Working with hot brine

Why it is worse than hot water

A boiling brine carries acetic acid into the air with the steam, and in a small kitchen that concentrates quickly. It stings the eyes and the back of the throat well before it is dangerous, which is useful in that it warns you, and unhelpful in that people treat the warning as an inconvenience rather than as information about the room.

Ventilation first

This is the precaution that does the most and the one most often skipped, because a domestic extractor is sized for cooking rather than for a canner and a brine pan running together. Open a window as well as running the extractor, and if the room has no window, that is a fact about the room rather than something to work around.

What to wear and what to use

None of this is specialist and none of it is expensive. The reason it gets skipped is that boiling brine does not look dangerous: it is quiet, it is in a domestic pan, and it has none of the signals that make people careful around a fryer.

• Dry gauntlet-length gloves. Wet cloth conducts heat straight through.
• Eye protection when pouring, which is the moment steam comes at your face.
• A jar lifter rather than tongs, because a jar that slips goes into the canner.

The two moments

Almost every injury in this craft happens at one of two points, and both are moments when one hand is busy: pouring brine into a filled jar, and lifting jars in or out of the canner. Knowing which two tells you when to slow down, which is more useful than being told to be careful for an afternoon.

Decide in advance what you would do if brine goes on skin, because the moment it happens is not when you want to be working it out. Cool running water, for longer than feels necessary, is the published answer for a burn of this kind and it is the same answer whether the liquid was acidic or not.

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