Food Preservation

What are the two basic ideas behind food preservation?

The basic ideas between food preservation is either:• To slow down the growth of disease-causing

bacteria• To kill all the bacteria in the food.

Canning• The canning is a method of preserving food in which the food is made and put in

an air-tight sealed container.

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Pickling• Pickling is the process of preserving food suing the preservative qualities of salt

combined with the preservative qualities of acid, such as vinegar. To make pickles, cucumbers are soaked in a 10% salt water brine for several days, then rinsed and stored in vinegar to preserve them for years.

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Pasteurizing• Pasteurizing is the method of preserving food (almost always liquid), what you do

is heating the liquid or food to a high enough temperature to kill certain bacteria and to disable certain enzymes.

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Chemical Food Preservation• The three classes of chemical preservatives commonly used in foods are:• Benzoates (such as sodium benzoate)• Nitrites (such as sodium nitrite)• Sulphites (such as sulphur dioxide)

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Freeze-Drying• Freeze-drying is a special form of drying that removes all moisture and has less of

an effect on a food’s taste than normal dehydration does.

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Medieval Times

• In medieval times, people had to go for long weeks and months with little or no fresh meat. They relied on salt or salt preserved meat.

The beginning of Preserving

• It goes back to 1795, in France. They wanted to solve the problem, so they offered a price of 12,000 francs to anyone who could invent a method of preserving food so the food can be fresh and remain fresh for a long period of time. In 1809, M. Appert found a method of canning and received the prize from Napoleon himself.

The Next Year

• In 1810, an Englishman, Peter Durand, used for the first time as a container a metal canister, the word can was token from canister. Durand did not know the scientific principles involved. His hand-made cans were uneconomical and made 60 a day, whereas a modern machines makes over 300 a minute. In Bermondsey, London, Donkin and Hall formed the first English canning company, which lasted as an independent firm for 54 years, they supplied the British navy with canned meat.

What happened later on…

• In 1817, a other Englishman, William Underwood, went to New Orleans to start a canning factory. At first, he wasn’t successful, but after several attempt in many places, he settled down in Boston, Massachusetts in 1819. There he founded the first food preserving firm in America. The first large-scale food preserving company was founded at Baltimore, Chesapeake Bay, by an Englishman, Thomas Kensett in 1840. Although he had been canning since 1819, he is believed that he re-invented Appert’s without knowing anything about the Frenchman’s work. As Kensett’s factory was on the coast, the products canned were mainly seafood. Fruits and Vegetables were added in addition later.