Interesting article of British Food Preserving

[baggins]

Found this article a couple of weeks back from an American author. For those of you who are into their food preserving it is a very interesting article and take of the state of British food preserving.
I'd be interested on other folks take on what he says (from both sides of the Atlantic).
Quite taken with the idea of being a master food preserver.
https://www.healthycanning.com/why-old-british-method-of-bottling-is-unsafe

 

[santaman2000]

Commenting to follow.

 

[Janne]

Preserving food in a jar/bottle without heating of said jar/bottle after closing the lid is fully possible if the content is :
Very acidic
Very salty
Very sweet
Very dry
No Oxygen
( might have forgotten something?)

If the author is correct, why do they feel the need to put so much chemistry in their food?
To prevent the mass deaths from food poisonings we experience all over Europe, al, the time?

 

[Toddy]

It's a load of mince.

Do you know anybody who has died of botulism from a jar of jam???
Seriously.

I don't.....and if jam goes mouldy you just take the mould off and eat the rest of the jam. It's like cheese.....but they don't eat mouldy cheese, or bread, either, do they ?
If it goes mouldy simply remove that mould and the surrounding stuff, and eat the rest. It generally only goes mouldy where there's condensation.
Surprised they manage to eat yoghurt or kefir, or even sauerkraut

Hey? how about all the continental sausages ? you know the ones made with no chemical preservatives except salt.

Basically the entire thing is simply to promote their canning method....the ones that use expensive jars and expensive use once and throw away lids.....they might be cheap in America but you're lucky if you can find a dozen here for under four quid, and it's usually a lot more.

Basic, decent cleanliness and hygiene, careful cooking and sealing, and there's nothing wrong with British (or European) jam and fruit preserving....except it's cheap and it's done at home by hundreds of thousands of people, and doesn't benefit anyone selling expensive canning supplies.

Toddy....who makes at least 200 jars of jam every year......and has done for longer than she cares to remember. In all that time I've had less than a dozen even go mouldy, let alone make someone ill, let alone kill anyone.

 

[Robson Valley]

Bernardin and Kerr are two popular brands of both jars and lids.
I bought the Bernardin book and follow that to preserve things like grape juice and home-made lime marmalade.
I have lots of freezer space so most garden produce is bagged and frozen.

Processing for correct preservation isn't perfect, There's mold in a jar or two evey winter.
Out it goes. All of it. Never scrape off the mold and eat the rest.

Unprocessed foods have always, always run the risk of serious contamination.

 

[Toddy]

Well we do, and have done so for at least 130 years that I can attest in the family. (Grandparents and G.G. Aunts who taught me to cook) No one would throw away good food here. Mould is only troublesome if the toxins are. Jam, cheese, bread moulds....they're fine. If jam goes off otherwise, provided you've used sugar, then it just goes to rather too sweet fermented stuff.

Nowadays folks throw away so much food that it's criminal when others go hungry.

M

 

[Robson Valley]

Don't neglect the great variety of micro-organisms which inhabit the spectrum of foods.
The mold cultured on a round of Brie is not the mold you might see in a jar of home made strawberry jam.

At the same time, that mold is releasing all kinds of different biochemicals. Some of which may be toxic to humans.
Under a microscope, you will see that the fungal mycelium has spread throughout the volume of jam.

In a past life, I was making 450 liter batches of grape wine.
To get any kind of a respectable result, I sterilized the must and used a yeast variety of my choice.
Never was one to chuck it and chance it.

I'll process my canned foods to last for years. The taste goes off but it's clean.

 

[Toddy]

My jam lasts years. We opened some my Grandmother had made that was dated 15 years old, and it was fine, and it tasted good too

I'm not disclaiming against basic hygiene, I am against claims that our traditional jam making is, and I quote, "killing people".
It's not and that claim is mince.

M

 

[Janne]

No European wine maker sterilizes the must. Yet they manage to produce the best wine on the planet.
Some crazy ones even press the grapes using their feet.


I know that my grand mother, born around 1900, heat sterilized her jars. Canned fruit, jams, canned veg.
Some soft fruits she boiled in the sealed jar.

