AdAgrA 2021: Hidden Treasure

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

The Farmers Pantry

Rob Norris

Introduction to Canning

My name is Robert Norris and this is the basic canning class for Ad Agra.

And this is the second recording that will be the complete recording for what we weren't able to cover on the first recording.

How many of you have been doing canning for maybe years and have done quite a bit of it?

So, I don't know if you've ever noticed, but food often comes in waves.

It's the natural order of things here on Earth now that we rarely get a steady stream of natural foods year-round.

So we must consider how to save that food for later use.

There's many ways to preserve foods, but today we wanna look at canning.

This year, We've harvested over 300 pounds of Honeycrisp apples just off of 1 of our dwarf trees.

You know, what do you use 300 pounds of Honeycrisp apples for?

Well, You can make a lot of applesauce on 300 pounds.

We actually didn't do too much applesauce this year.

We did a lot of juicing and some drying, but you know, Again, you have 1 harvest of apples, for instance, and you've got all your apples, you need to learn what you can do with it so that you have those apples available in some form year-round.

So we're gonna talk about 2 basic methods of canning, water bath canning and pressure canning.

There are other methods of canning, other areas that we just don't have time to cover.

There's steam canning, that's very interesting, And then there's dry canning, which we just don't have time to go into those other methods.

We're just gonna look at the basics of water bath canning and pressure canning.

And bear in mind, this is just an overview.

We can't give you everything in 60 minutes.

So maybe just sort of sit back and take a few notes and just we'll run through this and you can get a big picture look at the whole thing.

So what's the difference between water bath canning and pressure canning?

Water bath canning is used to heat treat high acid foods at 212 degrees, which is boiling.

This would include most fruits, jams, jellies, pickles, and tomatoes.

These fruits, or excuse me, foods, are really only vulnerable to heat sensitive organisms.

So the bacteria and the things that give us sickness, they're not gonna survive well, number 1, in an acidic environment that is heated up to 212 degrees.

So we can water bath can most fruits, like I said, jams, jellies, pickles, and tomatoes.

Now, when I said high acid foods, that means foods with a pH of 4.6 or lower.

If you remember back in the days of high school chemistry, the pH scale goes from about 0 to about 14, with 7 right in the middle being neutral pH.

So just to throw out a couple of numbers there, baking soda is very basic.

So that's tending towards the higher part of the scale, whereas vinegar has a pH of 2.5.

So that's down more towards the acidic end of the scale.

The lower the number, the more acidic, the higher the number, the more basic.

Sulfuric acid, concentrated sulfuric acid has a pH of less than 1.

So here's the thing, most tomatoes come into the range of 4.3 to 4.8.

Well it's both sides of our 4.6 cutoff line.

So tomatoes are a peculiar exception in that today it's just safe to say all your tomatoes need to be acidified when you're canning them by adding 2 tablespoons of lemon juice per quart.

And that will acidify them to the point where they're safe to water bath can.

Let me just give you a few other numbers as well.

Cherries, canned cherries have a pH of 3.8 to 3.9.

So you notice a lot of these fruits have a pH in the neighborhood of about 3 or 4.

So those would be on that acidic side of the scale.

If we look at pressure canning, typically we're pressure canning foods like vegetables and soups that have a much higher pH.

These foods need a higher temperature to actually kill the potential dangerous bacteria and their spores.

So we achieve those higher temperatures by putting our food that we're cooking under pressure.

So in a pressure canner, when we heat that up, let's say at 10 pounds pressure, the boiling temperature of that water inside the container is gonna reach 240 degrees.

And at 240 degrees for the recommended length of time, you're gonna kill that botulism or those other very potentially dangerous bacteria.

Just a few numbers for some vegetables, random vegetables.

Beans have a pH of 5.5 to 6.5, asparagus 5 to 6, peas 5.7 to 6, Potatoes, 5.4 to 5.9.

You notice all those vegetables have a much higher pH.

Now, they're still on the kind of acidic side of our number 7 midline neutral point, but they're not acidic enough to kill those potentially dangerous bacteria, so we have to pressure can them.

Now there are some safety concerns that most people will bring up and ask questions about.

Number 1 is food spoilage, and 1 of the worst ones that can spoil and really not even show signs of it is botulism.

