My mother and I recently canned a vegetable stew. She swears by the oven canning method and so we did that. We kept everything hot from the stew, to the jars (kept hot in the oven before canning) and then placing them back into the oven at 350 C for another 30 min. My question is, why is this method not recommended even with everything being consistently hot? I would imagine everything would be killed off.
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The recommended method for canning vegetables is pressure canning. Oven canning is not recommended. Botulism could develop with your method. Discard this stew for the sake of your health and invest in a pressure canner.
nchfp.uga.edu/
Here are two links that talk about why the oven method is not a good idea. The uneven temperatures is the biggest reason...this means that some of the food could be dangerous to consume because it wasn't heated correctly.
Having gotten sick from something canned the right way and still was a fail, I encourage people to can safely, follow recipes exactly and to follow only approved canning methods.
SAFETY FIRST!!! I would not eat anything canned in this method so you may want to discard what was canned this way.
If it hasn't been long, just dump in bags and freeze if you are worried.
This method is a thing of the past and sometimes we all have to rethink what we believe to be tried and true and perhaps never failed us in the past (?).
It is probably true that your mother has never known of anyone to get sick due to eating food canned by this method but that does not mean it could not happen with what you have just prepared.
Apparently there were cases of food poisoning and this method was deemed the culprit (CDC) so after many trials of this and other methods it was found that canning in the oven was many times not safe and this method should not be used.
Please convince your mother that if you intend to do canning in the future to please purchase proper canning equipment so there will be no danger of botulism (if instructions are followed properly).
I'm sorry if your food has to be discarded but most likely; someone will eat some of it just to prove that it is safe - if that does happen - I hope it is..
I see no reason not to oven can DRY foods. The point of a pressure canner is that you can achieve a higher boiling point for liquids. Under 10psi you will increase the temperature to around 240 degrees. You cannot achieve that in an oven since there is no pressure and liquid boilsat around 212 based on atmospheric pressure.
However for dry ingredients you certainly can achive 240 or higher in an oven. The other issue is that water is denser than air so transfer of heat is better, but this can be overcome by adding time. They also claim temperature fliufuation is greater which is also true since the thermocouple used to turn the oven on and off turns heat into low voltage must hit the lower limit to turn the element or gas back on. But again simply using a probe thermometer to see how your oven performs and putting the temp as high as you need to keep the lower limit above the temp required.
So for dry ingredients with a little thought put into the process it would be completely safe.
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