Finally cool enough to can, and I'm noticing that some canning guides out there are a bit precious. The box of pectin makes it sound as though if you look at your jam funny it won't set properly. Adding pectin all but guarantees it'll work, so I don't know what they're on about.
I also wonder how evidence based some of these guidelines are. Sterilizing your jars on a rolling boil for 10 minutes seems excessive. I get that a lot of these instructions are passed down from old-timey days when they didn't have studies on what temperatures kill microbes...
...and they had to make sure the bugs were good and dead. ("10 minutes oughta do it!") But surely now, knowing what we know about how microbes grow, we can be more precise and efficient.
