The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in shortages of a wide variety of necessities. Most notable has been testing equipment and protective gear for healthcare workers, as well as toilet paper and disinfectant spray. And the closing of restaurants has created a resurgence of home cooking and food preparation that has resulted in a scarcity of staples, such as yeast and flour. Those who can their own food in Mason jars have difficulty right now finding lids, those flat, round metal parts with a rubber seal. Canners can reuse jars and the rings that hold the lids in place in a water bath, but the lids seal just once and have to be new. Canning experts tell Victoria Wicks that lids are hard to find in stores right now, but even in the best of times, experienced canners know to stock up.
Victoria Wicks: Pulling hot jars of crushed tomatoes out of a water bath entails a lot of suspense. Will the tongs hold or will the jar drop and splat glass shards and tomato sauce all over the floor? If the jars land safely on the drain rack, the home canner then waits for that sound that announces the sealing of the lid. It's hard to catch because it doesn't always happen right away. Sometimes the lids are popping after the cook has left the kitchen and dozed off on the couch in front of the TV.
There are sites online, mostly blogs or chats, that tell you it's possible to reuse lids and still get a good seal. The experts say otherwise.
Megan Erickson: If you reuse the lid, you're not going to get a successful seal. They're not going to vacuum seal.
Victoria Wicks: Megan Erickson is a nutrition field specialist with SDSU Extension. She says if the lid doesn't seal, the food spoils.
Megan Erickson: It won't be able to drive out all of the air or keep all of the air out.
Victoria Wicks: Erickson says after taking jars out of the bath, the cook should let them rest for 12 to 24 hours before using one or more techniques for testing the seal.
Megan Erickson: The easiest one is press the middle of the lid with your finger. If it springs up when you release, it has not sealed.
Victoria Wicks: Here's what an unsealed lid sounds like. Erickson offers another tip.
Megan Erickson: You can tap the lid with the bottom of a spoon. If it makes a dull sound, the lid is not sealed. If it makes more of a ringing, high-pitched sound, that means the jar has sealed.
Victoria Wicks: This method is more subjective, in my subjective opinion. Here's the sound of a spoon tapping on a sealed quart of tomatoes compared with a sealed pint of peaches. Luckily, there's a third test. If you have a good eye, look at the lid. If the little center circle is slightly concave or caved in, it's sealed. If it's convex, it's not. And Erickson says you can give it another bath within 24 hours to see if that fixes it.
So what if you can't find these new lids so important to food safety? If you decide to freeze your produce instead, can you freeze it in jars to avoid using plastic bags and containers? That's a question I asked some pros at the Black Hills Farmer's Market.
The pandemic has induced some changes here. For one thing, there's no live music as there has been in recent years. So I'll provide some, courtesy of Tom Chapin.
Although the canopies are still set up on the grass in Market Park off East Omaha Street, they're spaced farther apart. This year, there are no picnic tables where people can sit and talk, and snack on lemonade and scones. And all vendors are wearing face masks, as are many of the shoppers.
One of those vendors is Sid Nachtigall, of Nachtigall's Greenhouse on South Valley Drive. The tables in his booth are covered with boxes of produce in the shades of green, gold, and red that lend the market its healthy, festive ambiance, this year subdued but still energetic. Nachtigall steps away from the booth and drops his mask to talk to me while I keep my mask on and maintain distance. He says he's had little luck finding canning lids this year.
You do a lot of canning every year?
Sid Nachtigall: We do a fair amount of canning, not as much as we used to. We're getting a little older and don't have the kids that we used to have.
Victoria Wicks: And have you found a supply anywhere? Or do you just have your last year's stuff?
Sid Nachtigall: Pretty much just our last year's stuff. I bought a whole lot of wide mouth lids up last year.
Victoria Wicks: Will you be doing freezing instead?
Sid Nachtigall: Possibly, I don't know yet. We're still looking for lids and if we do find them, then we will do a little more of the canning.
Victoria Wicks: Sid Nachtigall sells the fresh produce that his customers can take home and preserve themselves. Another vendor sells produce already processed and sealed in jars. Sheila Coad, spelled like road, watches over her table full of jars holding salsa, jams and jellies in front of a sign announcing the name of her enterprise, Sheila's Joyful Garden. She says she had the supplies she needed for this year's inventory.
Sheila Coad: Since I do have a small business, I always try to keep a lot of different supplies on hand, especially the canning lids and the rings and jars. But I have always tried to go out and find sales and I've noticed the shortage. I noticed they're missing.
Victoria Wicks: Coad says the COVID-19 pandemic is at the heart of the situation.
Sheila Coad: From what I've been told is that more and more people are canning, so that's creating part of the shortage. The other part of the shortage is coming from the manufacturing companies. They don't have their workers there to produce.
Victoria Wicks: She says she does freeze some food, whether in jars or vacuum sealed bags, but only for her family's use, not for sale.
Sheila Coad: But more and more people are using jars and your either one piece or two piece lid and ring to put right in the freezer. They're not going to break, and if you have the freezer space, of course. And a lot of upright freezers, they hold jars just like refrigerators do.
Victoria Wicks: Those of you who preserve food at home should find it fairly easy to transition from water bath canning to freezing produce in jars. Megan Erickson says Mason jars withstand the extreme temperatures involved in both methods. In the freezer, you have to leave the rings on to hold that unsealed lid in place, but last year's used lids will work, as long as there's an airtight seal. She says it's best to use wide mouth jars so it's easier to scoop out frozen food. And she says the safety measures are similar. The jars should be washed with hot, soapy water and the produce going into the jars needs to be blanched.
Megan Erickson: That's the primary method to destroy enzymes for vegetables.
Victoria Wicks: Blanching is a process of rapid heating and cooling. How long you cook the produce depends on what you're canning.
Megan Erickson: Once you've boiled it for the appropriate time, then you throw it into either a large bowl of ice water or I like to fill my sink full of ice water. And then you let it cool, and then you pack them into your containers and put in the freezer right away.
Victoria Wicks: This pandemic has been divisive and challenging, but it has also brought on a Renaissance of self-sufficiency and creativity that might carry on long after a vaccine has been found. When major cities shut down this spring, sales of flour and yeast increased by more than 600% over the year before. And when home bakers could no longer find yeast, sourdough became trendy. Faced with the scarcity of the materials we need to do it ourselves, we'll just figure out how to do it some other way. That might turn out to be better.