Why is it when you are old people think you know things?

Cause we do! ;) But most the time the youngsters won't admit it.

Freezing vs. Canning is kind of an apples and oranges thing. They are not mutually exclusive and I would argue that they should never be seen as such.

There is a very big role for both in food preservation, and each has foods it best serves and foods it ruins. Some foods MUST be frozen and cannot be safely canned, and vice-versa. Some foods MUST be canned because trying to freeze them destroys their texture and taste.

So what sort of foods is she planning to preserve?

Plus there is the taste bud factor. Frozen foods taste very different from canned foods. Some prefer one or the other but no one likes both - the many discussions here about frozen green beans vs. canned green beans is an example.

And there is canning and then there is pressure canning - 2 very different things too. Many folks do BWB canning (fruits, jams, jellies) and freezing but pressure canning opens up a whole other world of food preservation - vegetables and mixed ingredient recipes that can ONLY be pressure canned.

The power and shelf life argument: canned food safely stores much longer (years) than frozen food and you don't lose everything if the power goes out. Freezing is less time consuming than canning

I'd suggest she spend some time reviewing the many guidelines and recipes provided by the National Center and compare the instructions there to the types of foods she thinks she wants to preserve. In some cases, the safety issues will dictate which approach she has to use, other foods will be optional but best recommended, and some won't make any difference except for storage times.

Dave

Here is a link that might be useful: National Center for Home Food Preservation

I agree completely with digdirt....but I will add another thought... Let's take green beans for instance...you can dry them, can them, or freeze them , oh and pickle them and in the end you get different products...Now I like having dried things just because...and I toss them in soup etc and love the taste especially tomatoes...I freeze them and they are close enough to fresh that I love them this way and after blanching and freezing, they need very little cooking basically just practically reheating them...and then there is the canned green bean...a whole different taste...but I grew up eating my Mothers canned green beans and I just love love love them so I like to can some too. Experience will teach her which she and her family likes best and if she follows the guidelines suggest by Dave...she'll learn fast.

Most of us who do a lot of food preservation aren't mutually exclusive on either canning for freezing. Like said, it depends on preference, space, time and what method produces the results you want. I prefer canning to freezing for as much product as possible, because often canning has a longer shelf life and canned foods are cooked and therefore quicker to prepare. I simmer my canned green beans for fifteen minutes for safety, and they're done. If I start from frozen, I spend more time preparing the meal.

I freeze beef, but often also can some for the same reason. If I am making beef and noodles, I only have to cook the beef and broth for safety purposes and the meal is ready as soon as the noodles finish. If I start from scratch with frozen beef, the meal takes an afternoon to prepare.

Calliope,
If you used current guidelines and properly canned your food, why are you boiling it ? There is no need to do so. If it is canned safely, then it is safe to open the jars and eat it right from the jars.

I don't do it for acid foods, I've boiling water bathed but I do for pressure canned low acid foods. In which case they're either vegetables I'd cook anyway, or meats I'd cook anyway.
Yes, if you properly pressure can your food it should be safe, but think of it this way...the act of reheating it for a certain length of time breaks down botulism toxin and kills the organism. The surviving spores pass through the body harmlessly because the conditions are aerobic. I've just never made it a habit to eat low acid foods directly from a home canning jar. Yes, I can hundreds of jars of food a year, and do it safely, but I won't bet my life on it.

Not only do I can, but I also have two full-size freezers that tend to remain pretty full. Some things I prefer canned, some frozen.

Take pork - chops and most lean cuts I freeze, but the fattier shoulders I buy on sale and freeze until I can make time for a big project. Then I work with 4 or so at a time and they are cut up and the fatter bits and leaner bits are separated. I make broth from the bones and while it chills down in the fridge I make sausage from the fattier bits of meat. It usually works out to roughly 50/50 lean to fatty meat.

The next day I defat the broth. If I am going to hot-pack the lean meat, I use the broth for that; if I decide to raw-pack the broth is canned alone.

I do this with the shoulder because it is a cut that's best cooked long and slow until it's fork-tender. If I cook a shoulder it takes hours and then we are eating it for days - we tend to "lose" leftovers in the freezer. Canning it makes it a convenience food,and it can be seasoned differently each time. In this case, canning gives me the luxury of flexibility. Two days of effort yields at least two weeks worth of easy pork meals - a more than worthwhile trade off, in my book.

As others have stated, there is definitely room for both canning and freezing.

Linda, I have taken this quote from the CDC website, because I thought it might be of general interest here. My husband is a retired butcher who is rabid about food safety and although I am employed in the agricultural sector now, I am also a registered nurse and consult the CDC often for the ultimate answers if I have disease related questions and this is what they say:

"Because the botulism toxin is destroyed by high temperatures, persons who eat home-canned foods should consider boiling the food for 10 minutes before eating it to ensure safety."

I read this advise when I first started canning foods forty years ago and just have always done it for pressure canned, low acids foods. I looked this up this morning, because like anybody else, I can think I have read or understood something and be mistaken, even for forty years, LOL. I can't honestly say in the forty years I've been canning absolutely every jar I've ever canned has been perfect. Since botulism is invisible and you can't taste it, unlike seeing fur on your fruit or smelling a rank aroma, or having a lid fall off when you take it off the pantry shelf, it seems a reasonable step for one lapse in judgment when canning something like chickens or potatoes.

calliope I do the same thing and truthfully...I do it for canned vegetables from the market as well.

