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Tag: food (Page 1 of 2)

Canned Food is Fine


When I was a kid in the 1950s and 60s, my mother had the opinion that canned food was of low-quality and best avoided. I was young and took her word for it. I maintained this opinion myself into adulthood and sometimes shared it with others. But occasionally I wondered because my own observations and experience didn’t agree. In the late 1990s I became sufficiently curious and learned about it. But first some history.

A Real Short History of Modern Canning

The Dutch Navy were the first to seal foods like salmon in metal cans in 1772. For some reason, this process remained unknown outside of the Netherlands.

The rest of the story begins with French military logistics. In 1795, Napoleon offered a large reward to anyone who could develop a way to preserve foods so that armies could have better provisions when deployed, especially in summer temperatures. As you may know, logistics is what wins wars and availability of food was a major limiting factor in what armies could do.

Fifteen years later, Nicolas Appert won Napoleon’s prize after observing that food cooked inside a sealed jar did not spoil. The reason for this was unknown for another 50 years until Pasteur identified the role of microbes in the spoilage of food. The army worked on developing this process but advancement was slow and the wars were over before useful quantities could be produced.

Development of the canning process continued in Europe and the U.S.A. A process was developed for canning foods in hand-made wrought-iron cans, which worked. But the process was labor intensive and expensive. In 1824, Parry took canned beef along on his voyage to the Arctic. In 1829, James Ross took canned food to the Arctic as did John Franklin in 1845. Some of these provisions were found in 1857. One can was opened in 1939 and found to be edible and nutritious but was not tested for lead contamination from the lead solder used to make those cans.

By the mid-1800s, the wealthy began to see canned foods as a status symbol and novelty. By the 1860s, rising urban populations increased demand for canned food. Many inventions and machines were developed to fabricate cans rapidly. Improved processing methods reduced cooking time from six hours to 30 minutes.

Skipping ahead, a big step was the invention of the double-seam can in 1888. These provided a reliable perfect seal and were called Sanitary Cans. This is the type of can we use today. By World War 1, mass production of canned goods was perfected and large quantities of food, coffee, cigarettes, medications, and ammunition were packaged for the soldiers in cans by the British, French, and the U.S.A. At the end of the war, the companies equipped to make such foods like Nestle and Underwood turned to selling to the general public. Canned foods proliferated. It was now possible for European made foods to be sold in the U.S. and vice versa. Canned tomatoes and canned peaches were available year-round, regardless of the season. It was a whole new world.

Expiration Dates and Safety

I’m old so while I now expect expiration dates on foods, it still seems like a new thing for me. I remember when milk started to bear a date, then eggs, then meat. Before that you could write your own date with a grease pencil if you wanted to. And these were manufacturing or packaging dates, not expiration, best by, or use by dates. Food manufacturers soon realized that by putting “use by” dates on everything they could force supermarkets and consumers to donate or discard food that was past the date and sell a lot more product. Very quickly, manufacturers were all-in on putting dates. Customers began to expect dates.

Today, everything has a date. Even bottled water has a date and many consumers think dates are required by law. They are not. The only things in the U.S.A. required to have a date are pharmaceuticals and baby formula.

When use-by dates began to appear on cans, I just laughed. Cans are hermetically sealed and then heated to sterilization temperature or higher, as high as 130C. Most items are cooked in the sealed can itself. There’s no chance for microbial contamination unless the can leaks.

Modern double seam cans like we’ve used for the past 100 years almost never leak. When they do it’s usually visible. If a can isn’t damaged or bulging and passes the appearance and smell tests, it’s safe to eat.

In the 1970s, a trove of cans of freeze-dried food from 1865 was discovered and tested1. There was no trace of microbial contamination and the food was safe to eat. In the 2000s a trove of cans of various foods from the Depression Era (1930s) was discovered which were sent to a food lab for analysis. All of it was safe to eat. The worst case of degradation was the canned corn, which had lost 30 percent of its nutrient value, but was safe to eat.

