Pressure Canning in the Instant Pot Max

good morning and welcome to rosebed homestead i'm so excited today is the day that i'm going to share with you what jim and i have been working on over the past three weeks in terms of um doing an evaluation on the instant pot max to see if it can safely pressure can and so here's what we're going to do here's how we're going to proceed um when we come back after just a moment we're going to review clostridium botulinum botulism and the life cycle and what it takes to kill those little suckers also we're going to take a a quick um trip through what the food industry safety standards are relative to botulism and how they handle and how they have developed the mathematical model that we're going to be using we're going to talk about the things that the usda objects to and why they have yet to approve any of these multi-purpose canners or pressure cookers for use for pressure canning now there is a little bit of news on that front they have just recently approved the presto electric canner it is not a multi-purpose pressure cooker like the instant pot is but rather it is a pressure canner and it will do four quarts at a cost of 250. uh for my money i'll do four quarts in my presto outside on the fire so that is a no-brainer for me i'm not interested in that what i'm interested in is something that will can um pints safely in small numbers because it's just the two of us jim and me and a lot of times that's all we need to can our garden isn't major productive with bushels and bushels of food but rather we might get enough for four pints of something so that's what we're interested in so we will go through everything that we did to test it's quite exciting you see this grin on my face that will probably give you a big clue as to what the outcome was and then um i'll share that with you at the end and for those that want to then stay tuned i will take you through safe pressure canning of four pints of raw pack chicken in the instant pot max for this elevation which is 5 000 feet so we'll get right to it in just a moment [Music] let's review clostridium botulinum i did a little review of this on pressure canning for beginners the first video that we did on pressure canning but it's important for us to have that back in our mind as we go forward clostridium botulinum botulism is um bacteria and it is very heat resistant there are some that are more heat resistant but this is the one that causes havoc in foods um the vegetative state of this organism produces a toxin that is it's a neurotoxin it it attacks the central nervous system and it can be very very deadly and so when we talk about food safety in terms of canning it is botulism that we want to avoid at all costs so what does it take to kill botulism well first we need to realize that there are two life forms of botulism one is in a spore where it the the living conditions get um antagonistic to its survival and so it folds itself up into a tight little spore and it can exist in that life form that spore for literally hundreds of years and then when the environmental conditions are good for it then it opens up that spore and it it becomes the vegetative state where it then grows and reproduces it is while it is in this vegetative state that it produces the toxin that is so deadly for humans now here's the thing in the spore state we can ingest all we want and it doesn't hurt us at all those spores go in and go out without becoming the vegetative state except for babies uh infants under the age of 12. under the age of 12 months the reason that they are not to eat honey is because some spores have gotten into honey it's natural it's produced outdoors so those spores can then in a baby's gut become turn into the vegetative state and produce that toxin but other than that those spores don't hurt us at all but the conditions that are ripe for that spore opening up and turning into the vegetative stage are the exact conditions that exist inside a jar of low acid home canned food jim turn around we've got a road runner on the back um so this is a low acid food low acidity is one requirement for a spore turning into a vegetative state so low acid no oxygen anaerobic so no oxygen is in here we've replaced all of that with the steam when as it cooled it pulled this down to a tight vacuum seal so there's no um oxygen in there and that's perfect for a spore turning into a vegetative state and then the other thing is the temperature the temperature range is exactly what is in our pantry so it is pantry temperatures low acid no oxygen and if any spores are left in there then they're going to become vegetative and produce the toxin that is so lethal to humans so that is why it's so important for us to be sure that we do proper canning and why the food industry has established standards and why the usda over a century has done such magnificent and detailed testing and provided us with amazing and wonderful information which i certainly do appreciate speaking of the food industry what can we learn from the way they do things and this was something that i was completely unaware of i learned so much this past three weeks about the food industry and the safety standards now what has been determined is that botulism spores and that's what we want to kill in our jars we want to kill those spores because if toxin is produced the toxin we can just dump the green beans into a pan and bring it up to boiling and boil that for about 10 minutes or more if you live at higher elevations and the toxin is completely denatured and it becomes harmless and so it is not the the toxin can be easily destroyed with heat but those spores those spores are not killed easily at boiling water temperature and so somehow or other we need to create a condition where we can raise the temperature up to and what the industry standard is is 250 degrees fahrenheit or 121 celsius that is the kill temperature established by the food industry and how long does that have to be well here's the thing if you're in a laboratory and you have a little petri dish or a test tube with some botulism in it and you can bring that up to 250 degrees for three minutes it kills those spores so let me ask you a question do you feel confident in doing pressure canning and holding the pressure for only three minutes ah heavens no we don't and so that's a laboratory number it's an important number and one that we're going to use but we're going to do quite a few other things first so this is how the food industry has put together their mathematical model for getting rid of botulism in canned goods and this is commercially canned goods and the usda has turned that into basic standards for home canning so imagine what if you could take a bowl of food some amount of food and inoculate that with one trillion botulism spores so if we brought that up to what is called the thermal death temperature and that is 250 fahrenheit 121 celsius for three minutes how many spores would be killed now they've done all of the testing on this i would never work with botulism but they've actually worked with botulism and and others that are very similar to botulism but without the the horrible possibility that you might kill yourself if you're working with botulism you you can reduce that number by 90 percent so are we happy with a 90 reduction if of 1 trillion we still have 10 percent left oh no so we take that 10 and we heat that up again to the thermal kill or what is called the botulism cook temperature we get rid of another 90 and then we do it again and we get rid of another 90 