If Paul Virant Cans, You Can Too II
The Paul Virant canning class at Vie restaurant in Western Springs did NOT disappoint. I was so inspired that I spent all week canning instead of blogging. The recipes covered in class were:
The most refreshing thing about the class is that Paul Virant cans restaurant style - fast, fearless, and loose. We had a woman in the class who had taken a Master Food Preserver Class at the U of I extension office that was tut tutting his methods a bit. She was well meaning and her advice is better followed by the 'better safe than sorry' types, but Virant's style is more 'gitter done' than cautious. Which isn't to say he's not safe. I do believe he is, he's just not anal. For example, every canning manual I've ever seen instructs you to fill one can at a time. Virant does all the cans at once, assembly-line style. It is much much more efficient and saves a lot of time. It also doesn't hurt anything if you work as fast as he does. I guess that's the caveat.
The class also includes lunch, which in this case was:
Although I would love for you to come to MY cooking classes, I cannot help but highly recommend Paul's class. I had a blast, the food was great, and it inspired me to whole new levels with my canning. My classes are cheaper and shorter, BTW.
- Roasted & Pickled Cherry Tomatoes
- Spicy Pickled Carrots
- Klug Farm Concord Grape Saba
- Raspberry & Bittersweet Chocolate Jam
- Milk Jam
- Rita's Poundcake (to eat with the two jams)
The most refreshing thing about the class is that Paul Virant cans restaurant style - fast, fearless, and loose. We had a woman in the class who had taken a Master Food Preserver Class at the U of I extension office that was tut tutting his methods a bit. She was well meaning and her advice is better followed by the 'better safe than sorry' types, but Virant's style is more 'gitter done' than cautious. Which isn't to say he's not safe. I do believe he is, he's just not anal. For example, every canning manual I've ever seen instructs you to fill one can at a time. Virant does all the cans at once, assembly-line style. It is much much more efficient and saves a lot of time. It also doesn't hurt anything if you work as fast as he does. I guess that's the caveat.
The class also includes lunch, which in this case was:
gunthorp chicken confit panzanella: local tomatoes, roasted croutons,It goes without saying that the lunch was delicious and showed some examples of how to utilize our new knowledge. After lunch we got a tour of Vie's canning pantry. It was like a canner's paradise in there. Pickled everything, homemade horseradish, choucroute, brandied cherries, chow chow, you name it he had it up there. I wish I'd thought to sneak a camera up there but then I'd have to deal with release forms and yada yada. Anyway trust me, it was sweeeet.
shaved onions, roasted eggplant, spanish olive oil, picked herbs
rita's poundcake, raspberry and chocolate jam, goat milk jam
07 Champalou, Vouvray, Loire Valley, France
Although I would love for you to come to MY cooking classes, I cannot help but highly recommend Paul's class. I had a blast, the food was great, and it inspired me to whole new levels with my canning. My classes are cheaper and shorter, BTW.
So much of the "safety" instructions for canning are overwrought. In the infinite-time approximation, I'd love to can all sorts of things, but in reality we only manage a batch or two of jam a year. I unashamedly use the "open kettle" method for canning jam, which all the extension safety people warn about. This is where you keep the jars in boiling water, fill them with boiling jam, put the lids on, and briefly invert them, but never "process" them in a water bath. In fact, the first time I made jam it was when my father, who is a microbiologist, was visiting me, and he's the one who showed me how to do everything.
There's this huge disconnect in food safety. We all read the warning labels on meat that says to heat to 165 F or whatever, and if you look at the kill rate versus temperature curves for any pathogenic bacteria you'll find that it takes only a couple of seconds at 165 to kill absolutely everything. But then there's the obsession with boiling everything, a full 47 degrees hotter, for an absurdly long time. Like making drinking water safe, or with canning.
There aren't any (living) bacteria in a jar that's been sitting in boiling water, nor in jam that's been boiling, and any surface (such as that of a ladle) that touches the boiling jam will heat up instantly and kill any bacteria living there. The critical questions are, how are bacteria going to get in there, and will they survive, and the answers are there aren't any, and they won't.
And I even think that standard jam, with all the sugar, won't support microbial life anyways, because the osmotic pressure on the microbes draws draws all the water out.
Of course botulism is a whole different story, because of the spores that survive boiling, but just learn the story and do the pressure canning for the low-acid stuff.
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