So I was helping a friend figure out what to do with a wealth of tomatoes. She wants to dehydrate them and pack them in oil, and I thought, wait, that's really unsafe, right? But I've never tried it, so I went to the https://nchfp.uga.edu/ website, and a couple of Extension Office sites, just to make sure I had it right. I did: you can not preserve tomatoes long-term in oil safely. Throw them in olive oil, put the bottle in your fridge, eat within two weeks.
But the internet is FULL of well-paid garden bloggers who post exquisite photographs of food they will never actually eat alongside shit text like this:
Fun fact--this will kill you if you're not really lucky! Botulinum needs two things to be happy: A low-acid food source, and a low-oxygen environment. Bacteria that makes mold lowers the acidity of the tomatoes, basically clearing ground for the botulinum to flourish! And even better, it's not visible, it has no taste or smell; you won't even know you're consuming it.
This is my seasonal recommendation-slash-plea to only use tested recipes for your food preservation. When We Know Better, We Do Better--even if Nonna did it this way because her Nonna did it this way, we know better now. Botulism used to kill entire farming families, and their loved ones never knew why. The "why" was frequently something like this.
