With strawberry season in full swing and farmers markets expected to see more fruits and vegetables arrive, it’s a great time to start thinking about your home canning and food preservation entries for the State Fair. The home canning contests are always among the most popular N.C. State Fair competitions each year. In 2025, there were 1,266 entries, the sixth largest competition category.
Walking through the Education Building, which houses the display cases of canned good entries, you will see lots of examples of dried mushrooms, salsas, meats, pickled vegetables and pickles, conserves, preserves, jams and jellies. Some of the entries bear the coveted and colorful ribbons that distinguish the best of the best in each category.
To pick the winners, it takes a dedicated group of 20 to 30 judges who can tell the sticky, sweet difference between conserves and preserves or what makes a jam different from jelly.
“Many of our judges have been judging for years, and me being from the world of science and preservation, I don’t want our judging to be just on what jam tastes the best. That’s a different competition, but we are focusing on home food preservation,” said Ben Chapman, superintendent of the home food preservation competitions at the State Fair and department head of Agricultural and Human Sciences at North Carolina State University. “We want to have the best. Is it packed well? Is the color good? Like do they address all of the stuff that matters in home food preservation. And we want to incorporate all of those things into the judging process. So, we have been very systematic and scientific about it. At the end of the day, it is a food preservation competition, so it should hit all those marks of good food preservation. It’s not a taste test.”
The North Carolina State Fair is one of just a handful of fairs across the country where judges still taste acidified and dried food products submitted for competition. That is a source of pride for Chapman and the group of food science students who review recipes submitted with each entry to see whether the process submitted will adequately and safely preserve the food.
“We don’t actually taste the low-acid canned foods because they are the highest risk. We do taste almost everything else that’s acidified or dried,” Chapman said. “Our students are evaluating the recipes. They have gone through a series of training sessions around this. These are students who are food scientists and who have a background in pH and how to preserve foods or in microbiology. And the same with our panel of judges. They are all professionals within the world of foods.
“But before those judges even taste some of these things we think might be on the borderline, we will open them up and check the pH of that food.
“The pH is the indicator of how acidic the food is and it’s not magic, but there is a cutoff for us. We want to see that foods are below a pH of 4.1, which is pretty acidic. But that ensures to us that the acid is controlling any of the pathogens that might be a problem.
“We don’t test the pH of every single item that comes through. Like with things like jams and jellies, for example, if it is a strawberry jam, there’s so much sugar, it’s already a very high acidic food, so not a big deal. But when we get into pepper jelly or pear, those are a little more borderline. Some of our pickles and pickle mixtures, we do test the pH of those.”
You often overhear fairgoers and contestants alike remark that some jars of canned goods don’t even look like they were tasted and that is because of many factors.
“Not every entry might get tasted because we may eliminate some based on all the other standards that are there,” Chapman said. “I think about jams as an example. There are certain definitions of jam. You know there is a certain consistency of the blended product that is different from a preserve, that is different from a conserve. We have explicit definitions for things, so some may get eliminated because they didn’t make the definition.”
To a casual observer or non-foodie, these categories can be confusing. Here’s what defines each category of these tasty and spreadable fruit-based delicacies.
Jelly – made from cooking strained fruit juice and sugar. For the competition all juices for jellies must be home prepared, not commercial juice.
Jam – made from crushed fruit cooked to a smooth consistency that will mound up on a spoon but not jelly firm
Marmalade – contain small pieces of fruit or citrus peel evenly distributed in a transparent soft jelly.
Butters – pureed fruit cooked to a smooth consistency.
Preserves – contain whole fruits or fruit pieces that retain their shape and are clear, shiny, tender and plump suspended in a clear syrup that is the consistency of honey or soft jelly
Conserves – are fruit mixtures of jam consistency often containing citrus. A true conserve contains nuts and raisins.
That information can be helpful for people considering entering the home goods competition to remember.
Because judging is based on a set of food preservation criteria, attention to detail is important. With products like salsa, consistency and uniformity are key, he said. “Is everything chopped the same? We don’t have big chunks of tomatoes versus smaller chunks of vegetables?”
Plus starting with good quality products to begin with is important to the food preservation process.
“Whatever you start with, and this is a tenet of home food preservation, there is nothing that I’m going to do in the process that is going to make that food as good as it is from a sensory standpoint as when it’s fresh,” Chapman said. “Everything I do is going to make a change. If I’m adding vinegar, it’ll impact the cell structure a little bit. I’m cooking it and that’s absolutely going to change it. So, if I start with poor or mushy cucumbers for example, they are only going to get mushier. So, if I really want crispy pickles, I’ve got to select cucumbers that are really, really crisp at the start.”