Do canned foods last 20 years? USDA says “Most shelf-stable foods are safe indefinitely.”

Back to My Mother

In short, my mom’s opinion about canned food was false. But why did she have this opinion? Thinking back on the stories she told me as I was growing up provided the answer. My mom grew up in a big city in Northern Germany in the 1910s and 20s. By the 1920s, a lot of the food on the table was canned because that’s all that was available. Her mother was an early health-food proponent and went to great lengths to seek out fresh fruits and vegetables, gather wild berries and mushrooms. This made an impression on my mother.

When my mom came to the United States in the 1930s, she was astonished at the abundant fresh foods available in markets everywhere, even in big cities. And like most immigrants, she had the idea that everything was better in the U.S.A., which led to her deprecation of canned foods as inferior.

Conclusion

The truth is it’s not a matter of inferior or superior, it’s a matter of cooked versus fresh. If you want raw or lightly steamed broccoli, that’s not going to happen with a can. On the other hand, the can of broccoli will be there waiting for you years into the future without power-consuming refrigeration or freezers. Canned foods tend to be cheaper not because they’re lower quality but because it’s usually prepared near the farm, doesn’t need refrigerated transport, and doesn’t have to be rushed to the market before it spoils. There’s also less waste that has to be refrigerated and rushed to the market. How much of a broccoli head’s mass amd volume do you actually use? A third? The rest goes in the trash but you paid for all of it to come to you fresh.

If you consider the can itself, it’s made of steel, which is cheap, abundant, and non-polluting in a landfill. Unlike plastics, steel is easily recycled but hardly anyone does because steel is so cheap. If you look at the big picture, canned foods make a lot of sense.

Provisioning for Thanksgiving


Are you planning to host a Thanksgiving dinner? Do you know how much food to buy? Planning out a Thanksgiving dinner can be challenging. Since the Thanksgiving holiday is about plenty, you want to avoid running short. This can lead to making way too much food and eating leftovers for two weeks. Below are a few tips to help you.

I’m a retired engineer. I switched to the food preparation business ten years ago and can’t help but bring my engineering mindset with me. I study and learn every technique I can and study the chemistry of cooking. While I frequently cook things that I make up on the spot, for anything serious I like to have numbers and measurements. Below are some numbers you can use.

A Thanksgiving Spread

Turkey: 1 pound of bird (uncooked) per person, and you will have leftovers.

Dry mix stuffing like Stove-Top: 1 ounce dry mix per person

Potatoes for mashing: 6 oz (raw) per person or 3/4 of a large potato

Sweet potatoes: 6 oz (raw) per person

Canned cranberry sauce: 4 oz per person

Pie: 1 piece per person

Butternut squash: 7 oz (raw whole squash) per person

Brussels sprouts: 2.5 oz (raw) per person

Green beans: 4 oz (canned) per person

Extending the Above to 40 Persons

To extend the above numbers, multiply by the number of guests and round up to the next package size. Thanksgiving usually involves a lot of baking. If you try to prepare all the food on Thanksgiving day, you’ll need several ovens. Remember that cooking the turkeys will occupy your oven(s) for much of the day. Prepare as much as you can the day(s) before and reheat it.

Of course, you don’t have to do all of the items below. Just pick the items you think your guests will like. You don’t have to do squash and sweet potatoes, or offer three different vegetables. These are just examples.

Turkey: 40 pounds. So four 10 pounders, three 14 pounders, etc.

Dry mix stuffing: 40 ounces dry, so seven boxes. A lot of people go heavy on stuffing and it’s cheap and easy, so having extra won’t hurt. I’ve found the in-house brands like Walmart are just as good as the big name product and cost half as much.

Potatoes for mashing: 240 ounces raw. So 15 pounds of russets, peeled, cooked, mashed, and prepared as you like with milk, butter, salt, pepper, garlic, etc.

Sweet potatoes: 240 raw ounces. So 15 pounds prepared as you prefer.

