Introduction to More Exciting Pressure Canning

When people decide to acquire a pressure canner, it is usually so that they can preserve excess garden produce.  But there is so much more that can be done--so much that is quite tasty and will be very desirable in the dark days ahead.  Pressure-canned foods add variety to the diet, especially in a world lacking fresh and frozen foods.

Now, I'm not going to reproduce the Ball Blue Book of Canning (hereafter the BBB) here.  Everyone should have a copy of that for reference for basic guidelines, correct preparation, and accurate processing times.  What I do want to do is explore some ideas for using a canner to prepare some less conventional foods that will save you time and definitely boost morale.

Vegetables

Most vegetables are canned per instructions in the BBB.  There's just not a lot that is exciting or different to add.  And actually, I usually prefer to dehydrate vegetables when possible.  But there are some situations where the dehydrated version just doesn't work as well in recipes.  One of those is dehydrated shredded zucchini.  Don't get me wrong; I do actually dehydrate quite a bit some years.  But when I rehydrate the zucchini for making cakes and breads, it doesn't reconstitute perfectly.  And some baked goods I want to have absolutely perfect.  And of course, I do just put several bags of shredded zucchini in the freezer, but I'm preparing for a time without easy electricity, so every year or so I can a few pints of shredded zucchini.  It gets packed in jars and processed per instructions for squash in the BBB.  And then when we want zucchini bread or cupcakes, we don't have to wait for the dehydrated stuff to rehydrate, nor are we dealing with cupcakes that are a little on the chewy side because the zucchini didn't fully reconstitute.

The other exception around here is potatoes. Yeah, lots of people can potatoes, but we never really cared for the texture, and unless they were being used in a stew, we never seemed to get around to eating them.  However, there is that other more popular way of eating potatoes in this country, the French fry.  Even if the pressure canner was not used for anything else, it would be worthwhile (in this family, at least) to acquire just to be able to have French fries when the grid goes down. These fries are so incredibly divine. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a taste. You’ll just have to trust me. Canning French fries is one of the first articles I posted on this blog; as such, not a lot of people have read it yet. All the work is done in the canning; when you wish to eat some fries (which will be often!), open the jar and put the fries into a strainer. Thoroughly rinse and drain to remove excess starch. Deep fry in peanut oil until they reach a golden brown. If your family is just not into the food storage thing because it's too horrible to contemplate eating that stuff, give these French fries a try.  You'll see a complete one-eighty as they realize food storage can be really good.

Dry Beans
Dry beans aren’t a particularly exciting item to can, unless you get excited about saving money, time, and energy. Dry beans normally take hours to prepare for each meal. By utilizing a pressure canner, you prepare beans for several meals at once, saving money now and time down the road. So how is it done?  Dry beans are truly one of the easiest items to can and a great way to get started with pressure canning.  Basically, you soak the beans for several hours or overnight; rinse, drain, and cook; fill jars about 2/3 full; add boiling water and salt; and process.  It might sound like a lot of work, but it is really quick and easy, and not at all messy.  Complete instructions are here. 

Meats

Canning in the meat world is just like canning in the fruit and vegetable world--follow directions and be careful.  There's nothing scary about it, and preparing meats is a lot faster and easier than preparing produce.  All meats are canned exactly as outlined in the BBB.  However, here are a few ideas for preparing and packaging meats for other uses.  Food fatigue is a real thing, and having a variety of tasty and familiar foods in our menu will be essential to maintaining morale in the coming crisis.

• Beef. I can a good quantity of stew meat to be used as is in stews, but also to be shredded for use as taco filling, French dips, etc. Ground beef also gets browned and canned so that I can make soups and casseroles very quickly. 
• Pork. Some pork is canned in chunks for later use in chili or to be shredded for taquito filling or super quick pulled pork sandwiches. The Cooperative Extension has never tested the safety of canning smoked or cured meats, including bacon.  It may be perfectly safe; it may not be. 
• Bacon.  The Cooperative Extension does not recommend canning bacon for a variety of reasons, all of which are sound. That being said, there are still a lot of people doing it.  I admit to it myself, but now only for bacon ends and pieces, and not the strips that are "dry-canned."  I have posted on bacon in the past, including how people do it and exactly why the Cooperative Extension opposes the practice.  
• Chicken. Home-canned chicken makes for quick chicken salad sandwiches or adding to a summer salad for a main dish meal. And with a can of chicken on hand, it takes no time to get homemade chicken noodle soup ready when someone comes down with a cold.
• Chicken bones. This isn't being recommended as food for people, though apparently in some cultures chicken bones do get thoroughly cooked and mashed or blended in some dishes.  I'm not entirely sold on the safety of this in general, but it does work for making chicken bouillon.  However, chicken bones can be pressure canned, just like chicken meat is, for feeding cats.  After being pressure canned, the hollow bones are easily mashed with a fork and fed to cats. Unfortunately, the chicken bones are too high in protein to be fed to dogs (may cause kidney damage).

