 I'd like to welcome you all to the Wednesday weekly webinar. This is number nine in a series of ten. So next week is our final webinar. And our speaker today will be Cliff Hall. I have a couple things to share before we begin. So next week, as I mentioned, is our final webinar of the series. It's going to be featuring Todd Weinman. He's talking about introducing youth to gardening, which is always a great thing for all of us with interest in growing food to do. So please try to join us for that. Same time, same place, same link. I think you've all figured out the system because I've seen many familiar names. But if you have any questions along the way, you can just type those questions in on the chat pod. That's number five on this list. And the other thing I wanted to mention is that we have archived all of the webinars. So if you wanted to hear one, you can certainly just go to the Field to Fork website. And you'll be able to click on the link which takes you to YouTube. And you'll be able to watch any of the webinars that we've done along the way. And we now have, by the end of this, we will have 24 different topics available. And they're taught by lots of experts from NDSU and from other places. One thing I ask, and you've all been great about doing this, is to fill out the short survey that comes as a follow-up after the webinar. I had to turn in a report actually to be, and I had nearly 600 respondents to the surveys that we've done through the course of doing these webinars. You can't understand how valuable it is to have that data to share back with the funding agency. So much appreciated. And please continue to give us your feedback. I will be drawing some names for prizes after next week. I'm still waiting for the prize to be finalized. We're actually creating a new piece, and that's what the prize will be. And I'll send out a lot of them. So get your name in there multiple times. So I am pleased to introduce my friend and colleague Cliff Hall. We've worked extensively together and done a lot of workshops together through the years. I'd like to tell you a little bit about Cliff. He completed his bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin in River Falls. A master's and doctorate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the area of food science and technology. Dr. Hall is a professor in the Department of Serial and Food Sciences, actually in the plant sciences department. And he oversees research on pulse quality and utilization of pulse foods in food systems, as well as overseeing the annual US Pulse Quality Survey. Cliff has been extensively involved with students at NDSU. In fact, he's advised 11 PhD students, 12 master's students, and mentored over 30 undergraduate researchers and served on numerous committees. So he has a lot of experience in teaching and also working with students. And with that, I will introduce Cliff and he's going to talk to us about canning low and high acid foods and certainly typing your questions if you have questions along the way. So thanks, Cliff. All right. Thank you, Julie, for the introduction. For today's topic, as Julie mentioned, we'll really talk about canning. What's important about canning is that there's been a renewed interest in this particular area. For a while there, I think we as an industry kind of went away from canning. And from the food perspective or food science perspective, we're looking at alternative approaches to replace the canning methodologies. However, for local foods and for gardeners, canning is probably an excellent option for some foods. And so for today, I will highlight again for you as a refresher some food characteristics, essentially the pH characteristics of foods. We also will then discuss some canning basics. I won't cover every small detail, but I'll give you some highlights. Talk about internet canning and some work that we did at NDSU. And then we will highlight some places where you can find additional information. And then if you have questions, I'll try to cover some of those at the end or during the presentation. So the FDA or Food and Drug Administration broadly defines processed foods related to canning into three categories, either acid, low acid, or acidified. And their definition is really simply based on an acidity that is measured based on a pH scale. So that's really what they or how the FDA defines these different categories. And if we take a look at these in a little bit more detail, what we find is that low acid foods have a pH of 4.6 or above 4.6. So when you look at the products such as pumpkin and carrot and okra, these are all products that are considered low acid. So their pH values generally are right around pH of 5. You start to get into corn and green beans and mushrooms. These are now products that are in that 6 to 6 and a half pH range. So you can see then that when we talk about low acid, it's basically pH values above 4.6. Acidic foods, in contrast, are those that have a pH of 4.6 or lower. So this would be down at the lower end of the scale where we'd have food such as pears, apples, cherries, strawberries, and the like. So again, that would be an acidic food and would be treated different than a low acid food. If it's an acidified food, an acidified food is a food that is considered low acid that has an acid added to it to make it acidic in nature. What's really important about an acidified food is that the product itself has a final equilibrium pH of 4.6 or lower after it's been