Canned cranberry sauce: 160 ounces, so ten or twelve 14 oz cans. These could be split between cranberry jelly and whole cranberry sauce. Some people like one and not the other.

Pie: 40 pieces. For big pieces you’ll need seven pies, smaller pieces, 5 pies.

Butternut squash: 280 oz raw whole squash (17 pounds)

Brussels sprouts: 100 oz raw (6-1/4 pounds)

Green beans: 160 oz (canned), so ten or twelve 14 oz cans. When cooking raw whole beans, I figure six beans per person. A pound of raw beans is 35 to 40 beans. For 40 guests you need to cook about six pounds.

Conclusion

You can save money by buying larger cans. In supermarkets, verify that the larger container is actually cheaper. Many times I’ve seen a gallon jar of mayonnaise or other product priced higher than buying the same amount in several smaller jars.

Larger towns have stores that sell wholesale foods to churches and other organizations, and sometimes to the public. Here you can buy Number 10 cans (institutional size) that contain around 115 ounces, and save even more money.

Understanding Whipped Cream

I use cream for cooking and also make whipped cream for desserts, a quart at a time, about once a day. Sometimes I make it several times a day. These are sweetened with sugar and flavored with vanilla, sometimes banana, lemon, or chocolate.

Doing this for years with a hand mixer, I’ve noticed big differences between brands and types of cream. My favorite that I use the most is Glenville Farms Heavy Cream. It whips fast, becomes very stiff, and is stable. You can quickly ice a cake with it and it stays put. It never creeps or sags. This cannot be said of any other brands I’ve tried, and I’ve tried all kinds.

If you make things with whipped cream, you might like to know why Glenville is the best I’ve found and what to look for. Cream is cream, right? It’s the stuff at the top of raw milk. Not exactly. It varies.

What varies is the fat content. The higher the fat, the faster it will whip and the more stiff and stable it will be. Fat is expressed as a percentage. Finding out the percentage can be challenging because it’s usually not printed on the carton or bottle.

The minimum fat content needed for it to whip at all is 30 percent. Some brands get by with even less by adding a thickening agent like carrageenan. Look for it in the ingredients. You can recognize this as it flows out of the bottle as a very thick gloppy liquid. Real cream is thick but still flows smoothly like a liquid. The result of low-fat-content cream will be okay for some purposes but will be soft, light, less stable, less flavorful. This is often labeled “whipping cream”. A better result occurs with fat content of 37 to 38 percent and this often labeled “heavy cream”. Glenville has 40 percent and its superiority is evident in the result and flavor.

I was going to publish a list comparing different brands, but accurate info is difficult to get hold of, so I decided not to, for now. What I found, however, was something to beware of if you are a dieter or paying close attention to nutrition. I found that several nutrition sites on the web do not show accurate information. Some sites allow you to search products by brand and type. I found that the information they publish for all brands and types of cream is identical. They just copy-pasted the exact same information on every brand and type — the same calories per tablespoon, the same grams of fat per 15 ml. We know that’s not true.

No Chocolate, Potatoes, or Tomatoes in Europe?

If you took a trip to 16th Century Europe, you could meet or see Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Martin Luther, Charles V, Henry VIII, and many other fascinating people from that period. But, you’d also be shocked by many things, especially everyone’s diet.

Michaelangelo never tasted marinara sauce on his pasta because tomatoes were unknown in Italy. No Irishman, German, or Pole had ever seen a potato. No German, Swiss, or Frenchman had ever tasted chocolate, nor vanilla.

What? It’s true. Foods from the Americas started coming to Europe in 1493 when Columbus brought bell pepper seeds and a few others. But it took decades for these to become noticed and spread. Some items like tomatoes took a long time to catch on. It was believed that tomatoes were poisonous until a Frenchman demonstrated that they were not. Cortez first learned of chocolate from Moctezuma in 1520.

