On saturday, my wife and I canned a few bushels of apples by making applesauce. We did not, however, do a water bath afterwards – the hot contents of the sauce appeared to make a seal with the jars. Its been three days since we canned them; can the applesauce safely be reprocessed with a boiling water bath? Or do we need to write-off the jars which we did not refrigerate?
Canning applesauce – water bath after the fact
canningfood-preservation
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If you are seeing this effect after the jars have been in storage for a long period, do not eat the contents! This is a sign of botulism due to improper canning; the bacteria often (but not always) produce gas as they grow spores.
If this is happening immediately after the canning process, it is probably because you are not creating a proper vacuum seal. There are three accepted methods for doing this: Thermal exhaust, mechanical sealing (i.e. using a chamber vac) and steam displacement AKA steam injection. See the link for more information; the second two require specialized equipment, so thermal exhaust is what's normally done in a home setting.
In the thermal exhaust method, you get the contents very hot (71-82° C), which causes them to expand and release gases (air and carbon dioxide). After sealing and cooling, the subsequent contraction will create a vacuum seal. This is the most common method of home canning.
If you dump in hot brine and immediately seal the container, you are doing the opposite of this. Since the heat takes a while to distribute, you are causing this initial expansion when the jar is already closed, and this will force more gases up into the headspace and probably pop or warp the lid; if you're unlucky, it might even break the container.
Is this method safe? No. How unsafe it is depends on the acidity. Low acid foods must be processed in a pressure canner. That includes the majority of vegetables and especially garlic, peppers, etc. The main reason is botulism; the anaerobic environment is perfect for the C.botulinum bacteria, but spores cannot grow in high-acid environments with pH < 4.6. If the food is high-acid or has been acidified (i.e. pickled) then you don't need to worry, but with low-acid food you must kill all the bacteria and spores, and botulism spores are extremely heat-resistant.
In fact, they are so heat resistant that you cannot even kill them reliably in boiling water. That is why you need a pressure canner, to get the temperature all the way up to 121° C / 250° F, and you need to hold it there for at least 3 minutes. That is the only way to safely can low-acid food. Simply boiling it isn't good enough, and pouring in some boiling brine definitely isn't enough.
For high-acid foods, such as jams, a hot water bath is OK. This still involves boiling the entire jar after it's been closed, but you don't need a pressure canner. Pouring boiling liquid into a jar of cold or warm food will still not get the food up to a sufficient temperature, and even if it did, you would still need to sterilize the jar itself; that's done by boiling the whole apparatus. In this case you're not worried about botulism (since it can't grow in those conditions), but you still have to kill the other kinds of household bacteria, which don't have heat-resistant spores.
Since canning is intended to preserve the food, i.e. for long-term storage, you have to be a whole lot more careful about bacteria. You can't leave any opportunity for it to grow. Lots of people can the way your wife does and don't get sick, but it is a risky proposition, and I would strongly recommended you use safer methods, especially if guests or children are involved.
Yes, basically anything cooked will last at least a few days in the fridge.
If you want it to safely keep it longer than that, you can freeze it. It's probably best not to try to reprocess the jars though, since you don't know exactly how much water got in (and how much acid and sugar got out), so if you're unlucky it could upset the recipe enough to make them unsafe.
Best Answer
They can be reprocessed, but you will need to at least double the processing time, and you should be prepared to sacrifice one jar of preserves. If you have a pressure cooker, that is the most preferable way to go. If you don't, then a large double-boiler will do. Time your first batch of jars. As you water bath them, allow them to boil for an hour, then open one jar to check the temperature with a cooking thermometer. You need to be sure that the very center of the applesauce gets hot enough to kill bacteria. Once it reaches that temperature, keep boiling the jars for at least another twenty minutes to ensure a complete kill. Your temperature-testing jar should not be kept, so that's the one to use right away.
If, like me, you recently broke your thermometer in an unfortunate accident with a wildly enthusiastic stick-loving canine and haven't replaced it yet, water-bath your jars for at least three hours to make sure they have reached the sweet zone for temperature.