Putting Food By - Janet Greene [12]
PFB also is stiff-necked about refreezing thawed food, especially poultry and seafood—actually, any low-acid thing that has not been thoroughly cooked. When you look at the thermometer-chart in Chapter 2, you see the range where bacteria begin to grow and where they thrive. When the package goes back into the freezer, the micro-organisms don’t die—they just become inactive. Then if that piece of food is thawed on a countertop before being cooked, and the way it finally is cooked doesn’t take care of the manifold increase of bacteria . . .
HOME-CURING PORK
Professionals should do the slaughtering of meat animals, and the carcasses should be correctly hung and bled and chilled. PFB got a letter, restrained under the circumstances, from a reader who’d followed our directions for preparing the cure, and applying it, and holding the hams and bacon properly and at 38 F/3 C. She was clear and definite about the temperature; they’d used an old refrigerator, kept a thermometer inside, and checked it often. Despite such care the meat spoiled: it discolored and a nasty liquid collected in the bottom of the container.
We took the problem to various Agriculture Department experts, all of whom agreed that our directions were correct, and they offered these reasons for the spoilage:
The carcass had not been bled immediately or fully.
The carcass had been improperly chilled. This can mean either that the flesh had been allowed to freeze to some extent, thereby making it less capable of absorbing salt; or it had not been cooled adequately and quickly enough, and so the bacterial load had increased to such an extent that the cure could not offset its progress.
Perhaps the cure had contained ingredients that are not food-grade. Standard commercial mixtures are food-grade (even though some consumers jib at the nitrites), but an ice-melting type of salt might have been introduced into the cure.
Perhaps sea salt—which could mean solar salt, dried in beds (see Chapters 5 and 20)—had been part of the cure. Even if it is food-grade and OK to ingest, apparently sea salt can contain substances that react poorly with other natural chemicals in the raw meat (of special interest, because we’d not been told this before). Salt sold commercially as solar is loaded with impurities.
5
Common Ingredients and How to Use Them
Water
There’s hardly any method of putting food by that does not involve water somewhere along the line, beginning with the first washing of raw materials, continuing to the various water-based solutions used in canning and freezing and curing—which includes brining of all sorts, to ferment or to preserve—and even extending to some steps in drying.
The most important single thing about water used in any process for preserving food is this: The water must be fresh and at least of drinking quality. A staggering number of spoilage micro-organisms are added to food by impure water. Therefore:
Don’t assume that “it’s-going-to-be-cooked-anyway” will counteract all the extra contamination. Remember that an excessive bacterial load can tax your preserving method beyond the point where it is effective. (Nor is there any sure-fire, non-toxic sterilizing substance that you can tuck into a container of food before you process it—never mind what folkloric compounds keep surfacing in descriptions of ye olde-tyme methods.)
In any step of preserving food, don’t use any water that you cannot vouch for as safe to drink. In the late 1970s an outbreak of botulism from home-canned food was traced to the soil-borne bacteria in a family’s water supply; the canning procedures were not able to deal with them.
And change wash-water often, or wash under running tap