I doubt the generations before her or her mother heat sterilized the jars, I guess they used the Old British Method, without ever having set a foot in Britain!

I know people ( not disclosing nationality) that use a fraction of a can or tube of food, then throw the rest away.
Tomato concentrate, canned meat, fish, fruit. Everything.

 

[Janne]

My jam lasts years. We opened some my Grandmother had made that was dated 15 years old, and it was fine, and it tasted good too

I'm not disclaiming against basic hygiene, I am against claims that our traditional jam making is, and I quote, "killing people".
It's not and that claim is mince.

M

I checked some statistics.
1 in 6 Americans (48 million) get sick, 125 000 get hospitalised and 3000 die each
1 million get sick, 20 000 get hospitalised and 500 die each year. In UK.

US population 327 million
UK population 66.5 million

There is no proper Sauerkraut in the US. All contain preservatives galore

 

[Robson Valley]

Need a little math. 327 million does not equal 66.5 million. Effects per 100,000 population might be comparable.
Designated wine and beer yeasts have been around (and used commercially) for decades.

Of course there are preservatives in all sorts of prepared foods.
Ever stop to wonder why? There are 4 good answers for full marks.

 

[Toddy]

There is no proper Sauerkraut in the US. All contain preservatives galore

You're joking ? No ?
That's disgusting; what's the point of sauerkraut that's not ??
Good sauerkraut is a pleasure to munch and it's so easily made too.

This is a video of a little Japanese granny, making 'pickled vegetables' and she only uses salt...and what looks like an old fishing box

It's world wide, making sauerkraut of somekind .....without preservatives !

 

[Toddy]

Need a little math. 327 million does not equal 66.5 million. Effects per 100,000 population might be comparable.
Designated wine and beer yeasts have been around (and used commercially) for decades.

Of course there are preservatives in all sorts of prepared foods.
Ever stop to wonder why? There are 4 good answers for full marks.

Yeah, it keeps it looking pretty on the shelf in the supermarket. It means they can claim it's 'healthier', and they use chemicals instead of enough sugar or salt. They can put a Use By date and a Sell By date so that stock keeps ticking over even when it hasn't been bought. I suppose too the litigatious society they come from means that if someone falls ill with anything, then someone must be to blame and have to pay for it

 

[Nice65]

Well we do, and have done so for at least 130 years that I can attest in the family. (Grandparents and G.G. Aunts who taught me to cook) No one would throw away good food here. Mould is only troublesome if the toxins are. Jam, cheese, bread moulds....they're fine. If jam goes off otherwise, provided you've used sugar, then it just goes to rather too sweet fermented stuff.

Nowadays folks throw away so much food that it's criminal when others go hungry.

M

Too true M, a touch of sugar mould on jam or marmalade and my younger generation relatives just chuck it in the bin. Cheese, the same. Sell and use by dates are followed, so the Parma ham I have in my fridge that was salted in 2017 is apparently no good now it’s a week over. Along with the cheese that’s been forming it’s own perfect mould for months prior to sale. It’s a crying shame mould is associated with disease or a product gone off, though my wife’s old grandad did contract Botulism from drinking out of a corned beef can celebrating the end of WW2. But the can had been opened and emptied, that’s when the bacterium got in.

I grew waaaaay to many chillis a few years ago, my avatar contains a tiny amount of the crop. I decided to make a chilli oil as I also had a glut of garlic. The trial bottle became mouldy in a couple of weeks with the washed fresh chillis, garlic cloves and fresh herb bundle in it. So I dried my herb bundles (Thyme, Marjoram, Sage, Rosemary) and dried the chillis too. Heated a couple of gallons of olive oil and dropped in halved garlic and all the fresh chilli crop. Put one dried herb bundle and a couple of dried chillis in each clean bottle and poured the cooled oil in. It kept for ages. Well as long as it lasted, it was good stuff.

