Q. Fresh green beans are out of season and are very expensive at the moment. Have you ever heard of using [...]]]> Ask the Goats is an occasional Monday feature in which we attempt to answer your questions about growing, making, eating, and preserving food. Got a question for the goats? Drop us a line at dorisandjilly@gmail.com.

Q. Fresh green beans are out of season and are very expensive at the moment. Have you ever heard of using frozen for something like canned four-bean salad? They would already have been blanched. I’m guessing they would need to be dried well after thawing first but other than that would they work?—Natalia

Q. Just a question…can pickled three-bean salad then be frozen?—Shana

A. The answer to both questions is yes. But why would you?

Let’s take Shana first. I’m not entirely sure whether you wanted to freeze a fresh or canned four-bean salad, but neither strikes me as a particularly good idea. Fresh vegetables with vinegar in them do not, in general, freeze well. And if you’re talking about freezing a jar of pickled three-bean salad that you’ve opened, the resulting texture is going to be very sad. Remember, you’ve already simmered these beans in a vinegar solution and subjected them to 15 minutes in a boiling-water bath. Any remaining crispness is going to be obliterated by freezing. If you can’t finish your jar of three-bean salad in one sitting, rest assured that it will keep open in your refrigerator for at least a week. After all, it’s pickled.

On to Natalia. It’s the same problem, only in reverse. The texture of frozen green beans is not great to begin with. Although I haven’t personally tried it, I would guess that a canned four-bean salad that included frozen green beans would be very limp indeed. But I’m still having a hard time imagining why you would want to do this, since frozen green beans are already preserved. As Natalia herself points out, green beans are out of season. If you’re already buying frozen green beans anyway, why not just thaw out as much as you can consume at any given time? Why go through the time and effort of preserving something that’s already preserved?

I actually went back to Natalia on this very issue, and her answer made me reconsider. First, she cited cost—but that doesn’t answer the “why-bother-canning-them” question. More to the point, she said, “It’d be something I could can off season, not in the rush and heat of summer, and have available to eat from a jar this winter.” And that’s when I realized that I have, of course, done this very thing with frozen fruits, and even blogged about it here, and that it was more than a little hypocritical of me to chastise Natalia for canning green beans off-season. On more than one occasion, faced with a counter full of freshly picked strawberries, blueberries, or cherries, I’ve decided to stash the extras in the freezer and deal with them in the winter. Other people have told me that they enjoy off-season canning as a way to sharpen their food preservation skills, the better to face the onslaught of summer produce.

So, Natalia, you have my apologies. That being said, I still wouldn’t can a four-bean salad from frozen green beans, unless they’re your own. I think the texture will be disappointing, and if you end up tossing the results, you’ve negated the cost savings from buying frozen in the first place. If you find it more convenient to can a four-bean salad in winter than in summer, at least go with fresh green beans. And if you just want off-season canning practice, I recommend working with something where the texture is less critical, like a jam made with frozen fruit. Better yet, explore what you can do with the remaining produce that’s still available. You could make applesauce, or any number of pickled carrot thingies, or lemon curd.

How do you feel about off-season canning? Do you oppose it in principle? Endorse it only for things that come out of your own food preservation stash (root cellaring, freezing, etc.)? Love it for time management?

Q. Last week I canned a few quarts of crushed and whole tomatoes. I thought I had done everything correctly, including [...]]]> Ask the Goats is a weekly feature in which we attempt to answer your questions about growing, making, preserving, and eating food. Got a question for the goats? Drop us a line at dorisandjilly@gmail.com.

Q. Last week I canned a few quarts of crushed and whole tomatoes. I thought I had done everything correctly, including allowing proper headspace in my jars. However, after processing some of the jars leaked  some of their juices while cooling.  At first I was concerned, but it seemed that the jars had sealed properly so I cleaned them and put them away.  I checked on the jars yesterday and found that the two quarts of crushed tomatoes had leakage signs.  I tossed them out

A: Ah, siphoning—the canner’s bane. The problem you’ve described is fairly typical, especially in pressure canning (see this earlier Ask the Goats on a related problem). Whether you’re water-bath canning or pressure canning, the cause is the same: a sudden change in temperature or pressure can cause trapped air in the jars to suddenly expand, forcing liquids out. In a pressure canner, you can reduce the chance of the problem by leaving the jars to cool in the canner, but obviously, this strategy won’t work in the water-bath. What you can do is turn off the heat and take off the lid when the processing time is done, then wait five minutes. This cools things down a bit and reduces the chance that you’ll get siphoning without overcooking the product too much. I had never noticed this before your question, but it’s actually the strategy recommended in many canning books, including the Ball Blue Book and Put ‘Em Up.