Convenience foods

Pressure canning is great for preserving the harvest, but it’s also ideal for making life easier with convenience foods for days when we're just too busy or sick to cook.  A ready supply of stew, chili, and soup provides peace of mind for those situations when they arise.  Each family will have its own favorite recipes, so I'll refrain from posting any here.  Most any recipe can be adapted for canning, one just needs to always remember to process for the time stated for the ingredient that needs the most time and highest pressure.  Read your BBB for specific guidelines here.

A pressure canner is going to cost $100-$300. But the peace of mind that comes from preparing your own food? Priceless.

Links to related posts:
A Few Thoughts on Pressure Canners
Canning French Fries  
Canning Refried Beans  
Canning Hamburger Patties
Canning Bacon 
Canning Chicken
Canning Ham
Canning Pork 

© 2019, PrepSchoolDaily.blogspot.com  

Dietary Deficiencies and Consequences--Vitamin B3 (Niacin)

Disclaimer.  I am not a licensed health practitioner.  This is just another post on nutritional needs and deficiencies that you might wish make sure you have covered in your food storage supplies and plans.  No medication or supplement, including those available over the counter, should be taken without consulting a physician.  Information shared here is for educational and entertainment purposes only.  It is not medical advice nor a substitute for licensed medical care.  A qualified, licensed physician or other medical provider should be consulted before beginning any herbal or conventional treatment. 

Pellagra.  How many of us even know what this really is?  We may have heard of it, but heck, it's not a disease that currently affects our society.  So we don't pay attention to it.

Sadly, modern public education in the US doesn't teach our children much about nutrition and disease, especially those conditions that the powers that be tell us will never occur again here.  However, as prepared people, we've got a good idea of what's coming, and it isn't going to be pretty.  Famine and disease are in the future.  Well, hopefully, if we prepare well, they won't be in our future, but we will see the events and consequences around us.  It behooves us to prepare well to identify potential problems so that they can be avoided altogether or correctly understood and rectified when we can't avoid them.

Back to pellagra.  It caused over 100,000 deaths in the US alone, almost exclusively in the South, between 1906 and 1940.  That's a rather substantial number.  So why don't we hear more about it?  Well, for one, it's a condition that afflicts the poor.  Secondly, it isn't contagious.  Third, we don't have any deaths from it now in this country; it really only occurs in third world countries.  Fourth, the state governments didn't want to admit that it was their greed that caused a lot of these deaths.  When the US descends into third-world status, we'll see it again here.  So let's learn about it now to prevent it in the future.

A mild niacin deficiency slows the metabolism, causing decreased tolerance to cold.  That occurs in many conditions, so decreased tolerance to cold will not necessarily indicate niacin deficiency.  A more moderate niacin deficiency may result in nausea, skin and mouth lesions, anemia, headaches, and fatigue.  A severe niacin deficiency will cause pellagra (Italian; pelle=skin, agra=sour), the classic signs of which are the four D's:  dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death.  Where do we get niacin?  Foods that have the highest niacin content include meats (specifically tuna, turkey, pork, and venison), plants (ginger, tarragon, sweet peppers, portabello mushrooms, dehydrated apricots), and whole grains (fortified cereals, rice, whole wheat, barley).  

Why did pellagra suddenly start appearing in such large numbers in the US in the early 1900's?  And why was it called the spring sickness? Pellagra occurred wherever corn (maize) was the predominant food crop because maize is low in digestible niacin.  And if you are thinking, "Gee, wasn't maize a staple food for Native American and South American cultures?  Didn't earlier Southerners eat a lot of grits (which are from corn)?", you'd be absolutely right.  They most certainly did consume a whole lot of it.  And it wasn't a problem then.  Because the Southerners and Native and South American populations knew you use a process called nixtamalization (which all word processing programs I have ever used refuse to recognize as a word) to increase the bioavailability of niacin, meaning the niacin becomes nutritionally available. 