The other thing that people ask about is pressure canning.

Am I going to blow up my house and you know how dangerous is it?

Is it gonna, am I just putting a bomb on my stove top there?

Spoilage, going back to the spoilage issue, spoilage comes from improper processing times, jars not sealing right, poor quality food, or poor quality equipment.

There are many, many thousands, hundreds of thousands, if not more, people every year canning millions and millions of quarts of home canned food.

Canned food, and we just have very, very few, a handful of records every year of people actually getting sick or dying from food spoilage.

If you just have the ability to follow a few simple rules, this is not hard at all.

Something else to bear in mind is if you're at a higher elevation, let's say over 1, 000 feet, you need to increase the boiling time for water bath canning and the pressure for pressure canning.

So think about this, if you live at let's say, And I don't know the exact numbers, but if you live at 1500 feet elevation, water will actually on average boil not at 212, but maybe closer to 200 degrees.

Water might boil actually not at 212, but at 195 degrees temperature.

And so that less temperature means you're not getting that effective kill of bacteria at your standard canning, water bath canning time, let's say most fruits that we do, we can, water bath can for 30 minutes.

So at these different elevations, we're going to have to extend that time because we can't raise the boiling temperature of water, because we're just stuck with that, but given our elevation, we're gonna have to add time to that.

If you live at 3, 500 feet, you're gonna have to add to that pressure.

And there, the best thing I can tell you is go online and look up the charts for elevation and pressure changes and increased boiling times for your pressure canning and your water bath canning.

So that's just something that you just kind of need to keep in the back of your mind as well.

As far as equipment you'll need, there's 2 books that I would mention just right off.

Before you even start canning, I would get these 2 books.

1 of them, the first 1 is called Stocking Up 3, Roman numeral 3, by Carol Hupping.

Her name is Carol Hupping, H-U-P-P-I-N-G.

And the other book is called The Ball Blue Book.

The Stocking Up book is about 2 and a half inches thick and it is the reference, as far as we're concerned, for home canning.

This book also has, let me pull that up here.

Janitza Densmore

Natural Soap Making

Our loving father as we attempt to teach and receive a blessing Please be with us help the minds be open and readily to absorb and help me to say the right words and That I don't forget something that's important.

Amen If you got an email with the handouts I sure hope you printed it out.

If you did not print it out I only have 1 and I'm not sure if they have how about am I on this thing okay I'm going to put it right here for now while I talk and you can take notes there's a few basic ingredients that most of them are readily available in your kitchen.

There's a large variety of oils that we can use but you have to know what you're doing.

Are you 1 of those that don't measure in your kitchen?

Well, this is not a recipe you want to dump cook.

This is a recipe you want to measure and make sure it's precise.

But this is a chemistry of combining the triglycerides, the fatties, and the oil with the lye and making it into a salt okay.

When I'm at home I don't wear gloves But I am to teach you safety as well.

When you're first learning, you get nervous, you're fumbling, you're not unsure what you're doing.

So for my nervousness sake, I am going to wear them.

I do recommend if you're injury or prone to break or fall or be safe, lye does eat a hole in your skin.

Okay, I have everything here pre-measured.

I kind of cheated at home because I'm trying to cram everything in this class.

Okay, we have 12 ounces of coconut 17 ounces of olive oil and 10 ounces of palm On the right here.

There's a several scale Thank you, Jacob There's a scale of different saponification different values that you can do If you want your soap really harsh like a laundry soap and you want it to take all the oil off your clothes then you make it a lot harsher.

If you want a basic soap like a bathing soap then you want a milder soap.

Something that's going to leave some oil back in your skin because as we wash we wash our natural oils off.

So you want something that's going to leave a little bit of extra oil in your skin to moisturize.

If you use our soaps you won't need lotion very often because it naturally will leave a percentage.

I see you see they're highlighted number 7 that's the sevenification standard that we're going to use.

We're going to leave 7 percent of the oil in our batch without binding into a salt so it it'll be free floating in the soap.

I don't want you to think, ew, slimy soap.

But it's going to be free floating in your soap.

And when you wash, it's going to leave some oil on your skin.

The reason I started making soap is because my husband, in the military, got heavy metal poisoning.

Our well water, our pipes, our toothpaste, our foods.

