Do you have a specific example in mind?
Like soups with noodles and vegatables. Chunky, how do they get everything to not get soggy like oatmeal left too long
I wouldn’t say the vegetables and noodles in canned soup aren’t soggy. Theyre both pretty mushy.
Ya but what stops everything from, like, de-congealing into absolute slop/gruel/whatever?
This happens though. You can open a can of condensed soup or cranberries and it will pour out in the shape of the can because it’s all congealed together. Canned foods are usually pasteurized in the can and have a lot of preservatives and emulsifiers so that can help “fix” the texture for long term storage.
Look, at a certain point, it stops mushening. What is it that stops that from happening and it turning to just absolute like gruel or whatever?
This is just a wild guess (I’m not a food scientist), but maybe it’s simply that whatever fiber/cellulose in the cell walls survives the canning process is stable at room temperature indefinitely without any bacteria or fungi around to break it down?
This is just a wild upvote haha
condensed soup or cranberries
But in those examples, they’re congealed on purpose because of the deliberate inclusion of gelatin or pectin, respectively. You buy those things because the thick consistency is what you’re looking for.
OP was talking about other sorts of foods like canned green beans or corn or something, where all they’re trying to do is preserve the vegetable and the liquid they’re packed in is watery.
Canned stuff is generally way more mushy than something prepared recently. Take canned green beans for example and compare the texture to frozen or freshly cooked green beans. It’s totally different.
You can add calcium chloride to keep canned vegetables crunchy.
This is prolly the closest to explaining this
Look up Pickle Crisp.
Lack of air may help
Basically, water can only dissolve so much.
The heat of cooking and then the long soak in the can/jar will only work so much before the food is saturated and/or broken down as much as it can be.
Now, if you add more heat, some things will break down more. You’ll see this with veggies that start relatively soft to begin with, and things like pasta where there’s something that can “cook loose”. But things with more structure, say something like a beet, can handle a fairly long cook after canning before it turns mushy.
The process of canning kills off microorganisms that would act the break things down, and any enzymes that would do so.
But you’ll see eventual break down with higher acid levels, like canned pastas in tomato sauce. It just takes a really long time to fall apart. Decades.