Calliope,
I am a Master Food Preserver/Food Safety Advisor. I teach food preservation classes through my local Univ. extension. This is part of the instruction we teach. Years ago it was said to boil the food before eating, but now if you have properly processed it, you do not need to do so.
The newest guideline is to do so with only questionably processed foods. If it was questionable to begin with, I would toss it, not try to boil and eat it.
One example would be tomatoes that had been processed and no added acid added to each jar. That would be a "questionable" food. As you said, since it is undetectable, I would not risk opening those jars in that situation, but would toss them.

I don't doubt your credentials, Linda and respect them. Yes, I agree if food is properly preserved there is no danger. What I am getting at, is we are humans, and there is always a chance that a clump of something is too large, a pH is off, you looked at your timer wrong and underprocessed......and not even know you did this. I'm not quoting a forty year old cookbook. I'm quoting the Center for Disease Control. They don't make it a habit of using four decade old information. They're the epitome of information on disease as far as I'm concerned, and that's why I bothered to check to see what they say.

I'm not urging people to do this. I'm saying I do it. I'll always do it, regardless of what an extension department says. There is nothing at all wrong in erring towards caution. They're foods I normally will reheat anyway. I keep up with all the newest canning suggestions, that's one reason I check in here regularly.

If you feel better boiling the food, that is fine. Sure not a problem to err on the side of caution. I wish more people took this as serious of an issue.
You would not believe the crazy stories I hear !
Glad to know you are so careful with your food.
I used to boil mine, too, until a few years ago.

"You would not believe the crazy stories I hear !"

You know, I can only imagine, LOL. Do you expect to see a boom in home canners this year, because of renewed interest in gardening as a way of supplementing the food budget?

I'm another person who uses freezing, canning and dehydration, depending on the end product I want.

I can applesauce, and I freeze apples for pies sometimes, and I dehydrate some for snacks and for Elery's Mother's Apple Stack Cake.

I don't care for frozen green beans, I like them canned, so I can them.

I like cooked jams better than freezer jam, so I can those, but I like frozen asparagus better, so I freeze that.

I put a whole pig and half a cow in the freezer every year, and I always can beef stock and chicken stock for cooking, plus I can soups for my lunches while I'm at work. I like to can some beef, just because it's a fast supper, thicken the broth into gravy, add the beef chunks until hot and serve over noodles or mashed potatoes or mix in some leftover vegetables and have stew.

I do can a lot of things simply because I have two freezers but freezer space is still at a premium, plus if I lose power here in the frozen tundra it can be out for several days and sometimes I lose everything in the freezer. That's annoying and expensive....

Oh, and I use my dehydrator to make yogurt too, so it's a multi-tasker, LOL.

Annie

I freeze and dehydrate, mostly due to time constraints. I know how to can, but it usually takes me the entire night and after working all day, I seldom have patience for it. If I had the time, I would can some of the bounty.

I am into freezing veggies as opposed to canning. Pickles and tomatoes are canned, as are jams and jellies. Freezing does require blanching first. Also a good heavy weight bag for freesing is essenial. Food Saver is about the best option for packaging for the freezer. I use the FS for freezing meats and even stuff like home made breaded chicken breasts 'ah la cordon blu'. Nothing gets freezer burn that way. Peppers are dried, but it depends on the type. Sweet red peppers are great when dried and if ground up after drying offer a nice tasting paprika.

I am one of the "old ones who think they know things". However, I know things because I have changed how I preserve by keeping current with the wealth of knowledge exchanged in books, personal communiques, and wading through the internet (tossing junk as I go). More knowledgeable people than I (like scientists) figure out the why and I have to believe them because that is their job! What I did in 1975 makes me shudder when I think what could have been.

Old people who get stuck in "the way it has always been done" probably have the same furniture they had when they got married and do not own a cellphone with apps.

I am teaching my 40-ish daughter how to can, dry, freeze and tend a garden as she has lived far from me for more than 20 years but now is back "home". She was somewhat hesitant to preserve anything when I told her about botulism, fungi, bacteria, and mold, critters in dehydrated foods, let alone freezer burn, refreezing, and overly long term storage of foods (which SLOWS the decay of food but does not stop it). She actually believed that anything you buy in the store is good to eat. Then I told her about preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, and the myriad of people with allergies that have cropped up in the last 30 years when the big food companies started altering plant genes and prepackaging junk with artificial and chemical everything. If left on her own she would have to re-learn what I can condense for her from my experience and from my accumulated knowledge. She said she does not remember me being so careful with food growing up. She is right, but 25 years later so many things have changed that I have had to become more careful. I do still consume refined sugar, and like it, so I am not a rabid total naturalist, just more thoughtful about what I stuff into this old body.

Yes, I am old but I know what real whipped cream on a locally grown strawberry SHOULD taste like. It is NOT Cool-whip on a tasteless berry-thing shipped from across the country loaded with pesticide residue and only grown to be shippable, not for flavor nor for nutrition. How to preserve food starts with how it is grown - why preserve pesticides? Flavor, texture, and memories of /comfort food are important. Cooked to death homegrown green beans won't hurt you if you like them that way, but botulism home-canned in a water bath "the way it has always been done" might.

Bottom line is that you should only preserve food worth preserving, using the current guidelines developed and refined over the last 20 years, to suit how you think the flavor, texture, and ease of end use should be.

Nancy