Brent
03-09-2012, 09:54 PM
I have posted several time here about how you need to keep the temperature of your canning pot below 190-195 or you'll regenerate sand. To that end I suggested a double wall water jacket canner or an improvised double boiler.
Up until this week I thought the Leader canner was infalible. We just learned otherwise. One night ran late so we left about 15 gallons of syrup in the take-off tank. The next afternoon we plugged in the canner to heat the water and started pumping the syrup through our final filter into the canner. It to more hours than we expected to bring everything up to 185, so we called it an night and bottled everything the next morning. When we got to the last bit in the canner the wife saw the tell-tale creamy streaks in the last bottle. We lifted the lid off the canner and there is it was. The entire bottom was covered with sand. Looked just like the syrup pan on the evaporator after a 6 hour boil.
In the harsh light of the kitchen, we could see all the bottles were going to have to be poured out, washed, the syrup re-filtered, pumped to the canner and rebottled. Something like 250 bottles. &^%%$# :cry:
So:
1) preheat the water in the canner before pumping in the syrup, and don't pump it in too fast of the imersion element will get the water boiling under the syrup ... and we know what that does.
2) don't leave it overnight in a hot canner ( we actually hoped we might get a bit of darkening due to "stack burn" because our syrup is always too light.)
I don't know which of the two sins contributed the most to the new sand build up, but the combination was a pretty stupid mess.
As they taught us at pilot school ..... learn from the mistakes of others, you won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Up until this week I thought the Leader canner was infalible. We just learned otherwise. One night ran late so we left about 15 gallons of syrup in the take-off tank. The next afternoon we plugged in the canner to heat the water and started pumping the syrup through our final filter into the canner. It to more hours than we expected to bring everything up to 185, so we called it an night and bottled everything the next morning. When we got to the last bit in the canner the wife saw the tell-tale creamy streaks in the last bottle. We lifted the lid off the canner and there is it was. The entire bottom was covered with sand. Looked just like the syrup pan on the evaporator after a 6 hour boil.
In the harsh light of the kitchen, we could see all the bottles were going to have to be poured out, washed, the syrup re-filtered, pumped to the canner and rebottled. Something like 250 bottles. &^%%$# :cry:
So:
1) preheat the water in the canner before pumping in the syrup, and don't pump it in too fast of the imersion element will get the water boiling under the syrup ... and we know what that does.
2) don't leave it overnight in a hot canner ( we actually hoped we might get a bit of darkening due to "stack burn" because our syrup is always too light.)
I don't know which of the two sins contributed the most to the new sand build up, but the combination was a pretty stupid mess.
As they taught us at pilot school ..... learn from the mistakes of others, you won't live long enough to make them all yourself.