Is Oven Dry Canning Safe?

good morning and welcome to rose red homestead today we're going to answer a burning question that was raised in my mind this week as i went through some youtube videos and watched a lot of things relative to dry canning in the oven now i was raised in a large family and from a very early age we always stored food and had uh we were constantly working on a year's supply of stored food for emergency preparedness and then when i married and we started our own family i continued with those beliefs and practices that had been part of my growing up years and what i saw on the internet kind of flew in the face of some of the things that i had been taught and that have been backed up by my own scientific education over the years i just happened to cross a video that was called dry canning i never heard of it and so i clicked on that and of course once you click on a youtube video in one topic then a whole bunch more show up down the side and i was astounded at how many were there were about dry canning using your oven and the big question that just bubbled up in my mind as i began to watch these other videos was is dry canning in your oven safe well that's what we're going to answer today when we come right back [Music] those of you who have subscribed to our channel and have watched a lot of our videos know a little bit about my background i'm a phd i'm a science educator when i was in graduate school studying for my phd i studied a lot about science misconceptions and as i was watching all of these youtube videos on dry canning using a kitchen oven i spotted dozens of misconceptions that were spoken by the people who were doing the videos and another thing that just didn't quite ring true to me was the idea that it didn't matter who i watched male female whatever whomever um everybody had a different methodology for doing it so all of those things began to just make me really suspicious so um you know me i mean if you know me you know that um that wasn't good enough for me so i went uh to my usual resources and tried to find some substantiated scientific research for whether or not dry canning in the oven is acceptable and of course the big answer is no it is not absolutely it is not but i'm not going to just leave you with that i'm going to tell you a little bit about the science behind why it is not acceptable so let's talk about for just a minute what canning is so canning is where you take wet food and you put it in a jar and you heat process it either by water bath canning or in this example by pressure canning and that accomplishes two things the first thing is that that the time and in this case the amount of pressure has been tested by the usda to know that that time and temperature is enough to kill whatever might be in here and the second thing is that it replaces the air in this jar it removes the oxygen the boiling food during the processing time produces steam the steam comes out from under this lid that's why you only put things down finger tight instead of really cranking it down the steam comes out and is completely replaces the air the oxygen inside the jar so we have now an anaerobic situation and aerobic muse without oxygen and we have heat treated the moist food so that it will kill all of the bacteria that might be dangerous to us including the spores from clostridium botulinum which causes the botulism toxins and i've talked about those toxins in a couple of recent videos that's what canning is and so in the first place dry canning is not really canning at all because it is not in a moist environment so i found a great article i'll put the link to it down under this video it is by university of georgia i'm not sure if you all are aware of this but the home canning arm of the usda has not done any testing of anything for about five years um more than five years actually important people are retiring and they have not been funded in order to do that anymore and so they have deferred to the university extensions around the country like the university of georgia extension office university no it is utah state university extension office in our state they are the ones that are doing whatever testing is being done and so this article was by um it was put out under the usda home canning arm but it was done at the university of georgia extension and what they say is that it absolutely is not recommended to do dry canning for a number of reasons they list seven reasons even though presenters in these other youtube videos went to great lengths and talked a lot about sterilizing the jars and that putting them in the oven the food in the oven so the idea is that you fill the jar you put the jar of food in the oven and for whatever time and whatever temperature whoever you're watching as it's different with each one for whatever that time is and then you bring it out and you put a new lid on the top and crank down a ring and then it seals and then they say that everything has been killed everything is all sterile and it will keep for 20-25 years so what the usda says that that has not been shown by appropriate scientific testing it has never been shown that foods uh dry foods like this um are at to the point of ever being sterile and um that it extends the shelf life by doing it that way the second thing is that it's so obvious that it doesn't remove all of the oxygen there's still oxygen in these jars because when they pull the food out of the oven it's open to the air and then they'll pop the lid on and tighten it down and they do get a seal but they've not removed their oxygen isn't there and the very fact that you are heating this food up what does that do to the food value that's questionable and the thing that is a little bit nerve-wracking to me is the idea that if you think about in the first place all of these dry foods and and this happens to be a quick cooking steel cut oats here is rice and a lot of a lot of people demonstrated beans and um we're going to look at beans here in just a minute and even though these are dry foods this method is supposed to work for dry food there is still moisture even in dry food it is generally under 10 percent but heating the food up like that what is it going to do it is going to drive the moisture to the outside edge of whatever the the rice grain or a kernel of wheat or one of the beans in the jar it's going to drive the moisture to the edge and then when it's taken out of the oven that moisture is going to condense and it's going to leave wet spots and so it doesn't dry necessarily drive all of the moisture and so there is the danger of some moisture still being trapped in that jar now what we know about botulism is that it has spores those spores are everywhere they're in