 

[Robson Valley]

Look into the biology of sauerkraut. Not just any old bacteria will do. Shallow thinking.
The process is a carefully staged set of 3 seral stages for different halophyllic (salt-loving) bacteria.
They, in themselves, act as your nonexistent preservative.

I have seen photographs of sauerkraut made in a ditch in the ground. lined with cabbage leaves.

My sauerkraut-making adventures always ended with the kraut going black so I quit.

 

[Toddy]

Do you not think that maybe you just made the whole thing too sterile ?? Even good bacteria needs a start.

Have you seen the little Japanese granny making it ?

 

[Toddy]

Too true M, a touch of sugar mould on jam or marmalade and my younger generation relatives just chuck it in the bin. Cheese, the same. Sell and use by dates are followed, so the Parma ham I have in my fridge that was salted in 2017 is apparently no good now it’s a week over. Along with the cheese that’s been forming it’s own perfect mould for months prior to sale. It’s a crying shame mould is associated with disease or a product gone off, though my wife’s old grandad did contract Botulism from drinking out of a corned beef can celebrating the end of WW2. But the can had been opened and emptied, that’s when the bacterium got in.

I grew waaaaay to many chillis a few years ago, my avatar contains a tiny amount of the crop. I decided to make a chilli oil as I also had a glut of garlic. The trial bottle became mouldy in a couple of weeks with the washed fresh chillis, garlic cloves and fresh herb bundle in it. So I dried my herb bundles (Thyme, Marjoram, Sage, Rosemary) and dried the chillis too. Heated a couple of gallons of olive oil and dropped in halved garlic and all the fresh chilli crop. Put one dried herb bundle and a couple of dried chillis in each clean bottle and poured the cooled oil in. It kept for ages. Well as long as it lasted, it was good stuff.

I am reliably informed that if you open a bottle of oil preserved anything and it's smells of sh1t, then that's botulism and the whole bottle must be disposed off.
Parma ham dated 2017 ? would be a crime to throw that away if one ate meat. I have some absolutely glorious left over from before Christmas stilton that we're slowly working our way through. I'm pretty sure the UseBy date says sometime in December....on Stilton !

What the hang happened to common sense ? and what happened to looking for the agenda behind the hype and propaganda ?

 

[santaman2000]

It's a load of mince.

Do you know anybody who has died of botulism from a jar of jam???
Seriously.......

Yes. But that said, they had weakened immune systems to start with (that gives credence to the bit in the article where he said eat what you like but be careful sharing it) Given personal experience I haven’t seen anywhere near the number Janne found but I have no reason to dispute them.

 

[santaman2000]

......I know that my grand mother, born around 1900, heat sterilized her jars. Canned fruit, jams, canned veg.
Some soft fruits she boiled in the sealed jar........

Nobody I know boils in a “sealed” jar. The method the article is pushing simply puts the lid on the jar and boils BEFORE a seal so that the small air space above the preserves expands (pushing its way out of the jar) to createt a vacuum seal as it cools and contracts again. All that said I know people who do it as per the article and others who DID it the older pre WWII method(my grandmother and her generation as well as a few of her kids)

 

[Robson Valley]

Clean the sauerkraut crocks. Fine slice the cabbage. Pound that into the recommended quantity of salt.
Waxed wooden lids and big clean kraut rocks on top. Do it all in front of my Polish friends who are my coaches.
Nothing the least bit sterile about it.
I want the halophyllic organisms alone to break down the cabbage sugars etc.
There are very few survivors in that salty environment.

Lots of preservatives are meant to extend shelf life, whether it's in the store or in your house.
This is a brutal issue of supply and distribution to prevent starvation. Fact.
Preservatives enable the product to have predictable characteristics.
Preservatives allow the producer to control the manufacturing process.
Preservatives prevent the growth of unwanted contamination ( yes, brined and smoked hams included.)

Janne, yeast control in the global wine industry is a major issue with new varieties being developed all the time.
It's a modern mistake to expect random wild yeasts to predictably make award winning vintages.

Maybe you get lucky. Friend of mine found a wild yeast on his grapes which made fabulous bread.
Then one day, it all got "stuck" and died off. Never again.