sitting in the acidifying acid, for example, for a week to four weeks. So it's very important to understand when you're dealing with an acidified food that you don't do the pH right after it's made, but instead you wait about a week to four weeks depending on the food product because you want to have an equilibrium pH of 4.6 or lower. So that's considered the acidified food. Of course, many of you already know fruits, pickles, sauerkraut, that all belongs to that acid food category, the low acid food category. Anytime you're dealing with meat or a milk based product, that's in that low acid category. And the majority of your vegetables all would be in this low acid category as well. Tomatoes and figs are a little bit different in that they kind of cross between both of these categories in the sense that some tomatoes are actually acidic in nature as well as some figs, but then if grown in the soil that's very alkaline in nature, they might actually have a pH that would go above that 4.6 value. So they'd be then a low acid food. So it's very important to kind of make sure that when you're making products that you understand will that product itself by nature be an acid or not. If it's borderline, that's when you bring in acids like lemon juice or citric acid or vinegar to help reduce that pH and making sure that it stays below that 4.6 value. So again, keep in mind that not all foods will necessarily be either acid or low acid, some can be actually kind of right at that border. So what's important then when we discuss canning is to really go to the USDA guidelines for canning, whether it's an acid food or low acid food. The National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia kind of holds the record for a lot of this home preservation and they have all the USDA guidelines listed. So it's important that if you have a person that contacts your office and asks about canning, that's where I would really send them first. So what's important is to say, well, this is a site that you can maybe read through some of the frequently asked questions or you can read through maybe a product that you might be interested in making. Because there's a lot of details out there and sometimes it's just better to send them right directly to this USDA guidelines. So based on these guidelines then, we currently have two home processing methods that are done with a great understanding in the sense that the USDA has done a lot of research in these two particular processing methods. With the boiling water canning, this is simply boiling that can product in water. And at sea level, keep in mind that that's 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius. This particular type of method is for acid foods and foods that have been acidified. So that's, again, a method that's appropriate for these types of foods. However, when we start to look at low acid foods, pressure canning is the approach that we have to take. With pressure canning, keep in mind that it's not only for low acid foods, but it's also for mixtures of acid and low acid foods. So if you have, say, an okra that's chopped up in some tomatoes, in that particular case, even though your tomatoes might be acidic, your okra is not. So it still falls in this kind of category where you want to do a pressure canning. What's important to remember here is that your temperature with pressure canning reaches about 240 degrees Fahrenheit, so much higher than that of a boiling water bath canner. And this is important because at 240 degrees Fahrenheit, there's enough energy in that system to destroy spores that might be present within some of the organisms that are concerned to us. So you have to have that high temperature to be able to do that. One other thing I do want to point out is that home produced low acid foods cannot be sold to the public. So that's something that's universally accepted. Companies that do it for a business have a lot of safeguards in place. So companies that are selling products that might be of low acid foods, they basically have much stricter requirements in their facilities than you might add home. And so it's important to recognize that you can still make low acid foods or can low acid food products at home for your consumption, but you just can't sell it to the public. So again, just recognizing low acids are really the one that we're most concerned with. Cliff? In what? Yes? How about when we go to farmers markets and see like home canned green beans or those items? What do we do when we see it? I would maybe contact the health department, the North Dakota Department of Health, because I think they're the ones that oversee what can be sold at the farmers markets. Well, and I even think of salsas because sometimes they use their own recipes and may or may not have canned them in a pressure canner. Yeah, and that's something that, you know, I've had a lot of requests recently of product pH testing where some of the individuals say, well, we contacted the state health department. So there seems to be a lot of people that are starting to be aware of things, but it really is a case where to see if they have evidence for that. And I think that's the biggest thing is, you know, do you have evidence? So it might be even worthwhile to maybe stop by and just chat with them a little bit. And I don't know, Julie, do you have other comments? Well, currently, there is a guideline sheet on the North Dakota Department of Health website, and it expressly says the low