The main danger from siphoning is that it can interfere with your seal. If this is the case, refrigerate or reprocess them. Depending on their contents, you might even be able to add more liquid before trying again. If you do get a seal, the jars are safe, but you’ll want to eat them first, as they’ll be more prone to oxidation. Again, this isn’t a safety issue, but a quality issue.

As for preventing the problem in the first place: siphoning is much more likely to happen in liquid-y products (peaches in  light syrup, pickled peppers, tomatoes in water, etc.) than in thick, gloppy canned goods (jams, chutneys, relishes). Be sure to remove air bubbles, and watch that headspace. Then cross your fingers, spin three times, and hum.

When you first asked me this, I thought it was an easy question. So easy, in fact, that I planned on conducting a little kitchen experiment to document both the reaction and its counter-reaction. But things didn’t work out that way, [...]]]> Sometimes garlic turns blue when I cook it. Why? Is it safe to eat?

(Andrew, Philadelphia)

When you first asked me this, I thought it was an easy question. So easy, in fact, that I planned on conducting a little kitchen experiment to document both the reaction and its counter-reaction. But things didn’t work out that way, as I’ll explain below. But first, let’s answer your question. The simplest answer is that garlic contains a set of pigments known as anthocyanins. Under certain conditions, the anthocyanins appear blue-green. They are harmless to eat, and may even go away depending on what you do to the dish next. Harold McGee explained his take on this in his inaugural “Curious Cook” column in the New York Times:

I hear every year from cooks who have been alarmed at seeing normally pale garlic turn bright green and even blue, sometimes when the cloves are pickled whole, sometimes when they’re chopped and cooked with other ingredients. I’d often been puzzled by little blue-green specks when I made garlic bread with loaves of sourdough, but I was really rattled the first time I puréed raw garlic, onion and ginger together in a blender to make chicken in yogurt from Madhur Jaffrey’s “Invitation to Indian Cooking.” When I fried the purée the entire mass turned turquoise blue.

I asked a couple of Indian friends who happen to be plant biologists whether they knew what was going on. They said they had never seen the blue purée, because Indian cooks don’t grind onions and garlic together. They grind or chop them separately and usually fry the onions first. . . .

According to chemists at the China Agricultural University in Beijing, aging the garlic gives it a chance to accumulate large quantities of one of the chemicals that generate the color; fresh garlic doesn’t green much at all. And a strong green color develops in Laba garlic only with acetic acid, the main acid in vinegar (also found in sourdough), because it’s especially effective at breaching internal membranes and mixing the cell chemicals that react together to create the green pigment. The pigment itself turns out to be a close chemical relative of chlorophyll, which gives all green leaves their color.

Two recent reports from the House Foods Corporation in Japan detail exactly how the garlic and garlic-onion pigments develop. Their creators are the same handful of sulfur compounds and enzymes that give the allium family its unique pungent flavors. Under the right conditions these chemicals react with each other and with common amino acids to make pyrroles, clusters of carbon-nitrogen rings. These rings can be linked together into multipyrrole molecules.

The ring structures absorb particular wavelengths of light, and thus appear colored. The two-pyrrole molecule looks red, the three-pyrrole molecule looks blue and the four-pyrrole molecule looks green, as does its cousin tetrapyrrole, the chlorophyll molecule. Like chlorophyll, all the pyrrole pigments are perfectly safe to eat.

Now, I was familiar with the explanation that says that the blue-green apparance is more likely to take place in acid environments. In my own experience I noted that garlic only tends to turn blue when cooked in lemon juice, usually in a metal pan. In fact, the anthocyanin/acid relationship is so strong that you can actually use some vegetables—the classic is red cabbage—as a home pH meter. (You can learn more about the chemistry of red cabbage color changes in this episode of Distillations, a chemistry podcast.)