soil they're in air they're in mud puddles we probably have some tract in here on our floor right now there goes one right now oh no just kidding sorry i couldn't resist um okay um and so in case there happened to be which is not likely but possible yes in the jar where moisture has been driven out and forms a little wet spot that spore then can go to the vegetative state and produce the toxin so i mean that's just enough for me right there that i will never do that and um so that it could reduce the food value it's just plain not recommended by the usda so what are the alternatives what why do we want to do this anyway what we're doing is repackaging that oven process called dry canning is not canning at all it's just repackaging the food well why do we need to repackage the food anyway when we bring it home isn't it okay just in what it is the purpose of repackaging we want to preserve the food value we want of course to extend the shelf life and we want to protect it from critters well are there other ways that we could do that and the answer is yes yes there is it's safe ways quicker ways i need to confess that i don't do a lot of repackaging into smaller containers from what if we're talking wheat and beans and rice and and that sort of thing i've never needed to never in my growing up years or the whole time since then do i do a lot of repackaging because we just have not been bothered by infestations of bugs that jim and i were talking about this this morning trying to remember how many times in our 22 years of marriage have we found something that has been infested with weevils or something any of our dry foods like that and we do remember one time when the remains in a barrel of flour was infested but and that's about it and so i think maybe okay so i'm very practical minded i'm very pragmatic if i can find an efficient way of doing things where i do not have to expend my own time or my own money and the result is perfectly satisfactory then that is what i'm going to do so my whole career as as being a housewife has been that um number one i know the source of my foods when we buy in bulk we buy from uh folks that we trust and that we have had good experience with in the past and pretty much the foods that we have bought like buckets of wheat or oats or whatever grains or flowers or whatever um have are pretty much bug free and so i've not had to repackage we pretty much leave them in the buckets and then when necessary i will go out and fill a smaller jar to bring in the house and keep in the cabinet and so i've not done a lot of repackaging these are some of the barrels that i have used these barrels are probably 30 years old i got them at an army navy store you see that this one has wheat from 2002 so it is what 19 years old and um we just opened this probably about eight months ago and it's down to this far i use it for making bread and um i pre-loosened the lid usually we keep that lid on pretty tight but it's perfectly good and i didn't put anything in this barrel nothing and so there we have it so i just use what i have there this if you notice on the lid it used to be wheat 2002 but last year i packed it with pinto beans and the pimple beans are still in the package usually i don't buy things in this small of quantity i usually get them in like 50 pound bags or 25 pound bags so repackaging things in the first place doing dry canning is a little bit foreign to me but there are some things that i do and i'm going to share those with you and these methods could be easily transferred if you have um a reason to want to repackage the bulk foods that you bring in then by all means do it but you can do it very safely and without doing what they call dry canning i use this flower in five pound bags um and this is my artisan bread flour and i probably i have 20 of these bags right over there so that's 100 pounds of flour and i leave them in the original packaging and if you were really worried about it what you could do if you needed to repackage is vacuum sealing is really a good way to do that because vacuum sealing you can do it at room temperature it doesn't require any extra heating up of the food and it also removes all of the oxygen it makes a good seal and it can be used in either jars jars are a really good oxygen barrier that's why we do true canning in jars is because it creates a barrier oxygen can't get in once that seal is sealed so vacuum sealing you can do this is has been vacuum sealed we brought home bulk of this and um steel cut oats and so i have a lot of these out in the garage and i was the packaging was questionable to me and so that's why i repackaged it but then i just dump it in here for in the house and this isn't any kind of seal at all and i put the instructions i took a picture and put the instructions on every one of the jars so i know what the proportions of different things are these are things that i have vacuum sealed that i have dehydrated myself this was frozen mixed vegetables and now it is these are dehydrated vegetables in a vacuum sealed with the oxygen removed the same with these um green onion tops and with these walla walla sweet onions all vacuum sealed now with sealing in jars you cannot repurpose jars for vacuum sealing that don't have the standard threading for a regular lid and ring um we'll do something else with these repurposed jars in just a minute but for vacuum sealing you need to have the top of the jar threaded so that it the same as for a regular canning jar so that you can get it to work that is for jars but if you're worried about your flower in a bag or anything else in a bag you can just slip this whole flower bag in the bag itself into a vacuum seal plastic bag and then you can seal that with a vacuum sealer it will suck all of the air out it will even pull the air from the flower because this is a porous material and air can be sucked out of this material and it just just crunches it right up if that's what you would like to do that's easy enough to do so i'm going to demonstrate now how to do a little bit of vacuum sealing and we'll be right back so this is a bin that we we bought um i believe it was 50 pounds in 2009 that's what the lid says right up in the corner i've marked it um it we bought it in 2009 and this is six grain rolled grains and so it's like rolled oats and so i have for 11 years kept it here this is how much i have left i use it to make granola and um and and warm cereal in the morning but supposing that i wanted to go ahead and repackage it into a quart jar so it's very easy this is what i would do and this no problems with bugs for 11 years it's been in this bin and it's still just as good as the went from the day that we bought it so i would just fill this up