acid foods cannot be sold and so on. So I'm not sure that it's going to be in effect through the end of August. There was some new legislation that I'm not sure of the final version that has just come out. But for safety, nobody wants to be selling something that actually could be fatal, which in the case of home canned water bath green beans could be, as in the picture you're looking at right now. So the guidelines are on the North Dakota Department of Health website, food and lodging, and I think that will give you your answer. Okay, thank you, Julie. So yeah, I think that if you see somebody, just kind of point them in the right direction that they need to be following those guidelines. And as Julie mentioned, the concern that we have is by not understanding what our product is and how to process it correctly can lead to death. And so it can be severe. And this is something from the 30s where a number of individuals dined and passed away. So it's important to, yeah, if you see that, definitely point them in the right direction or if you have to, if you see it repeatedly, maybe it's something that you might even want to alert just the health department about. But one of the organisms that we're most concerned with, and this has been the one that the food industry as a whole from the canning industry have an interest in is clustering botulinum. So any canned food product clustering botulinum is that organism that is most concerned. And the reason for that is it is what we define as this obligated anerob. An obligated anerob is one that grows under very low oxygen content, so less than 2%. So the oxygen content in that product has to be lower than 2%. And so for canned products, that's easily achieved. So this organism, if not effectively killed, can grow under canned food environments. But also clustering botulinum is a toxin producer. The botulism toxin is one of the deadliest known toxin, and it's what is the reason or the basis for this botulism food poisoning. So if you get botulism, you're ingesting this toxin is what you're doing. One of the things is that there is an antidote available, but keep in mind that sometimes it might take a while for a doctor to diagnose what you actually have. Unless you tell them, well, I ate canned green beans or canned peas, that would be the only way that might alert them to botulism. So if you never mention that, they might think it's some other disease, and it might take a while for a diagnosis. So just be aware of that. Yes, there is an antidote, but it has to be properly administered. Also, the food itself that contains the toxin does not necessarily show signs that there's anything wrong with it. So it might look normal. It's just that the toxin itself isn't something that's going to be visible. So it's basically a chemical. So it's one that, again, keep in mind that when we talk about clustering botulinum, it's really the toxin that's the biggest issue. We also know that clustering botulinum produces spores that are heat resistant, and that the heat resistance is really critical here, because remember what I said earlier, we need that high temperature of 240 to really kill off the spores. And if we don't, then that really leads to the problem that we face, and that is the production of that toxin. So essentially what we have is we have the clustering botulinum, and it has a spore. You expose this to some sort of heat treatment, and so if it's a water bath can or, for example, it gets to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, but that's not enough to actually do anything but stress that spore. It kills off the vegetative or live bacteria, but that spore, it just triggers it to become active. And so what happens then is that it germinates. And if this germination occurs while it's under this anaerobic environment of a can, this bacterium starts to grow, because remember I said that it was an anaerobic organism. So it grows, multiplies, and then it excretes waste materials and toxins. So this is kind of the cycle that happens if an improperly canned low acid food. So again we need anaerobic conditions, low acid environments, temperatures of 40 to 120. So if it's sitting in your cupboard at 70 or 75 degrees Fahrenheit, ideal temperature. And then of course high moisture, which canned foods are. So it is a case where again this is that cycle of what happens in order for this toxin to be produced. Well how do we prevent botulism? Well the first thing is to inhibit spore germination, because one thing we do know is that you can eat spores of clustering botulinum. And so if you eat these spores they don't really do anything to healthy adults. Inference, yes they can, but not for people usually over one year of age. So what we find here is that if we can inhibit the germination that will effectively control clustering botulinum. So anything that's high acid, so high acid food, again remember pH less than or equal to 4.6, the spores aren't really going to germinate and be conducive for that bacteria to live in that acidic environment. We also would have an aerobic environment, so if there's an aerobic environment around, again that's not going to be very conducive for clustering botulinum. The other thing that we can do is promote spore destruction. And the spore destruction would be in that high temperature, 240 degrees Fahrenheit that we might achieve in a pressure canner. So that's an important way to get rid of that spore, destroy that spore. Once it's been destroyed