percent and we keep doing that and doing that and doing that 12 different times we reduce the probability of one spore of botulism being left alive in one billion cans or jars or food so it's one spore might be found in one can of a billion cans of food or jars of home canned food that's pretty good odds but if you increase that three-minute kill time just a little bit more you can even reduce that further until we now have mathematical models that are we can follow to be very safe and it it has that the temperature that needs to be in on the food needs to be at a certain temperature for a certain length of time now it is not just easy to say oh well all we have to do then is make sure that the food is held to that for three minutes and then we're done oh no no no no that is not right at all so what the food industry has done they're using logarithms they have um done the logs of the temperatures along a whole scale from 250 all the way down and then the duration that is needed to for that thermal kill so it may be three minutes at 250 but what if the food never reaches 250 and you know what a lot of times it doesn't what about 249 ah well in that case then the thermal kill time is expanded and it goes down the scale with each time the temperature goes lower the kill time is expanded and so they've done a model it is an equation using logs that you can calculate the thermal kill time during a whole processing time so 75 minutes of processing if you know the temperature then you can calculate the kill time if um and so that's what the food industry does to determine whether or not you process the food for long enough for to kill the botulism well thankfully the mathematical modeling was already done and all i really had to do was to take a look at that log it that log equation and plug it into excel and make my own table to where i could then enter the temperature and how long it was at that temperature and then this temperature and how long it stayed at that temperature and then my excel table would calculate the rest and give me a number that i could then compare against what the standard is to find out whether or not the food was okay so that's basically what i've done for the past three weeks so here is i want to refresh our minds also by a standard canner this is my regular lid for my pressure canner that i use outside so notice that it has a vent for venting steam we know how important that is because it replaces air in the canner with the steam and that brings up the temperature inside the counter it has an air lock so the pressure will come up and push that air lock up it's a safety device and then most importantly it has something very physical that i can look at to determine whether or not i am in the safety zone now here at 5000 feet and this is a this is a dial um pressure canner and so we to be safe this needle needs to be up to 13 psi 13 pounds per square inch we keep it between 13 and 15 and that keeps us in the safety zone to reach that botulism cook and keep it at the duration necessary and it varies between one food to another food so this is what we're looking for in order to be safe so i'm gonna set this aside for maybe five years ago when i first bought my this instant pot they've been on the market for a little while and um i usually don't like specialized appliances that do one thing but this of course did multiple things so i got it and i have loved it it's very versatile it's very quick i've used it for many many things including water bath canning because i can fill the inner pot with water and that water will boil and then it will um it will be just fine because it will boil for usually i have done jams in here water bath canning is no problem but i never even thought for a moment that this would ever be safe to do pressure canning in and it wouldn't because if you notice by looking at the front face it has all of these settings for different foods and you can have adjust timer and then whatever that says keeping warm and cancel and then manual i use mostly on manual but and then the time counts down here nothing about pressure nothing about temperature so this one is out for pressure canning any instant pot type of an appliance that does not show you either the actual pressure on the inside or the actual temperature on the inside i would never use for pressure canning and that is one reason why the usda does not recommend these so i'm going to set this one aside we're now going to focus on this one and i will tell you show you the features that attracted me to this one at the very beginning the screen here gives several options up top you can switch between fahrenheit and um celsius and i have it on fahrenheit you can change the elevation whoa what did i just say you can change the elevation so you unlock the tools right here and you can touch the elevation and then i was playing with it a minute ago i've had it set for 5 so so our elevation is 5000 and i can set the elevation so there is set right there and then here i can set say whether or not i want the sound which i do and when i'm happy with that it either goes off automatically or i can touch this button and it locks the settings so i've locked my setting in at five thousand feet elevation and according to the manufacturer's instructions that um setting the elevation changes what the computer does on the inside too so if we can trust the manufacturer then we can set it for our elevation i don't know how high it goes then another thing that i absolutely love is right here this readout is temperature and then for pressure it doesn't give the exact pressure but you can let's see if i'm canning i can set the pressure for either maximum or minimum minimum is about six pounds of pressure maximum it says is about 15 pounds pressure so that also very much attracted me but the big thing for me was this right here was the temperature so uh since it's set for fahrenheit right now this says 244 degrees it's not 244 degrees because i've been messing with it so that is really really cool then the other thing is in the lid we have the vent for releasing the steam here is the air lock so the pressure will push this up and then pull it down when there's some safety features on this one now it came with this little trivet that goes on the inside and i don't like this the jars wobble on i have another little rack that i used with my other instant pot and that's what i use here so this seems to have all of the features that i needed it had something physical that temperature that i could monitor and here is it measures the temperature right here the thermocouple is right here and so it is measuring the temperature at the top of the canner and so at least i know what the temperature is right here so that gives me an indication so let me ask you if we put four jars of food in there and the temperature readout is within the safety range do you feel comfortable trusting that temperature providing that the thermocouple is reading an accurate reading is that good enough if you answered maybe well you're close because the real answer is no it isn't enough because what really has to happen and the usda makes this very clear is that the canner itself may be up to temperature but what about inside the jars is the food brought to the correct temperature so that's the sticky piece and for that i had a little bit of help the university utah state university a couple of years ago did a study on whether or not it was safe to pressure can in three different of these multi-pressure pots one of them was an instant pot but it was the