(For the curious, lye or wood ash is used to nixtamalize corn.  Soaking the corn in water alkalinized with wood ash softens the outer covering, the pericarb, and makes niacin available (and the corn easier to grind).  Today calcium hydroxide, also known as pickling lime, is used for nixtamalization.)

So why did pellagra suddenly start appearing in the US in the early 1900s?  After all, Southerners had been consuming maize for years.  What changed?  

As the farmland in the South became entirely turned over to cotton production, the poor sharecroppers couldn't raise their own food.  It was available more cheaply from the Midwest.  The problem was that corn from the Midwest was qualitatively inferior to the traditional cornmeal that Southerners had eaten for centuries.    The disease appeared in the spring because the niacin-rich pork was only available to the poor during hog slaughtering season--fall and winter.  The pellagra victims were always in a state of moderate niacin deficiency, but when the cheap pork was no longer available in the spring, the pellagra symptoms returned.

What does all this mean for us?  We better be sure that we are storing some niacin-rich foods for our family.  If we don't have a lot of meat, we had better have whole grains.  If we're planning on growing corn (field corn or dent corn, not the sweet corn that we eat fresh, frozen or canned), we better be able to nixtamalize it ourselves.  We can't just buy a lot of food and put it on the shelves.  We have to know that we are supplying all the essential vitamins and minerals and we need to know about additional sources of each of these nutrients.

There's a whole lot more to the pellagra story in the US.  If you have school-age children (and even if you don't), take twelve minutes to watch the following video.  Everything that these guys at Extra History produce has been fabulous, and their history on pellagra is no exception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYKBgdrZsM

Links to related posts:
Dietary Deficiency and Consequences--Vitamin A
                                                                Vitamin B1
                                                                Vitamin B2
                                                                Vitamin B5, B6, B7
                                                                Vitamin B9
                                                                Vitamin B12
                                                                Vitamin C  
                                                                Vitamin D
                                                                Calcium  
                                                                Iodine  
                                                                Iron
                                                                Magnesium
                                                                Potassium  
                                                                Zinc

© 2019, PrepSchoolDaily.blogspot.com   

26 january 2020

Dietary Deficiencies and Consequences--Vitamin B1 (Thiamine)

Food manufacturers routinely add vitamin B1, also known as thiamine, to enrich breakfast cereals and breads.  But what happens when Kraft and Nabisco and Kellogg's aren't working for us anymore?

Due to the fortification of foods, cases of nutritional thiamine deficiency in the United States are extremely rare.  However, it remains common in parts of Africa and outbreaks occur in refugee camps.  While thiamine deficiency has been described in historical records for thousands of years, it only became common in the late nineteenth century with the increased processing of grains, particularly rice in the eastern hemisphere and wheat in the western hemisphere.  As researchers observed increasing incidences of disease in populations that consumed more white rice and white flour, governments mandated the addition of essential vitamins back into these foods that processing had stripped away. 

Mild to moderate thiamine deficiency is marked by malaise, weight loss, irritability, and confusion.  Risk factors for thiamine deficiency in a functioning society include dialysis, bariatric surgery, diabetes, large numbers of diuretics, and alcoholism.

But what happens when our society is no longer functioning?  What are the risk factors?  How quickly will thiamine deficiency and beriberi (Sinhalese phrase meaning “I can’t, I can’t”), return when our society collapses?

Ten days.  The human body doesn't store thiamine.  Symptoms of mild to moderate deficiency may occur in just ten days.

Diagnosis of beriberi in a collapsed society without access to laboratory blood tests is going to be based on symptoms and improvement with good nutrition, specifically whole grain bread, because conventional treatment with thiamine administered intravenously also won't likely be an option.

Unfortunately for caretakers, beriberi is expressed in different forms, which could make diagnosis difficult.  Common symptoms include impaired reflexes, droopy eyelids, lack of coordination, and difficulty walking.

Wet beriberi affects the cardiovascular system and is marked by an increased heart rate, shortness of breath, and swelling of the legs due to vasodilation.