it will not germinate into bacteria. So again you need that high, high temperature. So what does this previous information mean to me then? As a person that might be interested in processing, one of the things is that understanding the characteristics of the food and that of clustering botulinum is important because it kind of gives you a direction to go with processing. And anytime you have a high acid food, a water bath canner is appropriate. So you just have to get to that 212. Remember with clustering botulinum it will not grow on that acidic environment. In contrast with low acid foods we have to use then the pressure canner. So with low acid foods you need that higher temperature to inactivate those spores that are in that clustering botulinum. So before we get into the separate types of food categories I want to just refresh the steps of canning a little bit. And I'm not going to go into a lot of detail for you but when we talk about high and low acid canning methods there are some common steps. The first thing here is it's very important to have cans that are structurally sound. If you have cracks or you have nicks on the top surface of that jar, throw it out. Because we know that if there's a nick in that lid or the top of that jar it's not going to form a very good seal. And so therefore the food is likely going to spoil just because you weren't able to process it correctly. Also use new flat lids and I kind of stress that a few points lower. Used ones that have already come off of a jar basically they've gone through that process of sealing that jar. When you pull it away some of that plasticizing agent might be lost and make it ineffective for reusing these flat lids. So it's important to move forward with brand new flat lids. When it comes to prepping the jars I always remember warm soapy water rinsed well that's sufficient. Or if you have a dishwasher run them through a dishwasher cycle. One of the important things about the lids is that you really want to follow the manufacturer's directions in the context of how to handle these lids. Some of the flat lids only require you to wash them with warm soapy water and rinsing. They don't require a heat treatment. Some other brands require a heat treatment. So this is kind of something that's actually been highlighted just recently as being something new as a new recommendation is to just wash them in warm soapy water and then rinse well. And that you don't have to actually heat these lids. So that's kind of a new recommendation although the ball website said that they had recommended this back in 1969 but I have never been able to find anything about that. But their new recommendation is now just wash it. You don't really necessarily need to heat the lids prior to the actual canning process. But if you feel comfortable in doing that just make sure you're not boiling the water and then throw on the lids in this boiling water. You want to avoid that part. If you want to just have it at a warm temperature that probably would be okay but avoid the boiling process. Also with food preparation we have two methods that we use for the packing the product. We have a cold pack versus the hot pack. Remember with cold pack that's placing that cold food into either cold or warm jars. And then adding hot liquid to that jar before removing the air and sealing. Some of the advantages would be less time consuming for preparation and packing. Easier to handle the jars. It's easier to handle a cold jar or something that's lukewarm versus burning hot. And some foods retain firmness better by doing a cold pack. In a hot pack food the food is cooked in a liquid before packing. This is also then a case where you would pour the liquid and the food into the jar. You remove air and then seal that. There are some advantages. You have fewer jars needed. Less floating of the products during and after canning. Better color and flavor retention. Easier to pat that food because it's pliable and then it's faster heating to the target canning temperature. Because you've already heated that food product. Another important common step between these two would be the head space. And remember that the head space is just simply that space from the bottom of that lid to basically just slightly above the top of that food product. Or where that liquid might be. What's important here is that you know what type of product that you are canning. For gelled fruit products about a quarter inch. If it's fruits such as tomatoes and pickles it's about a half inch. And then for low acid foods it's about one to one and a quarter inches. And if you don't have this nice little handy tool that measures head space distance you can actually then use the jar. And on that jar you can see where a quarter inch is a half inch and then one inch. And so it's a nice way that if you don't have that tool you can just use that as a gauge. You don't have to be like 100% accurate when you do these head spaces but be as close as possible. So in high acid foods again that's where we have the pH of 4.6 or less. Boiling water bath is sufficient for that task. A couple of things that's important. We want to make sure that the temperature of that water should be about 180 degrees Fahrenheit. That's about simmering. So if you simmer the water before adding it to the canner that would be best. One of the things here to remember is that it helps reduce the processing over all time by having the water that's already close to where it needs