What can be wrong with canned corn? All the ingredients are kosher. Let's listen to Rabbi Mordechai Stareshefsky a Rabbinic Coordinator at the OU as he explains some potential issues with the most basic food items. This serves as a reminder why one should always ensure that there is a good hechsher on everything they buy.
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Hello everyone and welcome back to Let's Talk Kashrus, presented by the Kashrus Awareness Project in conjunction with Torah Anytime. Today I am privileged to be joined by Rabbi Mordechai Stareshefski, Rabbinate Coordinator at the Orthodox Union. Thank you Rabbi Stareshefski for joining us once again.
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky Good to be here, thank you.
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger We'd like to discuss today the topic of retorts. It has tremendous ramifications in the field of Kashrus. For those of us who have never been to one of these large factories, we may not have seen a retort, we may not even know what it is. Tell us what it is and then we'll talk about the halachic details.
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky So there's different types of retorts. Let's talk about first the purpose of a retort. A retort is, there's two ways of cooking food. Food has to be cooked obviously, some food is not edible without cooking, but a lot of food has to be cooked as a preservative to make sure it's shelf-stable, to make sure that the bacteria, the pathogens have been killed. A lot of times that cooking process is done in a retort. A retort is a steam cooker, which means that it's done under pressure because steam is by definition is under pressure. There's different types of retorts.
They're all the same principle, it's cooked with steam if under pressure. The most common retort you'll find is a batch retort, which means that these cans or you can have fruit cups, they're loaded, they're sealed, but the point is that the product is already sealed. Like canned vegetables. Canned vegetables.
Canned fruits. Right. The can, already done, they go through into this chamber called the retort. It looks like, if anybody ever saw a picture of a World War II type of submarine, like a long tube, you put the torpedo in, so it looks like that, this round tube, and I have a plant actually on the Idaho-Oregon border. They actually have an old-fashioned one, the technology is about 100 years old, it works. They actually go take the retort and spin that wheel around to pressurize it.
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Manually?
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky Manually. Yeah, yeah.
Interesting. Because labor's cheap. Today, most retorts are done, even batch retorts, are done by a robot. It's a whole cart, a whole train, the door opens up automatically, the goes in. Shoots it through? Shoots it in, there's like four or five baskets that go in, seals it, and then the robot moves on to the next one. Obviously much more efficient that way, but the point is it goes in, it's sealed, and it's cooked with steam. There’s another type of retort, which is only the really big companies have this. It's called a continuous feed autoclave, continuous feed hydrostatic retort.
And what a hydrostatic retort is, is it has hundreds of thousands of cans at a time. It goes in this big chain through a water leg. Which means water there? There's water, no, there's steam in the middle, there's different chambers. So steam obviously is under pressure, and the cooking section is the steam section.
The water on both sides is to make it heavier than the steam, that the steam shouldn't blow out, keeps it contained, so the cans go through.
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger And that makes it hotter?
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky No, it doesn't make it hotter, it just makes that the steam is contained, because it's not under pressure. You know, when you have just the steam in one batch retort, so all the steam there, it's being held in place by the metal. Here the steam has to be held in place because the steam is always looking to blow out.
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger So it cooks faster that way?
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky In the steam it cooks faster because it goes up like 280 degrees, but the water is there to hold it in place. It goes through in this, the in leg and the out leg, first the in leg, then the in feed, then it goes through another. This is about six stories high. You drive to a plant, I went to Tennessee, drive up there, it's like this smoke billowing out the top, this big building, eventually the snow, that is a hydrostatic retort.
So when you have, there's a lot of interesting halacha, Shailos, that come out from a retort. First of all, it goes through, some plants can even have a double chain. So you can have your canned corn, which is like, what can be wrong with corn? Yeah, but it might be sharing, actually it might be sharing the steam, not just the steam, it can actually be in the water, the water is also hot. You're going into the steam and actually sharing a chain.
With another product that may not be kosher. So we're talking about bliyos, in a kli rishon, because the water is cooked. It's like they're sharing, the bliyos pass through the shach, the taz, siman pey daled etc. So retorts, one interesting thing, which one of our experts, one of our experts discovered is that we have a plant that does pork and beans. So of course they kasher, we don't certify the pork and beans.