It was with all of this in mind that I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. If acid turns garlic blue, shouldn’t baking soda, a base, turn it back? So for you, dear readers, I attempted to conduct a scientific experiment.

First I added lemon juice to minced garlic in a glass bowl. Nothing happened.
I transferred the contents to a metal pan. Nothing happened.
I heated it up, thinking maybe the reaction needed a jump start. Still nothing happened.
I added white vinegar, thinking maybe my lemons weren’t strong enough. Nothing happened.
We ate dinner, giving the garlic and acid time to get to know each other. Still no blue.

At this point, I did some additional research and learned that garlic actually turns blue for two reasons. Certainly the anthocyanins are the main culprit. But garlic also contains a lot of sulfate that, when combined with copper, creates copper sulfate, an insoluble, bright turquoise compound. (Again: still fine to eat.) Apparently the trace amounts of copper in water and other foods can be enough to trigger the reaction.

So, I added water. Still no blue.

More research: what food stuffs have high proportions of copper, I wondered? Leafy green vegetables, like kale, chard, and spinach, and certain nuts, like sesame seeds.

I dumped a big pile of sesame seeds into the pot and kept cooking. At this point the kitchen smelled terrible. But still no blue.
Table salt, perhaps, with its iodine content? No go.

This went on and on for about an hour before I finally gave up. So while I can certainly tell you what turns garlic blue, I cannot tell you whether you can turn it back by adding baking soda. If it happens to you, give it a try, and let me know.

Well, Jilly. No, you really shouldn’t do this. I tried, and it’s the only time that I have been frightened [...]]]> Q: All of the pressure cooker instruction books say that you shouldn’t cook split peas in your pressure cooker. But Doris, you told me you did! What happened? Is it safe?

(a conversation between Doris and Jilly)

Well, Jilly. No, you really shouldn’t do this. I tried, and it’s the only time that I have been frightened when using the pressure cooker. This happened:

I put the split peas and their broth in the cooker, and everything was going swimmingly. The regulator was rocking, it was hissing—no problem. But suddenly I noticed that the jiggling stopped. The pressure cooker became very, very quiet. Suspecting what had happened, I immediately turned off the heat and waited. After about 30 seconds, the cooker made a horrible sound and split pea mash started emerging from the underside of the regulator. It didn’t actually explode, but had I not turned off the heat, it’s hard to say what might have happened.

So, kids, it turns out that the instructions are correct: it is not safe to cook split peas in the pressure cooker. They foam, and the foam clogs the vent. Pressure can’t escape and you’ve got yourself a ticking time bomb. However (!), you can still prepare them in the pressure cooker, but—and this is a big but—you must enclose them in a separate pan. Simply put your split peas and broth in a small, heatproof bowl, cover it securely with foil, and place it on the steaming rack. Add 2 cups of water to the cooker and cook as you normally would (about 5 minutes should be plenty). This is the same procedure that we used for steaming the barley. All set!

One more thing: this accident was averted because I was in the kitchen and noticed that it stopped jiggling. Never leave your pressure cooker unattended.

Yes! If you had [...]]]> Q: I tried canning chicken stock, and followed the directions on your blog, but the lids made the “pop” sound as soon as I poured the liquid in and seemed to seal (I hadn’t heated them up yet). Then I processed them. Is this OK? Are the jars safe to eat?

(from Christina, Philadelphia)

Yes! If you had hot liquid, and cold (or even room temperature) jars, it’s possible that you could create a vacuum just by putting on the lids. As the liquid cools, the volume of the air inside decreases, and you get a good, clean seal. This is the same thing that normally happens after you process the jars—it just happened early. When you put the jars into the pressure cooker and crank up the heat, the contents will expand once again, so you’ll still need to check that the jars have sealed once your done.

Just to clarify: you do need to process the jars, even if they’ve sealed, because you need to kill the bacteria with high heat.