to be. One of the problems I sometimes hear people talk about is that they start timing the processing once they have their jars in the water. And if that's not boiling that's not the correct procedure. So it's important then to think about cases where the temperature of the water is important and how long you actually process that product. So when we use this water bath canner what's very important is to get that canner up to temperatures with a full boil. Because you want to basically be boiling that because you're dealing with a processing temperature of 100 degrees Celsius and that's what you want to aim for. And in this particular scenario once this water is at a full boil that is actually when you want to start timing. So if it says 20 minutes on the USDA guide it's once it starts boiling this water that you want to start that timer. What also is important that sometimes people have a tendency to turn down the heat once it's boiling. It's okay to do that if you know your stove or your water bath canner because if it stops boiling you basically have to bring it back up to boiling and then process it for the designated amount of time. So if you boil for 15 minutes and all of a sudden you walk away and you come back and it's no longer boiling you don't know when it stopped boiling so you have to redo that. So it's important just again to recommend to people that keep an eye on that to make sure it boils continually through that recommended processing time. Also remember that each of the foods that you would want to make has its own processing time and it has its own directions and that you want to follow the approved method. And one of the things to remember is that depending on where you live the processing time might be different and so it's important to follow your specific guidelines. One example if you look at this chart in the corner where we have boiling point of water at various elevations that if you're living in Fargo the boiling point of water is actually roughly 99 degrees Celsius. But if I go out to Colorado and decide I'm going to retire in Colorado and I'm at 6,000 feet for elevation now that that temperature is only 93.3 for water to boil. And so there's a big difference there in the amount of heat in that system. And as a result you actually have to process for a longer time at these higher elevations. So keep that in mind is that you want to follow the appropriate processing time and temperature for your specific location. Jar size will impact processing time so it's important to know do you have a quart, do you have a pint, do you have a half pint because in some cases that will affect the processing time. And then of course look for sealed jars after it has cooled but the lid is curved inward then you know that you have a vacuum in that jar. So just examples where to send people so if people ask if they are looking at canning fruit and fruit based products send them to the USDA processing guide number two. So home canning guide number two is for really the acid type food products. So when you point them to these guidelines just reinforce to them that hey they have recipes there try to follow those recipes the way they have written. For example in this particular product one of the ingredients is vinegar so if they say well you know what oh I only have a cup of vinegar you know that won't cut it. It's not going to be a sufficient acid in that product so unless they cut everything else in half the ratio is not going to be maintained. So it's important that they understand that they need to follow these recipes these have been proven to be safe. The nice thing about this guideline also gives you detail so there's enough detail there to tell you how to prep the sample. It tells you about things such as you know how much head space, they talk about quart jars, they talk about hot fill etc. So it's really nice because they provide all the details so you don't have to memorize every detail for them and you just let them know okay this is where you can find that information. And then also when we talk about this they also give recommendations for the type of style or pack, hot pack, type of jar, pints, half pints versus quartz. You can see that there's different temperatures and different times with different elevations there's also different times of processing. So it's important then that just point them into the direction is important. So there is a question does processing over a recommended time hurt anything or does it damage quality? And it's really only a quality. From a safety perspective because you've already a lot of that specific amount of time for processing safety-wise it's okay. It's just that by overdoing it sometimes you can damage the quality so maybe the quality might not be as good. So it is a case where I wouldn't overdo it in a sense if you're over by a few minutes or so you're probably okay even maybe five minutes you're probably okay. But once you start going excessively long then you're clearly going to have maybe leaching of the nutrients more into the liquid aspect of that sample. So let's shift gears and move into the low acid foods. With low acid foods remember greater than pH 4.6 we must achieve a temperature of 240 degrees Fahrenheit or 115 Celsius. It's always important to remember that you have a pressure cooker and you have a pressure canner. And it's always important that a pressure cooker is great for if you have a tough piece of meat, a roast of some sort and you want