Botulism and Canning vs Vacuum Sealing

[Music] hello friends Heidi here from rain country god is good all the time and today I'm going to talk about the real numbers of botulism and canning versus vacuum sealing your food because I've had a few questions from people about vacuum sealing I think really really important to be approached but first let's start off with those botulism statistics now as I said in a recent Facebook post food preservation is not something that should be taken lightly however it is very easy to learn and to do and really you just got to learn some of the basic differences and what needs to be pressure can what needs to be water bath can't and what you can safely vacuum seal so once you've got that down it's a piece of cake and botulism should be absolutely no fear whatsoever so let's come back to these numbers what bothers me is that there's this big scare just out there being pushed by whoever I believe is probably from corporations that want you to keep buying their nasty products at the store which you are far more likely to get sick from ecoli from then you are from botulism from your own health home canned goods so let me give you some real numbers here so when you look at the actual actual statistics and I went to a couple different places to find these numbers including a.gov site I think it was the CDC or it was a foodsafety.gov one of the two and that is the actual numbers of botulism a contamination or outbreak is a hundred and forty five people in the US alone per year so that may sound like a big number but that's the total number that's not just from foodborne and that's not just specifically for hamp home canned goods that is all the way across the board that can be most of the numbers are with infants I didn't read up on what all the different things but I know you know honey under the age of 12 months can cause botulism in infants but the thing is it's infants are more likely to come out of it unscathed than adults are so it's surprisingly not as huge as a concern so let's focus it right down to home canned goods so how many deaths are there per year from home canned goods from botulism from home canned goods - that's - well of course none of us want to be or or do we want our family to be one of those two that die annually but let's compare that to other statistics and things that you could possibly die from in a year you are more likely to die from getting hit by a flying champagne cork by far then you are from botulism from your own home canned goods 21 people that's a big difference between to die annually from flying champagne corks 25 people and this is actually a low number now it used to be about 49 was the average that died annually from a lightning strike but still 25 a lot bigger number than to 7,000 people die annually from getting an improper prescription because their doctor's handwriting was so terrible that the pharmacists misread it and then this was from a Harvard study it's a hundred and thirty six thousand people die annually from properly prescribed pharmaceuticals so putting that all into perspective your chances of dying from a botulism contamination are extremely low and again if you practice proper canning techniques you can bring that number from two down to zero because really the botulism from home canned goods comes from improper accounting techniques so let's talk about I've got three different things here I've got pressure canned things low acidic foods I've got high acidic foods that I've water bath and then I have dried foods that I vacuum-sealed so starting with the the pressure can't typically you're going to look at all meats and vegetables being 90 minutes for a quart sized jar in a pressure canner and 75 minutes for a pint sized jar in a pressure canner now there's a lot of talk out there about the old-fashioned method of which would be I think it's three hours for a quart and I don't know what it would be for a pint I didn't look it up or if I you probably safest just assume three hours I'm not going to talk about about the water bath method because people did it long before pressure counters were even invented and my belief is that pressure Kanner's were invented only to reduce the amount of canning time because it reduces it by half now I did not I did look a little bit I didn't look thoroughly because of my limited time to see I just couldn't find anything off the bat to see if the number of botulism deaths or at least even illnesses lowered with the introduction of pressure counters as far as home canned goods go so I did see in the 1950s botulism cases went down but that is mostly due to the fact that proper care for a person once they got ill from botulism was they were able to prevent them from dying so that's that's what I gathered out of that however I am still going to be one that will use my pressure canner rather than water bath method when it comes to low acid foods because regardless either way it's still going to be your safest bet especially if you're afraid of getting botulism so low acid foods and here are my examples I have right here these are the green beans I can from my garden from this year these are some black beans that I can DUP from this year they were dried ones I had in storage for a couple years I want to start canning them to make them more readily available to me when I think of something and I want to make it right then and it's like oops I still have to soak and cook the beans now all I got to do is open my own jar some beef from 2015 still good still has beautiful color and some potatoes from last year I actually have some potatoes from the year before as well so these are examples of pressure canned things now there are certain meats like fish that need to go longer than 90 minutes so you need to look up your charts for that if you're going to canned tuna or anything like that those I think are a hundred and ten minutes for a quart I just do know that the processing time for fish is longer than your your other meats and vegetables so then here are