instant pot duo plus two others and the instant pot duo does not do i would never trust the duo to do pressure canning but in their paper that they wrote i read about how they um tested the temperature inside the jars by using a little scientific device called a logger and so i asked them i i've sent them an email and they very graciously let me know what they had purchased and then i purchased one too and this thing is not cheap let me tell you so this is a data logger and it detects temperature at the tip of this probe and so this probe can fit right down inside the jar and sometimes i i did it with the probe up would that give us enough of a reading well i thought some of the literature that i was reading some of the other scientific papers said you have to find the coldest point inside the jar of food and so at other times then i put it down so it was measuring the temperature at the bottom and the top of the jar in the middle so it was right smack in the middle of the food now the downside was that for every batch of four that i did i had to take one of those four and open it up and pull out my lager and so we've been eating a lot of green beans lately and i tested three different things we did pinto beans and we did green beans and we did um chicken now this was hot pack these are hot i followed usda instructions to the tea and for the chicken i used raw pack because i was wanting to start not with something that was already hot because i wanted to really test to be sure i wanted my margin of safety to be very inclusive and so again in each one of these i did batches of four and on one batch i put the probe down on the other one i put the probe up so we have a ton of canned goods and i'll show you those in just a bit um then what happens is after i after i retrieve this logger from inside the jar it has a little cradle that it fits in and i download the data and it was taking the temperature every single minute once a minute it would log what the temperature was that it was tracking right here and so i have the temperatures all across an entire processing episode and i want to show you the results on that so because you know i'm a professor and but i don't have a whiteboard but i have a white door and i have something posted over here on the door so i made one of these graphs with the data from the logger for every single batch of canning that we did and we did seven or eight batches of canning i did everything twice once with the point up once with the point down for chicken and beans and um green beans for pintle beans and green beans and chicken and then we had a couple of fault start so we've done a number of these so this is what it looks like so here are the minutes along the bottom and then um the data really go way beyond both sides because it takes an hour and a half to um or two and a half to three hours for a complete process from start natural cool down to finish before i could retrieve the lager so i just picked out of the middle the most important part so here is where the 75 minute processing time this is when the canner kicked on and this is when it kicked off this is the temperature and this is in fahrenheit so uh by the time i'm picking it up it's already at 140 degrees and so it goes on and on and on up here here's 240 degrees line right here and then it never hits 250 and then here's where the heat goes off but notice that it still is up above 240 and then it continues to cool down now scientific literature says that premier kill temperatures are between 240 and 250 and so we can calculate the duration of how long it was at 240 how long was it 241 242 so on and so forth and so this pink line represents this is the kill time this is the botulism cook now is it also killing down here at 230 yes it is but i didn't even want to calculate those times because the durations are way long so i listed anything between 240 and 250. here are the results of our tests and each one is noted by the type of test it was and which test it was and then that was followed by a page in my data notebook that we i did for every single batch recording some data there plus i have a minute by minute temperature for each of our batches um in excel so i was able to do a lot of research so here are the results i am so pleased that every single batch i did exceeded the industry standards using the 12 logarithm reduction model and not just by a little bit but by a whole lot and so i was just absolutely thrilled and um then i learned so much that i've that is really going to inform how i can from now on but keeping the temperature between 240 and 250 is what is really really important now i did also a little control test using my presto canner outside i canned a batch of quarts of pinto beans and i did put the lager in one of those quartz and what was really interesting to me and we held the temperature between 13 and 15 which is what we're supposed to do on our at our elevation that presto canner did not by one degree reach as high celsius as it did in the max and so the max is cooking things at one degree celsius higher now what is also very interesting is that it's so consistent almost the whole pressure processing time the temperature was above 240 which is the kill time now it wasn't quite that much when we were doing the chicken because the chicken started off colder but even starting a slower start there was enough kill time there to meet the industry standard so here is my bottom line i am completely comfortable using the instant pot max for canning four pints at a time at my elevation of five thousand feet now what that means for you is that you need to make your own decisions on this um i i didn't test it at any other elevation i'm pretty confident that it would pass the test at lower elevations it is the higher elevations that um i would be a little bit leery about higher than 5000 because i'm very confident at our elevation that i can do it if we ever get to a place where it's higher than 5000 and we're at a place where i can take my instant pot and plug it in and do a batch and and use my little data logger i will do that just to test it out to see exactly how high it goes so the next step in our video now is i'm going to demonstrate how to can four pints of raw pack chicken so we'll get started on that in just a moment as we approach uh canning our chicken a couple of things i want to remind us about first of all the usda has four problems with these pressure canners and that is why what these well with these multi-purpose pressure cookers that claim that you can also do pressure canning and they say just because that the claim is that it will get up to 15 psi 15 pounds of pressure that doesn't mean much because it is temperature and not pressure that is important and for years and years what if they said to us make sure the pressure stays this high this is the pressure that you need they have not made until recently a really clear link between pressure and um temperature on the inside of the canner well they're not the only ones manufacturers do that to us as well it's like oh just don't worry your pretty little head about that just do what i say and you'll be fine when in reality consumer these days consumers these days are pretty dang savvy and so it is the temperature that kills those spores the way that we get the temperature high enough is because of the pressure so of course pressure is important but it is the temperature number two the temperature inside the food jars needs to be within that kill range and the kill range is between 240 and 250 with 250 being the