to make it a little bit more tender before you eat it. That's great. You can make it in a pressure cooker. But if you want to can and preserve food you need to use a pressure canner. So that's the important distinction between these two types of pressure devices. Okay so again remember pressure canners are the recommended pressure vessels to use when you're using low acid foods. It's important to understand that pressure is more easily controlled through heat input. So by changing the temperature of your stove top it's easier to control that pressure inside the vessel. We often times use temperature as a way to regulate that cooking process. Instead we monitor the pressure. What's really important to remember is that in a pressure canner we are relying on saturated steam to drive this heat penetration and spore destruction. That's what we really need. We need a saturated steam. And when we plot out temperature versus pressure we can see that at basically zero or atmospheric pressure which would be what we would use in water bath canner. As we increase the pressure so as we go in this direction with pressure you can see that there's this gradual increase up to about 160 degrees Celsius. That's when you have 70 pounds of pressure. It's important to recognize that at home canners they are designed only to be right around up to 20 psi. And then they actually get into, at 20 psi they actually get into the point of that danger zone on a pressure gauge. On your pressure canner that 20 shortly after that it gets into a high pressure state. And that's when you would have concerns that your safety valves would pop open and so forth. So we deal with canning in a very small range from 10 psi up to about 15 or 16. And under those conditions at 11 psi we are at, so at 11 psi we are basically dealing with about 115 degrees or 115.5 degrees Celsius. So that's that temperature that we need to achieve spore destruction. As we move up and we get to like 15 psi then we're at about 120, 121 degrees Celsius. So those are the small ranges that we have to deal with to get to the right temperatures to destroy those spores. Again, high pressures become a safety issue for your well-being. There's also a question here about box elder maple syrup, pH 5.2 to 5.4. Any hope for canning? One of the things, anytime you're dealing with a syrup, with many syrups they're concentrated or the sugar is concentrated to a high sugar percentage. So if this maple syrup is concentrated to a sugar level about 67%, it then becomes more of a sugar being the driver for the preservation of that product. If it is more liquid in nature then maybe a canning process might be applicable, but because it might have a high sugar you'd have to be careful about it browning too much. So a few other things basically would be that in a pressure canner, remember that the water should not cover the jars. So you don't need the, in this particular case you can see on one side that there's water over the jars. In another case that water is only about 2 to 3 inches from the bottom of the vessel. That's all you really need because remember you're relying on saturated steam. The saturated steam is essentially what is driving this destruction of that organism. Stacking of jars is permissible. So in this particular case you can stack those or I usually use this basically this jar or this additional rack in there. So where I put this rack on top of one layer of jars and then put my next layer of jars on top of that. In a boiling water bath it's difficult to do that because jars tend to tip over and so forth. So it becomes an issue that is not desirable. So just to remember with the pressure canner, some of the key things when you use a pressure canner is that you want to vent that. So you want to vent the canner for about 10 minutes. It's also called exhausting. So if you see exhausting or venting they're basically the same terminology. It's important because you want this environment within this canner to be a saturated steam. And what we have known is that when you have mixtures of air in steam it affects the actual temperature in that canner. So once you start venting it keep in mind again this idea that if there's air in that steam it's going to affect the overall temperature. And with this particular graph we can see that 0% air, 5% air, 10% air, and 15% air. So that's what these different lines represent. So when we're at 5 pounds of pressure and we have 0% air we have a temperature of about 106. But when we have 15% air in that we're at a value of about 104. So as you go up to 10, so getting closer to our canning pressure requirements, you can see that when you have 15% air in that it's about 110. But when you have 0% you're at about 115 for a temperature. So it's very important to vent or exhaust that canner just because it affects the temperature of that steam in that vessel. Again when some of the things that are important to make sure that when you adjust the pressure you do this by adjusting the burner temperature. So that's how you can control that. You don't want to really be adjusting your pressure by pulling off the gauge or the weight on that particular unit. You want to do it by changing the temperature of that stove top. So keep in mind that the magic pressure is typically 11 pounds per square inch. And that if the pressure drops during any of that processing you have to basically reprocess that product at the appropriate 11 psi. So it's important to maybe not walk away