Preserving your garden's bounty

[Hencackle]

It's not too early to think ahead! :coolsun This book is next on my "to buy" list:
Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning by Gardeners & Farmers of Terre Vivante

Maybe this: Making & Using Dried Foods

What I do have:
Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz here
Stocking Up by Rodale Press (1973 edition)

Be sure to check out AcresUSA.com for other interesting topics.

 

[digitS']

Hencackle, what are you thinking you'll learn to do from these books?

What have you done in the way of preserving food?

Steve

 

[Hencackle]

Let's see....I've dried leeks (read that they don't freeze well), dried onions, green & red peppers, tomatoes, herbs, and apples. Made beef jerky (no MSG!) and it was delicious! All these things weren't really ambitious. I use a 5-tray Excalibur food dehydrator. I want to find a way to store zucchini and yellow squash...so far my attempts have been yucky.

Then, I've made saurkraut and kimchi using whey and Celtic sea salt. These were fermented of course and are stored in the refrigerator, not canned. I wanted to make fermented cucumber pickles last summer but I didn't have very many cukes. I hope Tennessee isn't hit hard by another exceptional drought this summer.

My green beans and corn are frozen while tomato sauce and beets are canned. If I'm lucky enough to buy ripe peaches (not picked green, sold as ripe) I freeze those too.

I did experiment and dried some corn and made "leather britches" (green beans strung up and dried) but I haven't soaked them and cooked them yet.

digitS', what do you do to preserve food?

 

[digitS']

It's mostly preservation by freezer at my house. The freezer is pretty darn full.

There's a room in the basement which is isolated from the furnace and water heater and it has an earthen floor. I just checked the temperature down there and it's 44F. This home is over 100 years old and they thought about things like cellars back then.

Unfortunately or fortunately, the floor space in this room is taken up by dahlias and gladiolas right now. The potatoes & winter squash I had to put on the selves have already been used. :/

I have never canned altho' Mom did. About the only thing I do in that regard is make apple butter but, once again, it's in the freezer.

The food preservation issue could be more important this year as I try to figure out what I can grow for the laying hens. I'm unwilling (I think) to put their food in the freezer - I'd need to buy another one! And, there's only so much space in that little cellar room.

I made freezer pickles this past Summer. That didn't work very well mainly because I don't like sweet pickles. There was a freezer dill pickle recipe I came across but it used a HUGE amount of sugar. The pickles were okay but there was no way I was going to eat very many. They were left in the fridge and that turned out to be a mistake, as well. After about 3 weeks - out they went!

I'm interested in your "Wild Fermentation" experiences. I really like all that sort of stuff (saurkraut and kimchi), just not willing to eat very much at a time .

Can your Summer squash be dried in the dehydrator??

Steve

 

[Hencackle]

Lucky you to have a basement (I love old homes!)...

The good thing about Wild Fermentation's recipes is that you're not dealing with bushels of vegetables. There's a lot of crazy-sounding stuff in the book that I'd never make. However, it is interesting in a historical sort of way. There's a couple of beer recipes in Wild Fermentation.

How I made my sauerkraut:
1 head of cabbage, chopped or grated
Celtic sea salt (or Himalayan salt), 1 tablespoon**
filtered water
whey from plain, unsweetened yogurt, 3 or 4 tablespoons
dillweed (or seed)

Sprinkle the cabbage with salt, let stand a while. Pound the cabbage to help the juices come out. (my SIL gave me a wine-bottle-shaped wooden tool that I use to pound the cabbage) Put the cabbage & dill into a large mason jar and tamp it in well--be careful not to crack the jar. Add the whey. Add more than enough water to cover the cabbage--it needs to have extra liquid to keep the air from touching the cabbage.
I place a clean lid and screw band on the jar. A clean cloth held in place with a rubber band works too.
Leave the jar on the counter top 4-5 days, or couple days longer for a more sour product. If the cabbage rises, push it down with a fork. Then refrigerate. It keeps a long time.

Depending on the size of the cabbage, you might have to use 2 jars (quart & pint) **You can add more salt if you wish, or use less.

See, you don't have to have a big crock to make this! A Perfect Pickler this works great and keeps down the fermenting smell.

 

[Txchikngardners]

Most of my preserving is done by canning.
tomatoes, whole
tomatoes, stewed
okra and tomatoes
banana peppers (like hot pepper sauce)
green tomato relish (yummy)
Frozen - bell pepper slices
banana pepper slices
(had lots and lots of banana peppers this year)

And we made lots of jelly
mahaw (not our bounty but picked down the road)
grape (again not our bounty but traded)
And jam
strawberry
fig
and my favorite: Strawberry fig preserves (yum yum!! )

 

[Rosalind]

Canning, mostly. Although this year I'm going to freeze a lot--I'm going to get a chest freezer and keep it in an unheated section of the barn.

I have a method for canning tomatoes in the oven--wash the jars, lids and rings in the dishwasher with no soap on the hottest cycle, then pack them full of tomato slices or cherry tomatoes, with lots of garlic and basil, 1 tsp. sugar and 1 tsp. salt per pint. Set the jars on a cookie sheet that's been lined with a towel, then set the lids on the jars and put the rings on very loosely. Bake at 275F for about 1 hour, then allow the jars to cool in the oven overnight. In the morning, tighten the rings.

Chili recipes then use 1 pint/pot to feed 3 people, or 1 quart/pot for 5 people.

I really don't like having to cook twice, though--don't have much time for that. I've been known to leave carefully canned fruit and veggies on the shelf for years before bothering to make anything out of them. So usually when I can, I make a sort of finished product that could be heated in the microwave, like soup or sketti sauce, or something like jam or canned fruit that doesn't need any further cooking. Sometimes I make marinated veggies that can be dumped by the quart into pasta salad with a sprinkle of Parmesan. I like making pickles, but I am the only one who eats them, and then I eat about four before I get bored of them and leave a half-jar to rot.

Same with freezing things, I blanch veggies and make mixed baggies that can be microwaved and dumped into a stirfry. Or make several quiches and freeze them in halves, so all I need to do is warm them up.

 

[Txchikngardners]

wow - I'm going to try your oven canning process this year - lots less work!

Thanks for sharing that one!!! :coolsun
Brenda

 

[patandchickens]

One thing to know about oven canning is that you're more likely to get broken jars or insufficiently sterilized jars (for which reason it is no longer officially recommended as an option by gov't agencies).

If you are going to do it, and of course many people have put up countless jars using the oven and lived to tell about it , it really is worth being extra persnickety about how you fill your jars, using only proper canning jars (not old mayonnaise jars etc), and very definitely checking your oven temperature first with at *least one* reliable oven thermometer.

Pat, raised on years and years of oven-canned stewed tomatoes and lived to tell about it, but using the boiling water bath method herself these days.

 

[digitS']

I don't knooooww . . .

I did a google search on "oven-canning site:edu" - that gets you all the cooperative extension webpages. 119, google says.

Here are some quotes:
"Oven-canning is extremely hazardous . . ."
"Oven canning is not a recommended method . . ."
"Oven-canning can be danger-. ous . . ."
"Oven canning is dangerous . . ."
"Oven canning is extremely dangerous . . ."
". . . oven canning are no longer considered safe . . ."
"Oven canning is likewise not a safe method for canning any food."

That doesn't even take us to the bottom of what's on my monitor. Here's a link to the page at the top.

Steve