How does home canning work?
Below I talked a bit about what the canning process does to rid a jar of micro-critters, but the physics of how canning works is every bit as interesting. Wait — where are you going? There’s no need to…what do you mean you’d rather be water skiing? Don’t hit that quit button, I was just starting to… I’ll be serving Ovaltine later! Dang. Just us nerds again. Oh well, at least I won’t feel self-conscious wearing my pocket protector. But I’m not lying when I say that canning is interesting stuff. As you probably already know from having received a jar of home made jam or fuit preserves before, a home canning rig consists of three parts: a jar, a flat lid with a rubber lining on the underside and a screw-on metal ring that holds the lid on while the jar is in the canner. The way it works is as follows. Once the jar is placed in the boiling water canner, it begins to absorb heat. That heat soon creates steam in the inside of the jar in the “head space” or air gap between the food and th
