My housemate refrigerated my still cooling jars canned strawberry jam. Can I take them out and store them in my cellar?

I made strawberry jam over the weekend, and had to leave town a few hours later. I had a number of small jars that had been fully processed, along with 3 bigger jars that had not. I was waiting for the bigger jars to get cool enough to stick in the fridge, but had to suddenly leave for a death in the family. I asked my housemate to put the 3 unprocessed jars in the fridge once they were done cooling. When I returned 2 days later, I found all of the jars in the fridge. The processed jars were supposed to cool for 24 hours before I moved them to storage. She put them in the fridge less than 12 hours after I processed them. Most (if not all) were sealed before I left, but I don't know which ones or if all of them were sealed before she refrigerated them. If she can confirm they were all sealed, is it safe to pull them back out of the fridge and store them in my cellar (where I normally store my home canned goods)? Or do I need to keep them all refrigerated?

Tonua
  • Posted by: Tonua
  • June 20, 2017
  • 10826 views
  • 2 Comments

2 Comments

HalfPint June 20, 2017
If I understand the events of what happened, it should be ok to put all the processed jars into the cellar. The processing has already killed all the microorganisms. If the lids on processed jars are sealed (sucked down by the vacuum created during processing), the jars can go into the cellar. It should not matter that the jars were refrigerated as they cooled. The refrigerator would have merely accelerated the cooling process and subsequent sealing of the lids. Unless the jars were not processed and/or the vacuum-seal was not created during cool down, you should not need to keep them refrigerated.
 
Tonua June 20, 2017
Thank you! This is what I was hoping!
 
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