like sauerkraut, you can process that in the water bath canner and preserve that for later use that way. Just a basic list of signs to look for on your canning. If you see any of these, such as a bulging lid or the lid comes loose and you don't know why, don't take your little pinky finger and stick it in there and taste it. That one little small little taste could be deadly in the long run. And you don't want to end up getting botulism like the lady did in that video. If you see any color changes, bubbles moving on their own, and you don't know why foam creating underneath the lid or if the jar is leaking, those are clear visual signs that something's going wrong. If it doesn't smell right when you open it, if it doesn't smell like that good green bean smell that properly canned green bean should smell like, something's going wrong. If the liquid spurts out of it violently, there's some gas being built up in there. And obviously mold growth is a sign that contamination is there and mold grows down into a food. It's not just what you see on top. Mold grows down so you can't just scrape off the top and go ahead use it. It's really best to just throw it away. Slimeiness is another sign. So use your eyes, use your nose, just don't taste anything that looks suspicious. And as we always say, when in doubt, throw it out. That's really the best recommendation. If you want to learn how to preserve food at home, our university friends at Michigan State they have put together a really good series of online classes. If you just do a search for Michigan State University food preservation, you should be able to find their online course. I think that it's a cost of $10. That's really very minimal. Penn State University also has some online classes. There's around about $5. Again, just you can just do a search for Penn State University for food preservation classes and you should be able to find that pretty quickly. I've watched the Penn State ones and I've found them to be really quite good. North Dakota State, our friends up there, they have a lot of great educational materials on food preservation. So check those out if you're not familiar with those or give Julia Call or your local extension office. And then the bottom link is my website, the Rapid Response Center. I have a whole section there on home food preservation. Tons of links in there. I have some videos on there too that you can learn about canning, water bath canning and pressure canning. In the pressure canning, I actually show canning meat if you're interested in that. The water bath canning, I'm talking about salsa. But the main thing to learn about by watching those is the steps that you go through. That's really the big message in looking at the videos. But take a look at these online classes. These folks have done a lot of great work and we really appreciate what they've done with this and they've really gotten a great response just in the last year of doing those online classes. All right. I think that leaves us with about 15 minutes or so. Are there any questions? You've got a lot of questions. Okay, I kind of figured that. Take a breath. Yeah, I need to drink water here. I took care of a few of them, but somebody asked, when you were talking about adding bottled lemon juice, someone asked, can't you just use a scorbic acid powder? Okay, so when you're canning tomatoes, you can use either bottled lemon juice or you can use citric acid. That's two of the options that you or you could use even vinegar. So for canning plain tomatoes, like tomato juice, whole tomatoes, diced tomatoes, things like that, you would use one tablespoon of bottled lemon juice or lime juice per pint or two tablespoons per quart or you could use citric acid and it's a quarter teaspoon per pint or a half teaspoon per quart. If you want to use vinegar, you would have to use two tablespoons of vinegar per pint and four tablespoons per quart. Vinegar is not quite as acidic as lemon juice is. So I don't know the exact conversion of using lemon juice versus a scorbic acid. They are too different. Even though lemon juice isn't a scorbic acid, I have to admit, I don't know the conversion of that, Julia. I don't know if you know that. I have not seen that. So what I usually tell people is to find the recipe that calls for the acidulant that you want to use and that would be on the national site where we don't get our information. Another question on that same line, and I'm glad you talked about acidifying tomatoes because that's the most common one I get. So Twyla says when using bottled lemon juice, can one use minute-made frozen lemon juice without the preservatives? I don't think so. No, that's really because that's going to have sugars in it. And I'm not sure what else is in the frozen concentrate. So it may not have the right amount of acidity that bottled lemon juice does. It's actually a sweeter. It may be a little off. So I would not recommend doing that. I would just stick to a bottle of lemon juice. Amy has a question. I've heard varied information on whether pressure canning on glass top electric cooktops or stoves will damage the stove top. Can you pressure can on glass top cooktops? Okay, that's a great question. One I get a lot, and I know Julie does too. So first of all, follow your stove manufacturer's recommendations. If your stove manufacturer says yes, you can do canning on this particular stove, that's the first thing to look at. Okay, the second thing to look at is the type of pressure can, the brand, actually the brand of pressure canner that you're wanting to use. I can tell you that the Miro company and the All-American pressure canners are not recommended to use on glass flat top stoves. And they say that in their instructions. The All-American brand is a heavy canner, and that one in particular especially could really crack your stove top. So you do not want to do that. The Presto brand, the newer versions of the Presto canners, they have added an extra bump out on the bottom of their canners. And they say that theirs can be used on a flat top stove. Now, the caveat to that is how big is your flat top stove burner? And the canner should not hang over that burner size more than one inch around the outer edge. So pay attention to that. I've used a Presto pressure canner on flat top stoves with no problems. And so, but pay attention to what your stove manufacturer says and then buy the proper pressure canner for that. I'll also mention that if you have an induction stove top, Presto came out with a pressure canner to use on induction stove tops so that it has a magnetic connection to the induction burner. So that one you can find on their website. And it looks just like the other, you know, the regular dial gauge. I think it's only in the dial gauge style. So looks just like the regular one, but it's designed and made with the proper metal so that it's magnetic and works on an induction stove. So pay attention to that. I have heard of people that have cracked their stove tops because of not following the manufacturer's directions. So use at your own risk, I guess. It could be very costly. It could be very costly, exactly. So I'm going to step back as I see another question here from Annie about bottle lemon juice. And she's wondering if you can use 100% organic bottled lemon juice? I've never had that one. I've never had that question before. You know, honestly, I don't, I don't know what the acid content of that is. I would think it would be the same, but I can't