We kasher it and then we just certify the beans. Discovered that in one of these retorts, the pressure cooling section, that means that water, after it's cooked, they have to cool down those cans. So water gets down, water sprays on the cans, makes the cans cold, and in turn the water gets hot. That water has to be cooled off.
So they came up with an ingenious arrangement that water coming into the plant, which is going to be used for the sauce, called city water, regular water, you open up a tap, coming from the city, it's ambient, which means in kashrus terminology, plant terminology, which means it's room temperature ambient, and they want to get that hot, and they want to get this water cold. So it runs against, it doesn't touch each other, but it runs against, it's called a heat exchanger, and heat pierces from one to the other and it cools it off. A heat exchanger is actually off topic a little bit. There's an ethanol plant in Nebraska that I was by, so ethanol is made from the corn, so it goes through first a hydro heater, with water, with an enzyme, to make it very hot, and to start the alpha amylase, to start acting on the sugar, to start breaking it down.
Then it goes to be fermented in a beer, and a beer can be three quarters of a million gallon tank, a few. So it has to be cooled off to go into the beer. Then from beer, if it's fermented, it has to go for distillation to make it, without going t through how it gets distilled, it has to get hot again. So a little heat exchanger, coming from hydro heater to the beer, it has to be cooled, and from beer to the still, it has to be hot.
That little heat exchanger saves the plant six million dollars a year in utilities, just by having them cooled down and heated up. Fascinating topic, heat exchangers. In this case...
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger So as a general rule, when you have a cross-exchanging heat in such a case, where you have kosher and non-kosher, I imagine it's a problem, right? It's a real problem, yeah. So you have to kasher in between, or what do you typically do?
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky Typically the OU is going to flush, we don't kasher the boiler, it's a technical discussion based on a pri megadim, when we say chanan, but not for this forum. But in this case, of course we have to kasher, we couldn't do it at those temperatures, we had to lower it. At a lower temperature.
So that's the general parsha of a retort. There are many different concerns with a retort. For example, even take pork and beans. If you take pork, how much pork actually goes into the bean can? Not very much. But there's a concept called chanan –
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger chaticha naaseis neveila, which means, tell our viewers...
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky Let's say you have, for example, a 59 ounce container of orange juice. Let's say you have milk in there, and a schnapps cup of chicken soup gets poured into there, so it's not batul, because you need 60 times the amount to be batul. It comes in a drop below that, it's only 59 times the amount. So if you would not say Chatichah Na'aseh Nevelah, let's say that orange juice container falls into something else, a few gallons.
If you don't say Chatichah Na'aseh Nevelah, all you have in the bottle is that one ounce. It's a small amount. Once you say Chatichah Na'aseh Nevelah, the orange juice itself now is treif. The whole thing becomes problematic.
So in a pork and beans plant, maybe the pork is very small, but then the can becomes also Chatichah Na'aseh Nevelah. And then once it goes, the source becomes also Chatichah Na'aseh Nevelah. And that goes into the retort, that's going to assur the whole retort. So you end up with the cascading, exponentially assuring everything, and that's why you have to have an expert mashgiach go into this plant to make sure that everything is done properly, kashered properly.
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Right, like we always say, you can't just walk into a place and, oh, everything, the ingredients are kosher, the tube that it's going through is kosher. You really have to know the structure of such a facility. Any final thoughts on this, because I know you mentioned to me before, we were talking about acidic fruits and vegetables. High acid fruits and vegetables, which very often will be self-preserved. Talk about that and its ramifications as far as kashrut is concerned.
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky Right, so we know that, for example, corn, beans, it's low acid, it goes into tomatoes, I'm not sure what acidity, but let's say watermelon, bananas, low acid, and it has to be, we know it has to be, it has to go through a kill step, like we say, to be heated to kill the pathogens. And that we know is going to be halachic shailos like we discussed. High acid fruits is...
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger That would be,
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky let's say, peaches. Peaches, pineapple. So the pineapple, the fruit itself has enough acid in it and the source has enough acid that there is a thought that you're not going to need to do any kill step because the acid itself acts as a kill step.
For example, vinegar, which is an acidic acid, there's enough vinegar in there. Vinegar plants don't have a cleaning step because vinegar is used as a cleanser. So there's enough acid, but I don't believe, I'm almost 100% positive in this, there's not enough acid in most of these fruits to act as a kill step. So it does need to go through, you know, they put in the potassium sorbate or sodium benzoate as preservatives, but even with that, it has to still go through a heat treatment.
