Canning Tuna

I'm making a link here to a show that I've been watching on hulu.com, and this particular episode is about water, but for my interest it shows canning tuna in Italy. In this video there is only a short highlight of canning the tuna. It shows cooking the tuna in boiling water, scraping the skin off and boning the tuna, cutting it into pieces to fit the jars and putting the jars into a pot of water.

What I get from watching the video is that the tuna is packed in jars with screw tops unlike the canning jars we use in the U.S. but tops that things like our pickles from a store come in. I forget the different names for the different tops. Blast getting holes in my mind. Regardless of canning warnings from Ball, I frequently can things in recycled pickle-type jars. They seal. Period.

I also get that they are canning the tuna in a water bath. My Ball Blue Book calls for processing tuna in a pressure cooker for 1 hour and 40 minutes for half-pints or pints.

Now I know that the canning guides for the U.S. are litigation driven nowadays, and that the way people canned things in the past was different. People can argue that science is better, and we have more knowledge of bacteria, its survival and affect on our food than people used to have. It's still a subject that I ponder frequently.

At ORNL I worked with a man from a city west of Nashville, TN, and he used to talk about his youth and how his mother did things. He was from a large family, like, 14-15 siblings, and they weren't well off. He has talked about his mother canning fish whenever the kids brought a large one home, and she would pack the jars and cover them with melted, hot bacon fat or lard.

At one time I priced tuna for home canning. I was wondering how effective it would be cost-wise. My conclusion was that living in the middle of the country made buying fresh tuna prohibitive. Maybe if I lived on a coast and could go out fishing for tuna, it might be worthwhile. Otherwise, nah.

Here's the link to the video:  http://www.hulu.com/watch/85506#i0,p0,s1,d0

Dehydrating Tomatoes Into Fake Figs

Okay!  When my tomatoes come in, I'm going to have to try this:  Dehydrating tomatoes into tomato figs. This is a video from youtube.com by imstillworkin. It is a recipe she found in an old cookbook, and it is a way to mimic figs. However, she commented that to her the taste was more like dates than figs. Whichever they taste like, I love them both. That makes this look like a win/win.

Egg Storage - For Jill

My cousin was wondering about saving eggs without refrigeration the other day. She lives in a very rural area, and if there was an ice storm or damaging wind storm, there's every possibility that she might be without power for some time.

Imstillworkin, on  youtube.com has been conducting an experiment comparing different ways of storing eggs. She's trying refrigeration, non-refrigeration, coating with mineral oil and vacuum sealing. She posted a two-month update the other day, and I've embedded it here for Jill.




If I had more half-gallon jars, vacuum sealing might be a good option.  Personally, I'd opt for coating in mineral oil. I've also seen posts about people coating with butter, but I'm leery of the small amount of butter going rancid. Years ago many people used sodium silicate for storing eggs; this was called waterglass. They'd mix a solution in a big crock and immerse the eggs in there. If one googles "water glassing eggs," enough results show up to satisfy curiosity.

Since mineral oil is easily obtainable, and water glass is something: 1. I don't really know where to buy and 2. don't seem to have many uses for, mineral oil would be my medium of choice. We've enough junk around the house without adding something else that is one-use specific.

Dehydrating Celery

Since celery was at such a good price during Thanksgiving, I took the opportunity to stock up on it for my dried foods storage. There are as many different ways to dehydrate celery on the internet as there are to cook chili.

While doing this batch, I saw quite a few websites that talked about grinding the celery and mixing with salt to make celery salt. That's something I'd like to try in the future. I need to get a new grinder for spices before I can, though.


Edited 12/18/11 to add permalink to celery salt post:
http://jolagayle.blogspot.com/2011/12/celery-salt.html

After trying a few different methods, this is the one I've settled on as liking the best. It gives the best color, although it takes a longer amount of time.

1. Wash celery well.
2. Cut off leaves and wide root ends
3. Slice celery into 1/4" slices (crosswise)*
4. Put slices into bowl of cold water if processing a lot.**
5. Just before loading dehydrator, soak celery in 6 cups of water with 1 tablespoon of baking soda for 5 minutes.***
6. Drain and load dehydrator trays.
7. Dry at 110°F  until celery breaks easily, 16-18 hours. 

*This is the size with which I like to cook. I've seen directions for 1" slices and have considered doing that for putting under roasting meats; however, I've not done it so far.

**How much you process depends on the size of the celery, your stamina and dehydrator. It took 3 bunches of medium celery to fill 6 trays for my Nesco dehydrator.

***Do this in batches if you don't have a huge bowl.

Canning Roast Beef

I caught a good sale on roast beef the other day and am in the process of canning them tonight.  There were 2 roasts in the package, and after cooking to medium in the oven, they fit into 3 quart jars.  While the beef is canning, I've got a nice pork roast cooking in the oven.  I think it will end up yielding about 3 quarts, also.

Update: finished the canning. Ended up having 4 jars of pork roast. I had to really whack at that lovely roast. It was too big to work with well, and there weren't nature fissures in the meat along which to divide it.

Here's a picture to tempt your taste buds.  Pork is on the left and in the back. Beef is on the right.

Looking at the roast beef, I see a lot of fat in there.  I'll have to trim the fat off better the next time and use less oil in browning.  Really wasn't thinking about how much fat would end up in the broth. I think these will be eaten first because I have no clue how long the jars can be stored before that lovely fat goes rancid.  Mmmm, maybe a six-month limit will be placed on these beef roasts.

Speaking of rancid fat. My Dad in his zeal and going-to-Sam's-Club days, bought oil in 5 gallon containers.  He built a lovely little rack for it that tips over to allow you to fill another container. Gads, I couldn't believe how heavy 5 gallons of oil is!  It's gone rancid, and I can't even lift the thing to throw it away.  Going to have to empty it some to get it in the trash. Bleh. What a chore.

Dehydrated Eggs

This is to document my experimenting with dehydrating eggs. In making sure we have enough food on hand to get us through an emergency - say a tornado not killing us but wiping out a lot, or flood, or whatever - I've been working on getting some food stored up.  This post is about working on having eggs on hand.

The conclusion of the experiment is that:
1. It's not complete - I still have to try these in a something like a cake recipe.
2. If I didn't have food, these would be better than going without.

I tried rescrambling the dehydrated eggs.  The taste was A-okay; nothing at all wrong with the taste. Texture was a big fail. Talk about grainy. I have not yet tried these in a recipe such as a cake calling for eggs. I will try to remember to post back about this after I have done it.

Shelf-life of commercial powdered eggs is supposed to be 15 years. So good for long-term storage, good for nutrition, and good for long-term survival if TSHTF. I used this method to try to circumvent the cost of buying commercial powdered eggs.

The process is that you mix eggs in a bowl, then you scramble them. You take the cooked, scrambled eggs and dry them in your dehydrator until they're nice and crispy. Then you powder them and store the resulting powder.  When you want to use them, you rehydrate at a ratio of 1 tblsp dried egg to 2 tblsp of water, or 1:2.

Egg powder in blender after removing
from dehydrator

8 scrambled eggs dehydrated

1 tablespoon egg powder to 2 tablespoons water.
This is immediately after  mixing.

This is after letting it sit for 2 hours to see if it mixed
any better. It didn't.

These are the scrambled eggs made from the dehydrated
scrambled eggs. This shows what was left in the bowl and
gives an indication of the graininess to which I referred.