Hey guys!! My sister and I started canning, two days ago we made this homemade cranberry juice (I’ll link the recipe in the comments) and canned it! As soon as the cranberry juice was cooling down after the canning process we saw these weird little white guys in the juice. We have made this cranberry juice before and it’s delicious, we didn’t can it that time and we never saw those little white things. they are smaller than a grain of rice but the shape of it. What are they? Parasites? Little aliens? Pulp? Are we thinking this is safe to drink or not? We made it for our families thanksgiving, I would love to poison them but it’s just so not the thanksgiving vibe. New to this canning journey, if there’s any questions, or any more information i need to give I’ll reply asap 🌞💫🌸🧚♀️🔮 Thanks in advance!!
by Big-Interaction5850
9 Comments
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What recipe did you use?
The recipe you linked is not safe and the processing time was too short. It’s been more than 2 hours. You should discard the juice and take it as a learning experience to always follow a safe tested recipe
Could it be flakes of wax paper or parchment? Solidified oil?
Could it have been present in the jars before canning?
Does it move on it’s own?
Do you have access to any kind of magnification device other than your phone camera?
I suppose it could be pulp or maybe seed husks. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a cranberry in the wild to have an opinion.
So, this looks like bug larvae to me tbh. My garden raspberries had worms like this over the summer when I washed them. Between that and the unsafe recipe, I would discard the juice and clean the jars thoroughly.
Protein. No worries.
A great canning guideline is when in doubt toss it out. It’s not worth making you sick.
That recipe is very similar to this safe one https://www.bernardin.ca/recipes/en/cranberry-juice.htm?Lang=EN-US but the processing times are too short. However I don’t think this is your issue.
You say you’ve done this recipe before with no issue and the amount of straining you do makes me think this can’t be from the cranberries. If there were eggs in cranberries that made it through the filtering… to be able to live through the heat needed for canning and to hatch in that short amount of time…. so unlikely.
My thought is there was a residue in the jars or on the lids that broke down into the tiny pieces.
Either way id dump this batch unfortunately. 🙁
But if you do end getting them under a microscope please report back!
I followed ball canning as recipe and I have those too. They existed before they were canned. I believe they are part of the pulp.
Looks like bug larvae or yeast. Toss, imo