One more  side note: I’ve seen Christina’s pressure cooker, and while it’s certainly safe to use, it’s a little scary to can with. This is because there is no visual indicator that tells you whether the canner is at pressure once you’ve turned off the heat. It does have a lock, so there’s no chance that you can accidentally open it, but there’s also no way to tell when it’s safe to go in. When you can liquids in a pressure cooker, the general recommendation is that you wait at least 10 minutes after the pressure has dissapated before opening the lid, as the contents of the jars may still be bubbling when the indicator falls. If you have a pressure cooker like this, the answer is simply to wait. There’s no harm in letting them sit there all afternoon, if necessary. Better safe than sorry!

I’m so glad you asked. Like they say on Facebook, it’s complicated. The short answer is yes, BUT only in a pressure canner. Beans are the classic low-acid botulism-breeding food. [...]]]> Q: I make a lot of black bean soup but don’t have much room in my freezer. Can I can it?

(Another one from Doris’s co-worker J)

I’m so glad you asked. Like they say on Facebook, it’s complicated. The short answer is yes, BUT only in a pressure canner. Beans are the classic low-acid botulism-breeding food. Even in a soup packed with tomatoes, lime juice, and salt, it’s still not safe to can a bean soup in a water bath. If you have a pressure canner, though, can away.

As always, you’ll need clean pint or quart Mason jars, new lids, and clean rings. Rather than re-hash all the canning steps, I’m going to refer you to the chicken broth post where we cover important steps like heating the lids and venting the pressure cooker. Assuming you’re following the basic canning procedures, you’ll do the following:

1) Prepare your soup and keep it hot.
2) Transfer the soup into the jars and screw on the lids.
3) Put your jars into the pressure cooker, along with 2 quarts of boiling water.
4) Vent the steam for 8 minutes.
5) At sea level, using 10 lbs of pressure, process pints for 65 minutes or quarts for 75 minutes. If you’re more than 1,500 feet above sea level, use 15 lbs of pressure.

Honestly, at 75 minutes processing time, it might be more energy efficient to buy a bigger freezer. But if you don’t have room or are preparing for a future without electricity, this is a good solution. Thanks to the good folks at the National Center for Home Food Preservation for their tips on canning vegetables.

(Courtsey J, one of Doris’s co-workers)

Friends, it is time to examine a dairy product you may be lacking in your life. [...]]]> Welcome to the first installment of our new weekly feature, Ask the Goats!

Q: Tell me more about creme fraiche. It seems expensive. What’s all the fuss about? Is there a version I can make myself?

(Courtsey J, one of Doris’s co-workers)

Friends, it is time to examine a dairy product you may be lacking in your life. Creme fraiche is like sour cream’s fancy kissin’ cousin. It tends to be a little thinner and more tangy than our sour American version. However, there are two worlds to creme fraiche. The first one is the true, authentic (and expensive ) product of thick, unpasteurized fresh cream that is left to thicken and mature with its own proper lactic cultures. It is generally pricey and sometimes quite difficult to obtain since it requires raw cream. (However, you can order it from the Vermont Butter and Cheese Company.)

Our version of creme fraiche should always be identified as to its origins: a mock version that is easily made it at home with heavy cream, buttermilk, and time. Obviously, if you have lovely local, raw and organic dairy products on hand, use those. But you can very easily make this with corner store ingredients.

Here’s what you do:

Stir about 2 tablespoons of buttermilk into 1 cup of heavy cream. Place in a warm area, say near a pilot light, wood stove, or on top of your refridgerator–you’re looking for a home of about 85 degrees. Cover loosely and leave for at least 8 hours. The amount of time it takes to thicken and sour slightly will depend on the temperature and quality of the buttermilk you are using.

Why isn’t this real creme fraiche? If you’re pouring your cream and buttermilk  from a carton that says “pasteurized” or “ultra-pasteurized” you’re miles away from the real deal simply because your product is barren of wild and tasty lactic cultures that are swimming around in the raw dairy product. Another important difference between the two is that real creme fraiche will tolerate cooking and gentle heating and retain its thickening powers. Mock creme fraiche lacks this ability and is poorly suited for dessert slathering and sauce thickening. It is, however, great for drizzling over special bruschetta, starchy things like potatoes, or adding to a  composed dessert bowl thing (like fresh berries topped with crumbled streudel bits…)