while you're doing this but to kind of keep an eye on that pressure. What's also important again just like in acid food production, each food has its own processing time and there are approved approaches or methods so it's important to keep that in mind. One of the keys here with low acid food production is the amount of pressure that's in your pressure canner. If it's 2,000 feet or less, typically 11 psi on the gauge is appropriate. However as you go up to 6 to 8,000 feet that number has to jump up to about 14. So again keep in mind where you can, it's going to be in Colorado, is it going to be in North Dakota. So on a dial gauge we can see that number. If it's a weighted gauge instrument then anything over 1,000 feet and above you would use the 15 psi gauge weight for that instrument. So that's important things to keep in mind as people are processing products. Another thing that's very important is do not force cool this canner. Because people sometimes get impatient and why isn't it dropping? Why isn't the pressure dropping? You'll sit there and look at it every 2 seconds and it's not dropping. So it's a case where it's important not to force cool it because part of that cool down process is considered important to that overall processing of that product. So don't take your pressure cooker and dump cold water on it or touch it with a cold rag or anything because you're going to see a pressure drop no doubt about it. But one of the other problems is that some of the liquid might come shooting out of the jars. So it doesn't take much to lift up that lid and it just has to be a small amount and then the liquid can be drawn out. So it's important not to try to cool too fast. So again, guide number 4 is one that we use for canned vegetables and vegetable products. So remember it's fruits, it was guide 2. Vegetables, it's guide number 4. And again it has some of the same type of information, the procedures, hot pack, raw pack information. And then this is a little bit blurry but it has processing times, different elevations has different processing requirements. So it's important that when people might be asked you make sure that they understand that they need to kind of know a little bit about where they live. And what is the appropriate pressure and times to use. And this is just another one with beans. You can see that very similar type of information. Again, pints versus quarts, processing time 20-25 minutes. You can be a hot pack or a raw pack. So again it's a case where it provides that type of information. So moving on, we'll spend the next maybe 5 minutes here with kind of finishing up on this internet canning. You know what is internet canning? This is kind of a term we kind of coined around NDSU in the small group that's working with this canning area. These are basically canning of foods using unproven methods and it's usually posted on the internet. So that's kind of what we call internet cannings because these are methods that people are posted either in blogs or comments, etc. So it's important to know what's out there, what are people doing because it's important to know that if the method is unsafe, it's something that we want to steer people away from. We don't want them to be following that. So the first one here is this boiling water bath canner and this is true for low acid foods. Remember boiling water bath canning is fine for high acid foods but for low acid foods we want to stay away from this type of method. Commenters on some of these blogs, some of the in the comments sections of some pages talk about it's an old family recipe. My family's been eating it for 100 years and no one's died, old cookbooks and so forth. So these are things to be very wary of. Some methods say three minutes, some say three hours. So it's a case where very inconsistent in what they say. Oven canning is another one. It was unfortunately the USDA approved it between 1931 and 1942 but they fortunately found out in 1942 that maybe it shouldn't be approved and so it's been off the USDA's approval list for a long time. Oftentimes bloggers tend to make this about tradition. They make it about some emotional connection and so it's important not to fall trapped to that instead look at it from a scientific perspective, a food safety perspective. One of the comments that today is still one of my favorites is one individual that talks about the boiling point at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. And so if it's in the oven at 250 degrees for four hours that allows for plenty of time for the jars to be not only hot enough but fully, fully cooked. And it really shows just a lack of knowledge regarding food safety and how boiling water baths are just not high enough to get to that spore and activation level. But what's also interesting here is that this individual equates something that's cooked with that of being preserved. So that's something that needs to differentiate as well. Dishwasher canning, I'm not going to mention here, this was kind of a fad that we saw for a couple of years. People were running it through their dishwasher cycle. They would fill it hot packet, throw it in the dishwasher, run the cycle and seal jars and that's what they would do. Again, not done very much anymore than I've seen lately. And then atmospheric canning. Atmospheric canning was not recommended really until 1936. However, there's been a lot of conflicting reports about its effectiveness. However, the University of Wisconsin is putting