Dry beriberi affects the nervous system and is exhibited by confusion, numbness in the limbs, trouble moving the feet, and pain.

Gastrointestinal beriberi causes abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and lactic acidosis.

Infantile beriberi occurs primarily in infants two to six months in age whose mothers are deficient in thiamine as well.  It may present in either the wet or dry forms, and in addition to an increased heart rate, edema, and vomiting, the infant may also have diarrhea and pale skin.  Shortness of breath and convulsions are noted in the terminal stages.

There are also some genetic conditions that make thiamine absorption from food difficult, but they're beyond the scope of this post and the ability to treat post-collapse.

So how to we ensure that we are getting enough thiamine in our diet on a daily basis?  Building up a generous supply of supplemental vitamins is one way, but when that supply is exhausted, what next?  What foods are high in thiamine?  

• Whole grains, especially brown rice (which doesn't have a long shelf-life)

• Beef, pork, fish, liver, eggs, dairy (food from animal sources is only a good source of thiamine if their diet has adequate thiamine)

• Legumes

• Vegetables such as acorn squash, asparagus, spinach, beet greens, and Brussels sprouts

As I attempt to finish writing this post, my husband is asking me about where to find Christmas wrap and tape and bows and playing Christmas music.  (I write posts about a month before they appear online.  It gives me time to make revisions and lets me take a break if I need to.) My daughter's trying to keep the one remaining kitten from the litter from hiding behind the piano, or anywhere else, before someone shows up to claim him.  My son is studying for his last final.  I love my life.  I don't want things to change.  I'm sure it's the same for you.

Links to related posts:
Dietary Deficiency and Consequences--Vitamin A
                                                                Vitamin B2
                                                                Vitamin B3
                                                                Vitamin B5, B6, B7
                                                                Vitamin B9
                                                                Vitamin B12
                                                                Vitamin C  
                                                                Vitamin D
                                                                Calcium  
                                                                Iodine  
                                                                Iron
                                                                Magnesium
                                                                Potassium  
                                                                Zinc

© 2019, PrepSchoolDaily.blogspot.com   

Expanded Food Storage--Pressure Canning Pork

In my family the first Saturday in December is Tamale Day.  My mom and aunts began this tradition over thirty years ago as a way of celebrating our Mexican heritage and keeping connected with the family.  We continue the tradition, but because my family is some distance away from the others and because my family is rather large by today's standards, we celebrate and make tamales on our own.  And we do it in a prepping kind of way.

Everyone else in the world slow roasts and shreds the pork for filling tamales the day before.  I do it the year before, but without roasting.  I can the pork.  It makes getting ready for Tamale Day so much less stressful.  The pork is perfectly cooked and shreds so easily.  Of course, canned pork is not just for tamales.  We also use it for making super speedy pulled pork sandwiches, quesadillas, and tacos.  It's a major convenience.

And it's so easy.

Cut up the raw pork into one-inch cubes.  Try to remove as much fat as possible to reduce chances of seal failure.  Pack into canning jars.  I use quart jars for the pork that will be used to make tamales, about one quart per dozen tamales, and we usually make twelve to fifteen dozen tamales and then freeze them.  I use pint jars for pulled pork sandwiches, quesadillas, and tacos.

Fill jars to one inch below the rim and add salt--one teaspoon per quart, one-half teaspoon per pint.  Do not add any liquid.  Liquid is never added when canning raw meats.  The meat produces its own juice.  Wipe rims very carefully with vinegar.  Most say to just use hot water, but when dealing with foods that may have fat on them, vinegar will cut that fat and make for a better seal.  Put on lids and bands and process per instructions for your particular canner and your altitude and jar size.  Typically pints are processed for 75 minutes and quarts for 90 minutes.

That's all there is to it.

When you open a jar for making tamales, drain off and reserve the liquid.  It is used in making the masa.  For all other recipes, you can save the broth for using in soup, or you can do what we do and pour it over the dogs' food.

If we're making pulled pork sandwiches, we just heat the meat with some barbecue sauce.  For tacos, add your own seasonings to taste.

When times get really interesting, and when cooking fuel becomes expensive either in terms of money or of time spent gathering, and time for preparing food becomes even more scarce than it already is, being able to preserve foods and having those foods ready to eat will be really invaluable. 

And even more invaluable will be having learned how to do this before the crisis hits.