standard but with kill uh durations being already established for temperatures all the way down from 250. number three it needs to maintain a minimum temperature throughout it can't dip down and then come back up that's like outside when we use our presto canner on the outside burners sometimes the wind blows the flame out and maybe we don't check it and don't find it for three or four minutes and the pressure has dropped below 13 pounds of pressure that's what can't happen here and it can't happen out there you have to start over on your time and then the fourth thing is natural cool down there has to be a way that you can naturally cool down because even though the pressure uh processing stops at the end of 75 minutes or 90 minutes when you turn the heat off when the heat kicks off here that kill thermal kill is still going on because the temperature inside the food is robust and it stays high and drops slower than the temperature inside the canner and all of my grafts show that every single one there is kill time going on after the heat stops and while it is naturally cooling down so can we do that with this yes you can and this is what i'm going to show you okay so one of the things that and right now we're starting with an empty and dry canner i shouldn't say canner i should say instant pot and their recommendation is to sanitize the jars and even though that's not necessarily recommended anymore i decided that i wanted to do that just because i want i didn't want to take any chances so we put three cups of water in the bottom of the ipod and i call it ipot instant pot in the max and then we put the jars in and here are four jars it fits four jars very nicely so i'm just gonna say cancel and now um i canceled everything out although these are locked in place so all of those are still fine then i'm going to push canning and for canning i want to it right now it's on max pressure no i want it on low pressure i'm just sanitizing the time i tap here and then i can reduce that time down to 10 minutes and that's what the manufacturer recommends that we set it for and um then everything else is as needed and then i can start and these jars are still just fine still steamy and they have been sanitized and the nice thing is that there's this nice little uh bump right here that you can plug into either side on the handle and hold the lid up so we're just going to process these pieces of chicken this is raw pack chicken we're going to be doing four pints and with raw pack you do not add any extra liquid the liquid from the meat itself as well as from some of the fat that is found will um will be adequate there are no egg bubbles to check for so we're just going to wipe the rims so these are going in now we had um three cups of water in here already we need to add more water enough to bring the water level up to about a fourth of the how tall the jars are so we'll do that this has a nice little catcher for all of the water that the condensation it fits snaps in place right back here that way it doesn't drip on your countertop so that's now in place and we're ready to put the lid back on all right now setting the counter for canning now uh we want to cancel everything previously and then we're going to go to canning um we still have our 10 minutes there that's not what we want we need to have 75 minutes which is an hour and 15 minutes so the minutes are right and now i'm going to touch the hour button and move it up to one so that's one hour and 15 minutes and for the venting we want um natural venting so we're going to leave that right there from my data the venting takes anywhere between 50 minutes to about an hour and 15 minutes for a natural cool down so everything else is set oh no it isn't the pressure needs to go up to max and it claims 15 psi is max we don't care about that what we care about is the temperature and so we want to see temperatures right here above 240 degrees for when for processing time so remember this kit i just took that chicken right out of the refrigerator so it's cold so we want to be sure that once it gets going that it stays above 240 degrees so i'm going to push start oh it's registering 122 degrees fahrenheit 121 fahrenheit on the inside now um one of the things that is really really important in pressure canning is for the canner itself to vent to expel the steam and or the air with steam in my pressure presto canner that we use outside that venting has to go on for 10 minutes this does vent it does it in bursts like this we'll bring you back so that you can see that um it doesn't go anywhere near 10 minutes i don't personally think you need 10 minutes i calculated the volume of the inside of this canner compared with the volume inside the big canner fully loaded so four here and seven quarts out there and um the presto canner is three and a half times the volume of this canner so we don't need a full 10 minutes of venting from my perspective it does vent it goes um oh several times i think i counted up to 23 times for the high and then the low was about um seven or eight bursts but we'll bring you back when that happens so that you will not be surprised uh when it happens to you because the um instruction book didn't talk about that so we'll be back when it starts venting right around 220 degrees is when it starts venting the steam it's done it already probably eight times so it's getting rid of the air inside replacing that with steam so this is a really good feature of this to know that it vents the same way that a regular one does so we'll come back now when it's fully up to steam it hasn't started notice that our time still hasn't started yet uh it won't flip on until it reaches appropriate pressure on the inside and then the timing will start counting down from an hour and 15 minutes so we'll be back we're down to less than an hour we have 58 minutes left notice the temperature is at 244. i have been watching that temperature and the timer did not start until that temperature was at 240. remember that's in the kill zone and um then it has been fluctuating between 244 and 247 for the past 15 minutes now i'd like for you to notice something else too look what's happening here we have some steam escaping you can probably hear it so this equates to the jiggle on a standard type of a canner what's happening inside this cooker is that it is now regulating the pressure holding it so that it doesn't go over 15 psi even though at our elevation 15 psi does not yield 250 degrees so as long as we stay above 240 and it is consistent all the way through then we're good so we're going to let this finish out and then cool down naturally then we'll bring you back when we're ready to take things out of the counter the airlock just dropped and the do not open lid light just went off so we are safe now to just open this lid and we will put these out on the rack they are still boiling inside the jars they look beautiful notice all the liquid that was produced by that chicken remember we did not add any extra liquid at all and all of that has just been rendered from the meat and the fat itself so we have four pints of perfectly safe canned chicken and this was raw pack chicken and based on the data that i have for uh two other test trials of chicken i know that these are safe once they cool down we will add those out to our pantry in the garage with all of the other ones so this has been a great day to share with you um the fact that i now know that the instant pot max is safe for my family at 5 000 feet so thanks for joining us and we'll see you next video [Music]