together some guidelines for the use of atmospheric steam canning. It seems to be acceptable maybe for some acid-acidified foods and acid food products, but it's definitely not acceptable for low-acid canning. And hopefully more guidelines will come out in the near future here. Some experiments we did at NDSU, we looked at pressure canning boiling water bath oven and atmospheric canning. These are techniques that we used. We then looked at using a thermal couple, we looked at what were the temperatures in the canner versus the food product. And we saw what the pressure cooker, you can see that by following the green line here, you can see that the temperature was up in that sterilization zone of 115. The canner was at about 120. But when we used the boiling water bath canner, our green line shows that we did not really achieve 100 degrees for the boiling water bath canner. So again, that's not going to be enough to kill spores. And again, with oven canning and steam canning, we found basically similar trends. With oven canning, we were really never close to being at 100 for very long. And also, again, remember, we need to achieve 115, so we're a long way from that. And then also with steam canning, we did see that there was a period of time where it did achieve 100 degrees Celsius. But again, it doesn't reach that 115, needed for low acid foods. And then with the microorganism of interest, you can see that the pressure canner was the only one that really effectively reduced the number of microorganisms in that sample. The other methods did not. Yes, we saw reductions, but it was not really effective with this particular organism. So what we found here is that the only method that was appropriate was to follow the USDA method of 20 minutes at 11 psi. That would be the sample B. Yes, it looks a little bit brown compared to the other samples, but it's important to recognize that with these other methods, it's about food safety and not about color. So again, keep that in mind that these other methods might give you a prettier product, but they're going to be less safe and could potentially cause death. So again, just to kind of wrap up here in the next minute or so, I always recommend people that are interested in doing candy to go to the National Center for Home Food Preservation. Start to look through some of the guidelines. I think that's a good place for them to start. There's just so much information there. They could probably find something that they actually want to make that's actually present in some of that material. Julie also has a food nutrition site for food preservation, so a lot of different little newsletters there. I also found recently that Ball, they have their FreshPreserving.com, is also a very good site. They provide a lot of good details, a lot of recipes that have been proven. So it's really a good site to even direct them to that. Of course, they have information or ads that they want you to buy their product, but still I think it provides very good information. And then knowing who you're selling your product to, if it's North Dakota, again, the state health department is important there. If it's going to go across to Minnesota or to South Dakota, Montana or through the Internet, you need to start thinking about the FDA and their role in jurisdiction over your product. And a couple of weeks ago, David Sikowski had talked about regulations and so forth. Again, additional resources you can find on the entrepreneurial website that Julie puts together. And then, again, this is the last presentation will be next week. So the last webinar will be next week on gardening, so make sure you plan to attend that one. And then with that, I want to acknowledge the National Center for Home Food Preservation for a lot of the material that I use in this presentation. And then with that, I will end it kind of if anybody has any additional questions, I can answer those. Or if you think of something, you can always send me an email. And with that, I'll turn it over to Julie. Thanks so much, Cliff. You've covered a lot of ground in an hour. Does anyone have any questions? You can certainly contact either of us. As I've been writing you some notes, we have a lot of information including a little module all about food preservation and food processing. And I hope whoever asked the question about maple syrup checks out that link that I had up earlier from the University of Wisconsin and kind of walks through the process of stabilizing syrup. It seems to have disappeared from view. Yeah. Because there is one question here about examples of or two of something that could be cold packed. Actually, I think if you go to the USDA site, they do have some products that can be both hot packed and cold packed. I've seen people cold pack green beans because they want something that's a little bit firmer. Me personally, I don't usually can like peas or green beans. I usually freeze those. But I've seen people in the past do green beans just because they want it to be a little bit firmer. Right. Well, we've reached our 3 p.m. which I always try to keep these at an hour. So thanks to everyone for joining us and thank you Cliff for doing a webinar. Again, feel free to contact us if you want more resources. There's a lot of resources in this area. But unfortunately, there are a lot of resources that are not based on science. So be careful in what you find about food preservation because we want all of you to enjoy safe food products.