I know it wasn't in our foods and then when I discovered soap, it's like wow.

All those beautiful colors that you buy in soaps, they're oxides, they're rust from different minerals, mica, so it's called.

Children, do you realize that your skin is an organ just like your mouth?

Every little cell is a mouth, so when you bathe with these soaps, you're ingesting that in your skin.

So that's why I started making soap, because I wanted to know what was in my soap.

I wanted to make sure that I was getting the best that we needed.

It doesn't have any arsenic or any lead or any mercury, none of that.

And even the soaps that you buy that have fragrances in them, these fragrances are something that we don't want.

Fragrances, I got this off a website, Fragrance oils may contain a percentage of natural essential oils but due to the cost of this they're made of synthetic materials now and manufactured.

There's more than 3, 000 materials that can be used to create fragrances and they don't tell you what it is because it's a trade secret.

They don't want you to know but these fragrances contain phthalate and phthalate is a group of synthetic chemicals that are used in many things including making plastic more flexible.

We have liquid soap, I mean I'm sorry, we have liquid oils and then we have solid oils.

So the trick to working faster, because I have my mom of 7 and I'm always on the go, What I have discovered that I use part water and part ice.

And when we're making soap, you want your oils at a certain temperature and your lye solution at a certain temperature.

If you print it out my flyer, when you get home it will probably still be there, you can download it and print it.

You want to have your both liquids around 100 degrees.

So we're going to start if my stove is hot and there we go.

Sorry I got to take these till I do the lye.

What I have learned to do is I melt my solid oils first and when those are just about done melting then I go ahead and add my olive oil and that will help to cool down my solid oils they're in the liquid state so I can work faster.

So here we go, we have 12 ounces of coconut.

The oil is good to be close, it doesn't have to be extremely precise.

I have a friend that makes a lot of soap, she learned from me, and she's a chaff.

So she just went to my class and she instead of weighing things out she measured things out okay this is a cup and a half and that's how she makes soap this is my son Jacob okay so we're gonna go ahead and continue while he helps me here.

Something that you want to learn and you will learn each different oil has a different saponification value.

I don't do just different oils for the sake of having different oils.

You do different oils because each oil will incorporate something a little different.

1 will be more sudsy, 1 will be more gentle to your skin while the other 1 will be emollient like the olive oil it will leave your skin feeling smooth and there we go but each 1 combines different with the lye so you have to you just can't substitute for example I can't substitute olive oil with sunflower oil even though they're both liquid you have to know what the saponification value if you want to get consecutive results.

Like today I learned in the grafting class that if you want golden delicious you have to get a trade from the golden delicious because there is only 1.

So, if you want to get consecutive results and you want the results to be the same each and every time, you want to have a good saponification value scale and those are available online.

If you get that handout Printed out on the very top or you can write note now.

It's called the sage calm They have a live calculator that if you want to create your own blend of oils to make your own soap you can go there says okay I have 3 ounces of olive oil 2 ounces of babasu oil and 3 ounces of sunflower oil how can I make this into a bar of soap and it'll tell you how much lye to use, how much water to use?

So you can, you don't have to be precise and follow this recipe you can play with it.

They've been in the car where it's nice and cold.

Okay while we're giving that a couple of minutes we're going to go ahead and start with the lye.

On the lye, as I said, I have a few ounces of water and a few ounces of ice to speed up the cooling process.

There is not a color, a natural color like you say.

Oh I want some really pretty green soap so I'm going to put some peppermint leaves in my soap the lye will burn that up the lye will kill your green it'll be brown okay it'll still have the nice peppermint scent but lye is very hard.

What I have done in the past is I make a batch of soap with no scent no additives nothing in it other than soap.

Once it's solidified and done, then I shred it and I re-batch it.

And then, when the lye is wasted or killed or out of there, then I can add some herbs and it does not damage the color as much.

Okay, we are still working here with the, can you see it's melting but it's just kind of slow.

I didn't think to bring it in earlier to make sure it was.

While that's working, let's work on the next project.

Now the next step is the dangerous part children, but I want you to pay close attention because it can be done safely.

As you see I have things that are very basic that are found in your kitchen.

I bought vinegar to clean out my washer and I cut the top off or you can use a pitcher but I didn't have a pitcher big enough for your lye solution.