verify that off the top of my head. So that's a good question. I don't know. I really can't answer that one. And I would probably call the company and ask them how it compares. Exactly. I think that would be the first step to go. Okay. Now you're going to switch into freezing. Okay. And Emily's wondering, do you have to blanch fruits and vegetables before freezing for food safety concerns? Or is that just a recommended step to retain color, texture, flavor, etc.? It's actually both, especially for vegetables, the blanching, because the blanching heats up the food and can take care of any potential bacteria or yeast or mold that might be on the surface of that food. So in that respect, yes. Food safety-wise, it helps take care of that. But it also, the biggest thing it does is help improve the quality of the product in the end. And it goes back to what I talked about at one of the first slides where I talked about the enzymes. The blanching step helps inactivate those enzymes and the heat will stop any kind of flavor changes. It will stop the color changes, texture changes, things like that. And so in the end, during freezing, the quality that you get when you go to use that product will be much better. If you don't do that blanching step, those enzymes, even though that's in a cold temperatures, they still continue to work. It's just they're a little slower, but they still can make changes during the freezing process. So it really is both. When it comes to fruit, most fruit is not blanched. I mean, you can, but usually it's treated with like peaches, for example. You put the ascorbic acid mixture on there with what we normally refer to as fruit fresh. That's the brand name of it. Or lemon juice would work too, but fruit fresh works really well. And that's a color protector, but it also protects the flavor and sugar also helps protect the quality of the product in the end, too. But always wash your fruits and vegetables, peel them if it says to peel them because that's another step on removing any potential back contamination that might be on the food surface. All right. Now we're going to get into drying or dehydrating. What are the current recommended methods for dehydrating foods? Do you have to use a dehydrator machine, or can you do natural outdoor drying of fruits, vegetables, and herbs? Okay. A dehydrator really makes the whole process easier. Just say that. And sun drying is really difficult, even down where I am at. It's really difficult to do here in Kansas because you've got to have the sun, and you've got to have the heat, but you don't want the humidity, and it gets really humid down here. It's really got to be hot and dry, really dry, in order for sun drying to really work. The other thing that with sun drying is you've got to be careful with other contamination, you know, from birds flying by and insects and all that kind of thing to pay attention to. So sun drying takes a little more, I guess, effort and takes longer to do because it depends on if you've got enough wind to get the air circulation going because really dehydration is a combination of temperature, but also how much air circulation is to help remove the moisture from the food. And it also, you know, I talked about blanching for freezing. Blanching vegetables for drying is important too because that helps open up the pores of that food to help release the moisture, and they will dry faster. Okay. It's a lot more efficient. I did a test one time in a class that I was teaching, and we took green beans, and we did it three different ways. We left one batch just as they are. We didn't do anything to them. No blanching, nothing. Another batch, we blanched them as the directions said, and another batch we basically over blanched them. And the ones that we did nothing to never got dry after 24 hours, it should be done well before that, and it took forever. Of course, the blanched ones worked out great. The color was great, and they dried within eight to 10 hours or so. I can't remember exactly. But the ones that were over blanched, they turned into dried little sticks, and they were ugly and awful. And so, you know, that blanching step really does make a difference on that. So really a dehydrator is really best. You could dry in your oven, but again, you've got to have air circulation. If you have a convection oven, it's already got a fan in there. You could use it that way. But if you just have a standard oven, you'll have to leave the door open and set a fan outside the door so you can get some air circulation. And the optimum temperature for drying is 140 degrees. So that is the optimum drying temperature to get them dried properly and to get the moisture released properly too. So it's not very energy efficient to do it in the oven. I will say that. So really a dehydrator, it can be a good investment. So we're almost to the end of our hour. So I'm going to hand pick a couple more questions to wrap us up. And I want to assure all of you on this call that if you check with your Cooperative Extension, regardless of what state you're in, you will have a lot of excellent resources to use and people to ask questions. So what are you saying about the lid shortage in Kansas? Well, you know, the lids disappeared really fast last year. There was a lot of people planting gardens and then they realized, oh my goodness, we got to do something with this food. So lids disappeared quickly. I also think there were a lot of people doing crafting at home and using these jars and lids for a lot of different projects other than canning. And so the suppliers were caught short and they ran out and it got really difficult to do any kind of canning. So like I said earlier, I have seen some to start showing up here in the grocery store or the location where I'm at, but it's still going to take a little time. So be patient. A lot of times in a normal year, the Bollinger company usually really gets the supplies out in about March and April. So be patient with them. They really are trying to get back and get in store stocked with their product. So we'll end on this one. And as I said, all of your extension organizations in your state will have good resources for you. Anne is asking or saying, our water is very high pH. If I use our water, do I have to adjust for the high pH? Oh goodness. Oh, that's a good question, because that can, you may want to use bottled water. That's what I would suggest, because that's going to be more of a standardized level of pH on there. That's a good question. I've never had that question before. We've had a couple tough ones today. Yeah, this is great. This is great. Y'all are asking some great questions. So that's what I would recommend you do. If you know that, then I would just get some bottled water and use that instead. I know that's an extra cost, but that way you don't run into any risks with that. All right. Well, I'm going to wrap us up and I'm going to put my email in case you folks are from North Dakota. You can certainly pose the questions to me. Thank you very much, Karen. This was really helpful. And anyone on the call, please be aware that we have about 75 archived field of fork webinars on our website and several about food preservation. So please check those out. Check out all the resources in all our neighboring states. And I thank you all for joining us and certainly thank Karen for putting this on for us. And I hope all of you join us next week, because we're going to learn about flowers. All right. Thank you all.