Channel: RoseRed Homestead

Views: 32,272

Rating: 4.9162679 out of 5

Keywords: Pressure canning, Instant Pot pressure canning

Id: w62NdXOKROg

Length: 41min 52sec (2512 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/YaztromoX]

Hey everyone -- friendly neighbourhood moderator here.

We appreciate the reports we've received about this post. Here in r/Canning, we stick with rigorously tested and published home canning guidelines from the like of the NCHFP, USDA, Ball/Bernardin/Kerr, University Extension offices, and other scientific canning authorities. And at this time, none of these authorities recognize the safety of the InstaPot Max as a pressure canner. Indeed, one of the biggest problems with these canners is that they have no mechanism for adjusting for higher pressures needed at different altitudes. Research by Utah State University tested three different Electric programmable pressure cookers (EPPCs), with three different foods three times each at three different altitudes, and found they had inconsistent results. Because of this, I've flaired this post as UNSAFE CANNING PRACTICE.

That said, the video itself is informative, and interesting in that it does show certain aspects of the scientific process in testing canners. The fact that it tests at only a single altitude makes the research incomplete, and any conclusions made from the research valid only for the video authors kitchen lab. That makes it worthy of discussion and consideration, so this post will not be removed. It's our hope that the flair will suffice to warn people, particularly those new to canning, that this practice is not endorsed as safe by any canning authority.