our high acid foods so I've got my own homemade salsa with tomatoes and then I've got salsa verde from my own homegrown tomatillos I've got some hong-kyun plums and some home canned peaches and these are all water baths and the times are gonna vary depending on the fruits or the vegetables and the sizes typically you're looking at about 30 minutes ish you know that's just a rough figure but it's going to vary slightly depending on what it is that you're canning but these things know regardless any of your wet items or fresh items have to be canned if you're wanting to store them on a shelf the other method is to freeze them you cannot vacuum seal your wet goods your fresh beans or whatever into a jar and expect them to keep they will spoil and I need to stress this because I've got people that seem to think they can use the vacuums the vacuum seal method for for anything and it just doesn't work that way you cannot do that you're gonna have to freeze or you're gonna have to can with the other water bath or the pressure so examples of some things this isn't fully yet so I don't have it sealed up I don't bother sealing it until I fill it these are tomato flakes from this year one of my favorite things to do with my homegrown Tomatoes is I I process them up I put them on my dehydrator and I dry them and break them up into flakes and then vacuum seal them into a jar and I can use that for making any kind of sauce I want or even use it to add to some of my other canned tomatoes for making a for thickening up the sauce or for making ketchup even here is some zucchini from this is from 2018 this is from last year it is still sealed it's been sitting in there for over a year I've got a couple of jars from last year and a couple of jars from this year and I simply vacuum seal them these are fully dry this is why I can do this and basically the vacuum sealing you can leave it unsealed it's not gonna spoil they're just gonna go stale it's gonna keep them fresher to vacuum seal this is why vacuum sealing is a good idea I've got some calendula here the jar is almost full I haven't sealed it yet but I will be soon I'm gonna go pick some calendula later today dehydrate some more and by the time that's dried I should be able to have this jar filled up enough that I can vacuum seal it and put it away in storage now here's dandelion leaves from this year that I dehydrated this one is vacuum sealed because it's full I have a couple jars of dandelion leaves and these are just some examples I have many more to go I have some jars here I'm currently working on filling that's why they're right here like my echinacea leaves and flowers and so this is not yet sealed and then here I just have some random door from nasturtiums and rose petals and some other things I'm going to use in a shampoo blend so I've been including calendula and pansies so I'm just making a blender there that's going to be strictly for using in shampoo so while I'm here though I demonstrate the straighted this many times and I do have a separate video on just how to use the brake glitter to vacuum seal I'll go ahead and demonstrate it right here this is my favorite method but you can use your food saver I am just fed up with food savers I've been through four different models all of them just quit after a while after from between one to two years it's like they've got something programmed into them and they just quit sealing I'm really sick and tired of shelling out the money for another new one just to have it quit working on me within two years so anyway what I do is you have two different sizes this is the wide mouth and you can get these as a set if you don't have either one you can buy though you can just buy the whole set and it's got to the regular mouth and the wide mouth like this I do use them both typically you'll see me using the wide mouth more but as you can see here this is going to be vacuum sealed with a regular mouth and they both work well here's the thing in fact let me get the regular mouth out and show you because there are some differences between the two and one of the things that I had problems with with the FoodSaver is it very rarely would seal my regular mouth shut with with the brake bleeder I could seal it every time it is important that you make sure that your lids the inside of your lids and your jars are dry and clean and there's no Nick's or anything in your jar lid if you're having problems sealing it and you're using a metal band you can read or a metal lid you can reuse these metal lids over and over and over again but eventually they can get too bent up and not properly seal if you try it several times and it doesn't seal toss the lid it's no good anymore we put that on there again making sure it's clean and dry put your regular mouth on there insert the tip of your brake bleeder I will have links as I always do to both the brake bleeder kit and this kit in in the description box below insert the tip like this and then you're just gonna hand pump this up until that gauge reads 15 psi and I typically will go just a little pass out to like 17 or 18 now depending on how full your jar is or how loose the items are in there is going to depend that's gonna change how long you have to pump this and also how big the jars to get to that point so there we go or about eight now here's the difference with the regular mouth it's when you go to pull it off oh it didn't happen that time a lot of times this little rubber gasket will just slip out and it's kind of frustrating and irritating but just pop it back in there no big deal okay so now this is sealed I'm gonna open it up again when I go to add some more tomatoes to it and then I'll reseal it you can reseal it between every addition you can reseal it between every use usually once I open a jar like the zucchini or whatever and start using it I don't bother resealing it in between and lessen to something I know will go stale in a short period of time I've never had issues with the zucchini going stale and certain other things but some