now when we are working with dried foods we don't have to worry about things like head space and finger tight lids we can fill them up as full as we want to and then i'm going to tap that down a little bit and then i'm going to add a little bit more and i don't have to use a brand new wig with vacuum sealing i can use one that i have used before and so this is a pre-used one but it's nice and clean and here is my vacuum sealer it is a nutrachef if i had it to do again this was my first experience with a vacuum sealing and i'm not 100 fond of this brand so i would do a little bit more research and get another one it did not come with the attachments that i needed and so i had to buy these attachments so that i could vacuum seal jars and they came from a different manufacturer so i had to do a little uh jimmying around and re formatting ends and that sort of thing but it came with two sizes of these this attachment and it goes over wide mouth jars in regular jars and since this is a regular mouth jar i'm just going to put this over the top and then um this goes here and this goes here and then i just push this button and now it is sucking all of the oxygen out of here and that's what we need we need to create an anaerobic condition that means without oxygen to keep the bugs out of course there were not bugs in it or they would have devoured it in the 11 years so this is a demonstration okay that took a little bit of time and that little means that it is sealed and there we have a good seal so now this is in an oxygen free environment and i would label the top and put it out there so this is a good way to repackage that does not even come close to going into the oven it's quick and you can get it done in a relatively short time the other really safe and fast way to do repackaging of dry foods is to use oxygen absorbers oxygen is the main enemy of foods and so we want to get oxygen out of the jars and of course the oven way of doing dry canning does not do that so both vacuum sealing and using oxygen absorbers does indeed now this is a brand new package of oxygen absorbers i just got these with a delivery of our new freeze dryer that we're so excited about so i'm going to demonstrate how to do these using one of these now when you get a new package of oxygen absorbers you notice that this little pink button sometimes it's in the shape of an eye this is just a little round button this is your oxygen indicator now i want to talk a little bit about the science behind these oxygen absorbers and so these are just little packets inside the packet is um some chemicals and it gets set and ready to go for a chemical reaction and so what happens in the presence of oxygen once oxygen seeps through the packaging which it does immediately it starts that chemical reaction and it pulls oxygen right into the package to complete the um chemical reaction and so it is removing oxygen from the air so it can do its thing now when you have a chemical reaction there is either heat or light or other things that are given off to demonstrate to you that what's happening inside that package is a new compound is being formed it's not the same ingredients that it was when it started when that oxygen is added boom it starts that chemical reaction and that little packet becomes hot and so because these are so quick at absorbing oxygen what we have to do is as soon as i cut this package i want to get them into this jar immediately i'm going to put this little button to the outside so that it shows if this turns bluishy purplish i know that all of the oxygen absorbers inside here are now gone they've done their thing and they will no longer work so this pink means everything is still good and so i'm going to just show you i'm going to quickly cut across here and get these in this jar and then i want to keep the lid on tight we took just a minute and i did vacuum seal these so these are now back in zero oxygen and that will preserve them so i'm going to set them aside i have i think four in here that this this is not sealed so um and these will be fine as long as no more oxygen gets in now the advantage of using oxygen absorbers they do the same thing you can use them at room temperature you don't have to heat up the food it removes 99.9 percent of the oxygen in the jar and it makes a seal on jars that have a sealable lid now the cool thing is that you can repurpose a lot of jars like this was something olives and this was some spaghetti sauce and i don't remember what this was or this was but all of these have this same type of a lid on the inside it has that little gasket and then it has the capability of sealing um so there are some advantages for using oxygen absorbers as well so you can repurpose jars but again repurposing jars you have to wash them out you have to take the label off and so that is also labor intensive you can just use regular canning jars as well and those work just fine too but these oxygen absorbers since they're pulling oxygen into the packet will create a seal um so i'm just going to cut the corner off here and almost had a mess there then i'm just going to fill this jar with beans now if you're really worried about bugs you can pre-treat these by putting this bag in the freezer for three days and freezing everything and then pulling it out and if there are eggs left in there you can let those eggs hatch and come out for a few days and then put them back in the freezer and kill off everything again i'm not worried about it because what we're going to do here is we're going to pull all of the oxygen out of the jar anyway and most little critters cannot survive in anaerobic conditions so here's our oxygen absorber it's going to go right there putting the lid quickly back on this jar and putting this in place and this time we want to tighten this down really hard and that's what we would do even in a regular canning jar using oxygen absorbers not finger tight on these these we want to crank down hard because it's not the same process as it is when you're doing moist canning so these it won't pull this down right away it will take a little while but pretty soon that jar is going to pop down and then these will be sealed in this jar that's the story on whether or not it is safe to do dry canning and what the alternatives are to safely repackage the dry goods that we bring in for long term storage so hope this information was useful to you and we will see you with our next video

Channel: RoseRed Homestead

Views: 16,455

Rating: 4.9375973 out of 5

Keywords: oven canning, dry canning, unsafe dry canning, preserving dry foods, vacuum sealing dry goods, oxygen absorbers

Id: u_OZ09VJk7o

Length: 25min 24sec (1524 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021