Canning Pumpkin Butter: Safety Issues

At a glance..

If you have ever wanted to make homemade pumpkin butter and squash, this valuable resource details the safety issues surrounding canning pumpkin butter.

The details..

"Canning Pumpkin Butter and Mashed or Pureed Squashes" is a guide that focuses on the safety issues surrounding home canning of pumpkin products. The author, Elizabeth L. Andress, Ph.D., explains why it is not recommended to can pumpkin butter or any mashed/pureed pumpkin/winter squash based on studies conducted in the past few decades.

The book highlights some critical factors such as viscosity, acidity, water activity etc., which are essential for ensuring safe canned pumpkin products. However, there is too much variation among different batches of prepared pumpkin purees to permit calculation of a single processing recommendation that would cover potential variations among products.

Recent research with pumpkin butter has been done at the University of Missouri where pH values seemed to be extremely variable between batches made by same formulation raising serious safety concerns.

In conclusion, this book recommends freezing instead of home-canning these types of products due to insufficient data available regarding their safe processing times under varying conditions.