Food safety and home-preserved figs

Home food preservation can make people ill when it is done wrong, and figs need more care than most jam fruits because they are low in acid. This page explains how we approach that on this site.

Our rule

We publish our own experience freely: how we pick, cut, cook and test. For anything that affects safety, meaning acid additions, headspace, processing method and processing times, we follow tested recipes from the organisations below and link to them rather than restating numbers we cannot stand behind. Where a page on this site describes canning, it will say which tested recipe it follows.

Sources we rely on

• The National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia publishes USDA-based tested procedures, including for fig preserves and jam.¹
• The USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning is the underlying reference for most tested recipes in the United States.²
• Cooperative extension programmes at land-grant universities publish and adapt the same guidance and often answer local questions.
• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets govern any food we would eventually sell, which is a separate matter from home preserving.

What this means in practice

• Figs for boiling-water canning need added acid, in the amount a tested recipe specifies.¹
• A recipe from a cookbook, a blog or a family notebook is not a tested recipe unless it says which tested procedure it follows.
• Refrigerator jam that is never processed for shelf storage sidesteps most of these issues but must be kept cold and used within a few weeks.
• If a sealed jar is bulging, leaking, spurting or smells wrong, do not taste it.

About our own jam

We are not currently licensed to sell food. Anything on this site about our jams describes what we make at home. If and when we sell jam, it will be produced under the applicable New York regulations, and this page will be updated to say so.