Speaker 1:
Many people are growing and preserving their own foods maybe to save money maybe to support local growers maybe so you know exactly what ingredients are used in the food to prepare and serve to your family whatever the reason.

It's important you use safe food preservation methods so in the long run your food is safe to eat.

Hi I'm Lynette Gord field specialist food safety with Ohio State University Extension and today we're going to talk about pressure canning.

You may remember that we have some other videos on water bath canning and those can be found at our extension YouTube channel but today we're going to concentrate on pressure canning and the real difference in whether you use a pressure canner or water bath canner is the types of foods that you are using. 

When using a water bath canner you can safely process foods that have high acidity foods like jams and jellies tomatoes pickles and fermented foods are all good to use in a water bath canner the reason for this is with high acidity they can be processed at 212 degrees which is the boiling point on the other hand there are foods that have to be processed at a much higher temperature and these foods are things like meats and low acid vegetables such as corn, carrots, green beans, peas, potatoes. 

Those kinds of foods and the reason why they have to be processed at a higher temperature is because of a risk of botulism botulism is found in the ground and really not a problem in its natural state but when you put it into an environment that takes away all the oxygen or an anaerobic condition that botulism can create a spor and that spor can create a toxin and that's what we're really worried about is that botulism toxin and so we want to process foods with low acidity at a much higher temperature and we can't get that temperature unless we put them under pressure and so in pressure canning we can use two different types of canners. We have a weighted gage canner and in this process.

It works on a on a weight and this weight will start to jiggle as it reaches the sure that it needs to to reach or the poundage we call it poundage five pounds ten pounds 15 pounds.

With dial gauge canner which is another choice this works the same way except that it's a dial gauge and so you'll see the indicator come up to five pounds, 10 pounds, 15 pounds and that is based upon the recommendation of the recipe that you use and we do recommend highly recommend that you use tested recipes and USDA is our go-to source.

They have a home canning guide that you can find through our website and you can also use the information through the National Center for home food preservation.

You can find that information at our website at FCF dot o su edu so today we're going to go through the process of pressure canning green beans and we start here with our green beans.

You should pick them out of the garden early in the morning before the stunt Sun starts to shine keep them in a cool place until you can get time to process them but remember that the quicker you process the higher quality you're going to have so we're going to start by washing those beans once that's done we want to snap our beans and really just take the ends off and the the end that connects to the plant is the one that you really need to remove.

You don't always have to remove the other end, depends on the quality of that and then I just break them into bite-size pieces you can leave them
whole and put them in the jar.

That way it really doesn't matter there are two methods to putting any of your vegetables into your jars. There's a raw pack method and a hot pack method. In the raw pack that's what I'm doing right now is we put our vegetable into the jar and then what I'm going to do is pour boiling water over that with a hot pack method.

I would actually snap by beans and put them into boiling water and then cook them just a little bit and then pour them into my jars.

There's not a lot of difference and it's really personal preference/ Raw pack you're going to get a few less beans into your jar because you really need to pack them in there.

Hot pack they're going to be more flexible and easier to get into the jars and so you're going to get more food into the jars to start with so we'll just continue to fill this jar and I'm going to actually do four pints today so we'll get those ready to get into our canner.

We fill our jars and we're going to leave an inch headspace and that's the space between the vegetable in the top of the jar and so we'll put our boiling water in here okay once the water is in there we're going to use our bubble for you and what this does is it gets any of those bubbles that are down in the in the jar out.

If we don't do this then what happens is those bubbles will come loose during processing and we'll have a lot less liquid in the jar.

Than what we need try to make sure that all of your vegetables are under that that water level.

The other side of this has a gauge that does our headspace and so we want to make sure that we're right on with our headspace.

So there's one done. Once they're filled then we want to wipe the rim and we really didn't talk about jars and lids but you want to use a goodmason type jar and the type of lid that we use is a two-piece lid it's a lid that has the little rubber seal in it so once you wipe the top of that lid you don't want any food to be between the top of the jar.

In this lid and then you just put those on and add your your ring. When we do this this lid is used once the ring can be used many times and when we put that ring on we put it just fingertip tight and so you just use your fingertips and so you get it until it catches and then just with your fingertips you turn it about a half inch to an inch more.

You don't want to crank down on it because that'll put a bind between the top of the jar and the ring.

Now that we have our jars filled we're ready to get them into the canner and get the canner on the stove and get this process moving.

We want to put about three inches of water in the bottom of our pressure canner.

If you remember with our water bath canner we cover the jars.

We don't want to do this with this process.

Then we're going to put our jars into the canner and normally most canners will hold six or seven pints depending on the size of the canner that you have.

Once we get that our last jar in then we're going to seal up our canner by putting the lid on.

Most of our canners have arrows to line them up sometimes they're a little more difficult than others.

Little tighter seal that and the next we're going to take the vent cover off and we want this to vent for ten minutes.

What that means is you're going to see steam coming out of this vent pipe and that's going to be a constant flow for ten minutes.

What that does is it drives the extra air out of the canner and that raises the temperature up to what we were talking about: 240-250 degrees for safe processing.

Mow that our canner is steaming we want to let that vent for a full 10 minutes.

What that does is draws the air out of our canner and makes that ame environment at the end of 10 minutes then we're going to put the ventcover on that and then watch our dial gauge go to 10 pounds of pressure so let's go ahead and do that and be very careful if that steam is hot.

Okay now that our pressure is up to 10 and even 11 pounds of pressure that's fine to keep it between 10 and 12.

We want to start to regulate that and we do that by turning the heat down and then we're going to leave it at this pound of pressure for 20 minutes. 

Let it sit until the dial goes back to zero so I'm going to take off my vent wait and then I'm going to carefully remove the lid making sure that I remove it away from me so if there's still some steam I won't get burnt and then we'll remove the jars.

Once you're done with your pressure canning process you want to let your canned goods set for 12 to 24 hours you're going to start hearing that ping sound as they seal when they're sealed.

Then make sure you label and date them and then at that point you can take the rings off if they don't seal and you may have a jar - that may not seal for any number of reasons you can take that jar and put it in refrigerator and eat it right away.

Be sure to check out some of the other videos we have on water bath canning and freezing of fruits and vegetables and thanks for watching.