European Diet

Fundamental to Italian cuisine are the fagioli soups. Fagioli means beans — the common bean like navy, kidney, black, lima, northern, and pinto. There were none of those in Europe, just fava beans. Nor was there corn, squashes, yams, strawberries or pineapples — no peanuts, so no peanut butter — no zucchini, pumpkins, avocados, or cashew nuts.

There were no hot chili peppers in Europe. The only hot spices were pepper, mustard, and horseradish. But what about Asia? The Chinese and Indians love chili peppers. Chili peppers were brought there from the Americas by European sailors, and they became extremely popular. In fact, chili peppers found their way to Europe from the Americas, to India, then to England. There were no bell peppers either, of any color.

There was no white or brown sugar, just honey for sweetening. No Englishman puffed on a pipe, nor did any Frenchman smoke a cigarette — tobacco was unknown. No green beans, tapioca, papaya, guava, passion fruit, cranberries, sunflowers, pecans, allspice, or chicle (chewing gum).

The European diet was bland. Nourishment came from breads, pasta, grains and meat porridges, apples, pears, berries, beer, eggs, fish, and dairy foods. There was no coffee at this time either, although coffee came from Arabia, not the Americas.

Sound boring? It was. Most of the foods for which European countries are famous like Swiss chocolate, and Irish potatoes, were introduced in the past 400 years. Yet, most people I know think that potatoes came from Ireland.

Negative Side Effects

I find it interesting to observe the effects of introducing new food sources to a place. We’ve all heard of the great impact of the Irish Potato Famine. How did that happen?

The potato was brought to Europe in 1536 and was spread by seafarers to the rest of the world. It quickly became a staple food crop in Europe. It was so successful at feeding the people of Ireland that it touched off a population explosion, resulting in hordes of Irish immigrants to North America. By 1800 it was not unusual for an Irishman to eat an astonishing ten pounds of potatoes a day! Many Irish were literally surviving on potatoes.

For over 7,000 years, the Indians of South America cultivated more than a thousand varieties of potato. But the lack of genetic diversity in Europe left the potato vulnerable to various diseases. One potato disease known as Late Blight, caused by a fungus-like oomycete called Phytophthora infestans, was responsible for the Great Irish Potato Famine of 1845. It spread rapidly in western Ireland and resulted in widespread crop failures. More than a million Irish died of hunger and 1.5 million more emigrated to the United States, resulting in a huge increase in demand for the potato in the USA.

So, introducing a great source of nutrition to a region triggers a population explosion. This makes sense. And, it happened again. Africa never had an overpopulation problem before. What happened?

Corn was domesticated from a wild plant called teosinte more than 7,000 years ago in Central America. Corn is fundamental to the Mayan creation myth and is considered a sacred plant. The ears of the wild teosinte plant were small but years of domestication resulted in larger plants and larger ears of corn. Corn spread throughout the Americas. Popcorn was invented by North American Indians. Corn was brought to Europe as a curiosity by the first explorers and Europeans were not much interested in it. However in Africa, it spread quickly, and together with the peanut and cassava from the Americas, completely transformed the diet of much of Africa. The productivity and nutritional value of these foods resulted in a rapid rise in population in Africa, similar to the effect of the potato on Ireland.

Another negative side-effect came from the introduction of tobacco. In the Americas, tobacco was smoked in moderation, often associated with religious or other ceremonies. In Europe, and throughout the world, it became a highly addictive drug, smoked excessively, resulting in millions of premature deaths.

Lastly

To finish off the list of foods from the Americas, we have turkeys, brazil nuts, prickly pear, huckleberries, annatto (achiote), and maple syrup.

Lastly, although not foods, many other important substances came from the Americas such as rubber, mahogany, hickory, cochineal dye (Natural Red Dye #4), and logwood. Logwood was a very important commodity, driving politics, economics, and piracy in the Caribbean until the invention of aniline dyes in the 19th Century.

If you plan to travel by time-machine to Europe of the past, be prepared for extremely disappointing dining.

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