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger What's the relevance of the acidic level to kashrut?
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky If it's a high acid, then you can be pretty confident that it didn't go through, and those ingredients are all kosher, and it's high acid, you know, of course it's always ideal to buy with a hechsher. Canned oranges, because oranges are very high acid. Pineapples, pears, peaches, let's say. Very often buy the little orange tidbits like that.
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger You could buy that without hashgacha?
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky No, so there's a few things you have to watch out for, I don't want to just not try this at home, you know, speaking in theory. More theory, okay. First of all, you have to check the ingredients, and not always if there's flavors in there that could be, you don't know what flavors. Flavors, additives, things like that.
It could be a concern. Okay. We're talking just, let's say for example, just pineapples and syrup. Now, a lot of times, there's one trick that they use, they say natural, it has to be all natural syrup, but they don't want to put sugar in or high fructose corn syrup, so they just put in white grape juice.
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger And that won't appear on the ingredient panel?
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky It would. It would? It usually would. It usually would. So, that's something which you can't always assume that pineapples are, it's going to be kosher, because a lot of times they'll use grape juice as a sweetener, white grape juice, which wouldn't be kosher, it's stam yaynum. But let's say you know for sure, you can trust the ingredient list, and you know that it's not going to be, ingredients are fine. The issue is that if it's in a can, it usually goes through a retort.
Then it went through a retort. That's the bottom line. Even a fruit cup, it doesn't go through a, see a fruit cup can't go through a steam retort. Glass bottles, for example, are also retorted.
I had a company in Spain that I was by, they don't go, it's a glass bottle, if it goes through steam, the volatility of the steam will cause the glass to break. To break, right. So what you do is it goes through a retort, the steam goes into the bottom of the retort, and it heats up water, and the water sprays around the continuous spray. It's like a more gentle way of doing it, to protect the glass.
But either way, it's over yad soledes, you have issues. Even the fruit cup, the plastic is going to be a spray retort. Interesting. And you have, now again, can I raise my right hand and say it's for sure treif? You know, chanan, let's say you don't say chanan, the Rem”a, you don't say chanan balach balach, hefsed meruba, me’eis le’eis, issur derabanan of balach balach.
There might be eitzos, you know, but we believe in kosher without compromise. Right. If you're stuck in some deserted island somewhere with only kosher ingredients,
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger To summarize this conversation, first of all, everyone should try to buy canned vegetables and canned fruit with hashgacha, obviously. That would be highly recommended.
But I think the takeaway from this conversation is that you could go into a supermarket and see canned vegetables or canned fruits on a shelf. All the ingredients are kosher, everything looks good, but what you as a consumer may not know is that this can or container went through a retort and we don't know the kosher concerns that were in that retort. That's the takeaway here. And that's why...
Maybe real kosher... Maybe real kosher issues might be nothing. Right. So, you know, once again, it's so enlightening to speak to someone like you and learn about this because once again, the lesson is you can't take anything for granted and you can't make assumptions.
I think people, including myself, we very often make assumptions about things. We see something. Yeah, exactly. Or maybe you're just a chumra, a very extreme chumra over here.
We have a real, real kosher concern. And if you don't know, then you don't know what you don't know. So it's very important to be educated on this. And once again, a fascinating topic that you've brought to the table here.
So any final words on this?
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky We covered everything. We covered everything. But in general, not just when it comes to these high acid fruits. In general, a person should buy, always buy something with reliable hechsher.
It's not enough to say, well, the hechsher may not be reliable, but for this, what can be wrong with it?
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Right. You hear that often, very often. You hear people say, on orange juice or on canned fruit and vegetables, maybe I don't need as good of a hashgacha, so to speak. R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky Mentioning orange juice. Orange juice is, because of the nature of the beast, most of the, you know, it's expensive to ship things around the country. So a lot of these big orange juice companies will just rent out space by different bottling facilities nearer to the market where they want to sell.
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Is that right? Even brand name orange juices?
R’ Mordechai Stareshefsky They'll bottle different places because it's more economical that way. Instead of trucking something from one side of the country, you might as well have a plant somewhere else, of course.
And those plants can actually do grape juice, can do treif things, and then kasher. Those are shared facilities. You have to basically check it out. Very interesting.
A pleasure being here as always.
R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Thank you so much.
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