other freeze-dried foods once I put them in a jar and vacuum seal let's say you get a big bag or you get the big number 10 count of freeze-dried foods and then you open that up well then what I do is once I open that can then I will vacuum seal what I'm not using right away into other jars and what I have found is if the jar that I'm using if I don't use it up right away and vacuum seal in between with the freeze-dried stuff like say the cherries or the raspberries or strawberries then they will go stale they're still good they just go stale they lose that crispness so something to consider now here for the white mouth for the calendula same thing now before I continue one one of my subscribers said what they did was they took the hose that came with these lids and they jammed that hose into this one to make sure they got a really good seal and then we're able to use the tip that actually snaps into the top of these and that way you don't have to if you do that method you don't actually have to hold it in and for me it's just not a big deal I don't mind holding it in it's not that hard you simply got to hold it in there firmly you don't have to press real hard or squeeze it real hard most of the work happens when you're actually pumping up the brake bleeder itself and so you just keep doing that let's see this gets here a lot quicker because it's a smaller jerk and there we go it's sealed and it's ready to put into food storage course this I'll be opening up soon and adding more to it and uh but anyway it's just easy enough to vacuum seal it again so this is my preferred method for vacuum sealing another question I get about the vacuum sealing is do I need to add an oxygen absorber well that's entirely up to you some people prefer to use an oxygen absorber on its own put that in the jars and close it up and it will seal because it's gonna suck out all that you know it's gonna absorb all that oxygen I've never tried not I mean that's what they've said but if your vacuum sealing putting an oxygen absorber in there is really kind of pointless it's to me it would be a waste of money because you're already vacuuming out all of the oxygen in there and making it airtight so there's no need for an oxygen absorber however if you like that extra security you have having that in there then go ahead and toss it in there and that way if you lose your seal at least you've got the oxygen absorber in there and maybe it will reseal it or whatever but for me I'm looking at dehydrated foods that are very unlikely to spoil even if you lose your seal the only thing I found that can be kind of problematic a certain dehydrated fruits such as bananas they get kind of I've not had them spoil I just noticed that even in a well sealed jar they just get kind of um they just lose their flavor and stuff they just start started not so great after a year so if you decide to dehydrate bananas and then vacuum seal them up I recommend you use them within the year to get their best flavor which would also probably tell me you're also just like what do you think anything else you're going to get most of your nutrients within that time okay well that's it on that's all I wanted to share with you today just that little lie you know don't be afraid of canning you've got a lot more to fear from buying food from the grocery store then you are from your own home canned goods as long as you practice safe measures it's really make sure you get your ball book of home canning I will link to that below as well so you can check that out if you Dorner don't already have it or if you have an all-american counter it comes with a really good book with it and I recommend that counter more than any other counter it's the counter that I have you can find a link to mine below you can also through that link find a smaller or a bigger one if you prefer - the second - the biggest so you can stack you can have two rows of things canning when you go to the biggest size it gets wider and so then you have to consider what what you're going to actually be canning on so you're gonna want to make sure if you go the biggest size you have a big enough canning area to do that so that's why I stuck with the smaller size because it easily fits on my propane cooker out there so yeah read through your books learn make sure you know the difference between water bath and pressure canning and also know what your altitude is because that's going to determine when you go to pressure can that's going to determine the weight you use for me where we're at I use 10 pounds of pressure some of you will need five if you're really you know really low if you're higher up you're going to need fifteen pounds of pressure if you're you know live way up in the mountains and you're higher altitude well I hope you enjoyed this video and that if you haven't gone into home canning your own foods yet then I hope this helps you to get over your fear of that because there's like I said there's a lot of fear-mongering out there and it's really nothing to be afraid of just learn how and I'll tell you what if you haven't started pressure canning yet once you because you're scared once you finally do it that first time you will become hooked I know I was one I was afraid of it for a few years I had my pressure canner for about two or three years before I finally started using it that first time was all I needed and I was hooked and it's it's just you know it's it's just a great feeling to to be able to get over that fear to be able to do it yourself and then have a pantry full of all these foods that can feed you throughout the whole year okay thanks for watching take and God bless [Music] you

Channel: Rain Country

Views: 84,165

Rating: 4.9196401 out of 5

Keywords: traditional, old-ways, Health, Garden, Frugal, Homesteading, Self-Sustainability, Cooking, DIY, Homemade, natural-living, herbs, canning, dehydrating, vacuum sealing, food preservation, water bath, pressure can, food storage

Id: vQgYv4U_69Q

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 10 2019