By Steven Biggs
Simple Preserving Techniques
Preserving often brings to mind piping hot mason jars, bags of sugar, the stinging aroma of boiled vinegar, and a hot, steamy kitchen—all hallmarks of canning.
But there are many other preserving strategies that are simpler and less energy-intensive.
Sauerkraut is a great example of a simple method of preserving. All it takes is cabbage, salt, and time.
Preventing Spoilage
We preserve food by preventing the growth of spoilage organisms:
These organisms include fungi (e.g. moulds) and bacteria (e.g. botulism), and insects
We prevent their growth with conditions that don’t suit them: acidic, cold, lacking in oxygen, or dry
Sauerkraut
Enjoy your garden harvest year-round by using a few simple preserving methods. Simple is the key word: the simpler it is, the more likely it is to get done.
I was pretty excited the first time I made sauerkraut. No more insipid, store-bought kraut: I wanted the good stuff. With fennel seeds, juniper berries. Maybe even some apple slices. My great aunt Anna later taught me to put a whole head of cabbage near the bottom of the crock, so I could have whole sour cabbage leaves for making cabbage rolls.
You can’t get more tactile in food prep than making sauerkraut. It takes repeated punches to the salted, shredded cabbage until a film of liquid starts to show. The arm motion I find works best is a bit of a punch with a twist.
Once the cabbage is softened and there’s liquid, I added a bit of brine so I have enough liquid to pin down all the shredded cabbage under a weighted plate and have it submerged.
Then it’s time to let it ferment.
The first time I made it I kept the crock in the house. It didn’t win me any favours with my wife, Shelley.
It stank. I remember her saying to a technician at the door, I’m sorry about the smell, it’s my husband, he’s making sauerkraut.”
Now I make sauerkraut in the garage.
Bugs Too
A stint in the oven at low heat, or storing dry beans in the refrigerator is a simple way to deal with bean weevils.
Insects are spoilage organisms too. One year I found lots of scampering weevils drilling holes into my dried beans.
After making sure our stored food is insect-free, the next thing to do is have food in a sealed container — where insects can’t get to it.
Make sure that there are no hidden travellers or eggs: Even though my dried beans were in a closed jar, they included weevil eggs. If I had used a heat treatment to kill the eggs, I wouldn’t have had a jar full of weevils.
Fermentation
Lactic-acid-fermented dilly garlic cucamelons.
Lactic-acid fermentation is what makes sauerkraut sour. It’s a naturally occurring process during which lactic-acid forming bacteria multiply rapidly, giving off enough lactic acid to preserve the cabbage.
Despite the sour flavour, sauerkraut is made without vinegar.
This same fermentation process can be used for other vegetables too. Brined (fermented) dill pickles taste different from pickles made with vinegar—it’s the lactic acid that makes these pickles tangy.
Like sauerkraut, brined cucumbers undergo a fermentation process that produces acidity. This acidity then prevents the growth of spoilage organisms. Other vegetables such as cucamelons, beets, carrots, beans, and onions can also be fermented.
Other Preserving Techniques
Drying herbs. TIP: If drying herbs in the sunlight, cover them with a paper bag to get dry herbs that aren’t bleached by the sun.
DRYING is a simple preserving technique that works because most spoilage organisms need moisture to grow. While the drying of fleshier produce with a high moisture content might be best done in the oven or a food dryer, other crops dry very easily.
Herbs are one of the easiest things to dry. They hang in bundles from my garage ceiling, while linden flowers and elderberries are spread out on metal pie plates or cookie sheets. The dry bean plants hang by the roots to dry until the fall, when the beans are removed from the shell and stored in jars.
A dedicated drying room or shed isn’t necessary. Try drying herbs in the kitchen window. We’ve had good luck with strings of hot peppers or the wild mushrooms that we dry in the kitchen—we’ve even used the hot dashboard of a car to dry plates of elderberries.
FREEZING doesn’t kill all spoilage organisms, but it puts growth on hold.
My favourite freezing method is a simple technique for herbs. I love dill—and lots of it. In late spring there’s so much in the garden that I have to weed it out from the other crops. Instead of drying it in the sunny shed, where the sunlight causes it to fade to grey, I simply chop it then freeze it in a plastic tub or jar. I have ready-chopped dill all season long. The same technique works well for parsley too.
The Easiest Preserving Technique
What’s the easiest preserving technique? Leave the crop in the garden as long as possible.
Parsley can be retrieved from under the snow
In winter, the few leeks that remain in the garden make a nice stew during a mid-winter melt
Carrots and parsnips can be kept in the garden well after the first frost—in fact, they sweeten up with the cold weather as starches are converted to sugars
Ripe lemons can remain on the tree for months
Here are 25 storage crops you can grow in your garden to store for the winter.
I’ve had fun over the years getting my kids to help punch down the shredded cabbage to make sauerkraut!