When I'm at home I do this normally in the kitchen.

Lilia Perlee

Baking Bread the Old-Fashioned Way

I started with growing food and then I started baking bread, because that's what we do at home, just value add on.

Bread starts selling, but then I started exploring the option of baking bread the old fashioned way.

And I will tell you a little bit of my journey as we go on and I've been baking bread probably for about 20 years and there's always a lot to learn.

I think it's kind of like an art and transitioning from bacon bread with commercial yeast to bacon bread with natural yeast is a little bit more challenging but again never give up just keep up there is a lot to learn so I'm still learning every day So I would like to share today what I have learned and we're going to start with a little bit history.

Before we start I would like to pray and then I will outline what we're going to do today.

Our gracious Redeemer, I'm so thankful that you made this conference possible.

I believe this is like a Red Sea opened up for us to be here together and share and just encourage each other how to garden, how to homestead, how to just be together as a family, because we are all ready to see your face very soon.

But while we're here on earth, I pray that you will bless our time together.

You will give me correct English to say all the words right, and I pray that your face will shine as we share the topic of bread of life because you are the bread of life.

So today I would like to show you how to make bread in the very end.

That's what I do for farmers market but first we'll start with the history.

I would like to ask first how many people listened to live presentation last year that I presented in Florida.

Okay, so 2, how many people listened on Audiverse?

1 more thing, how many people actually bake bread at home?

How many people baked with natural yeast, not commercial yeast?

I'm not a pro at it, but I would like to share with you what I know.

It's wonderful that we have most of you are new.

So the presentation I had last year, I pray that it will Answer some of your questions because I was battling with the same question About the bread made without commercial yeast and the whole concept of sourdough and stuff like that.

So we're going to start The Bible talks about the leaven and it says in Exodus, and the people took their dough before it was leavened, having their kneading bowls bound up and they clothe this on their shoulders.

And during World War II and during harsh time people would keep the leaven, this is leaven, this is the natural yeast that we're going to make bread with.

They would sleep with it at night in harsh weather in the winter to save it because it can last for 345 hundred years and you can make with the same, just feed it.

Another parable spoke he unto them, the kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven which is a woman took and hid in 3 measure of meals till the whole was leavened and know you not that the little leaven leavens the whole lump and that's the whole concept about bread making you put the leaven into like today I'm just having flour water salt and water.

Leaven bread in ancient Egypt, so nobody really truly knows how leaven bread started, the history of it, but in ancient Egypt the word for bread was the same as the word for life.

Emer wheat and barley are by far the most common grains of ancient Egypt, while other varieties of this species and some millet have been identified.

In the beginning the simplest Egyptian bread was made from flour mixed with water and salt, patted into flat circles with the hands laid on the hot rock next to the fire to cook.

It's more like crackers or unleavened bread like tortillas.

Egypt produced the first leavened bread perhaps by accident.

1 theory is that yeast landed, not the commercial yeast, but wild yeast that's in the air actually, landed on some dough left out.

The gluten in the flour went to work and the bread puffed up.

So a sourdough method was employed for leavened bread.

Remnants of a previous batch of dough was mixed with new dough and allowed to ferment or sour overnight.

So in other words, in the literature you will see it's called mother dough.

I went to Central Asia they don't have anything like this what they do they just make a batch of dough they save little clump They put it actually in the cupboard for 2, 3 days.

They take that clump out and put it in the next batch of just flour, water, and salt.

So the Egyptians did not have east sealed in foil packets of jars, neither did the pilgrims or settlers.

So where did the families through history get east?

The answer is simple, from family and community and originally from the air, wild yeast is everywhere in the air you breathe, on the bark of the trees, on leaves.

Some people start batch like that with grapes, wild grapes, that's organically grown, of course, and make the starter themselves.

So the same film can be found on juniper berries.

For centuries both berries have been used as a natural start for bread yeast.

Natural yeast is sometimes referred to as sourdough but the right strain of yeast it doesn't have to be sour.

So until the 19th century homemade yeast was the only kind there was.

I just wanted to make it clear that for centuries people never had Walmart Fleshman yeast flakes.

So in 1857, Louis Pasteur discovered that living organism yeast were responsible for fermentation.

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