Home-Canned Vegetables: Delicious and Safe
By Diane Van, USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service
At the USDA’s Meat and Poultry Hotline, we receive about 70,000 calls a year from people who want to know how to prepare and store food safely. We can tell from our calls that it’s late summer, because we’re starting to get lots of questions about canning vegetables at home.
Canning is an excellent method of preserving your garden produce — if it’s done correctly and safely. If not, the vegetables you worked so hard to grow, harvest, and preserve could be deadly. If the bacterium that causes botulism survive and grow inside a sealed jar of food, they can produce a poisonous toxin. Even a taste of food containing this toxin can be fatal.
Here are some tips to ensure that your canned vegetables don’t spoil and make you or your family sick.
- Make sure you use the latest canning methods and recommendations. Scientific research is continually being conducted on food preservation. Make sure your food preservation information is always current with up-to-date, scientifically tested guidelines. For this reason, don’t use outdated publications or cookbooks, even if they were handed down to you from trusted family cooks.
- Use the right equipment for the kind of foods that you are canning. Pressure canning is the only recommended method for canning vegetables, as well as meat, poultry, and seafood. The bacterium that causes botulism is destroyed in these foods when they are processed at the correct time and pressure in pressure canners. Using boiling water canners for these foods poses a real risk of botulism poisoning.
- Follow these recommendations to ensure that home-canned vegetables are safe:
- Use a pressure canner.
- Be sure the gauge of the pressure canner is accurate.
- Use up-to-date process times and pressures for the kind of food, the size of jar, and the method of packing food in the jar.
Also, before eating home-canned vegetables, check to make sure that: - The jar lid is firmly sealed and concave.
- No liquid is leaking from the jar.
- No liquid spurts out when you open the jar.
- No unnatural or “off” odors can be detected.
If you need in-depth, step-by-step instruction on home canning, we recommend consulting these excellent resources:
- The state and county extension service of your state university; they’re specialists in home canning.
- The National Center for Home Food Preservation is your best source on the web for current research-based canning recommendations, including the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning.
For general questions, feel free to contact us at the Hotline (1-888-674-6854 toll-free) or online at AskKaren.gov.
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Thank you! I've read pamplets on canning but feel so much better seeing actual people doing it. It makes me feel say that, thank you for posting and sharing.
This is a very good article, and very true. This is important information to get out to people. (Especially Americans!!!) For there is a major weight issue in America, which comes from many of the processed food, even the vegetables!!!
I enjoyed this article on canning which I feel is still a great food preserving method.
Thanks for the information. It seems like every year we have good intentions on doing some canning. We bought the jars, have all the recipes, but something always happens to prevent us from doing it. Maybe it is all those hours of watching our parents "sweat" through the process with the hot gas burner under the porch area. Your article inspired me to try again!
Am wondering how long I can keep and use home canned salsa. I still have some that is going on 4 yrs. old. Is it safe to use??
You need to know the canning method used. If you used vinegar in the recipe, then there is plenty of acid to preserve using boiling water canner method. If the lid is still sealed, it doesn't have any off odors or mold inside when opened, then you are safe to taste it. If it tastes good, then enjoy it! I still have a few jars of salsa my sister gave me from 11 years ago. They are still as good as the day they were made, just darkening a bit.
To the last comment, I have always been leery of home canned foods that are over 1 year. Most of the things I have read say about the same thing, but I would open it and see what happens. If it smells or looks the slightest bit funny, don't keep it. You wouldn't want to risk being ill, or your family being ill, just by not wanting to waste.