After harvesting and processing, the next step in a successful winter food prep is making use of preserving skills. This is key in ensuring that favorite summer foods will be there during the coming months. So, let’s talk a little about the preserving methods we used here at Serendipity Farmhouse during the week of September 15th.
Farmhouse Food Skills Category 3 – Preserving
Hi! Old Fuzz Face here. In the first two posts of this winter food prep series, we talked about where we get our winter food and the farmhouse food skills we use to process it. But that’s just the beginning of our winter food prep. There’s another set of food skills we’ve learned that helps us preserve the food we’ve processed.
Food Preserving Skills
Q – Okay, now that we’ve processed our raw ingredients, what do we do to preserve different types of farmhouse food products?
A – We employ a variety of techniques to extend the shelf life of food, such as canning, dehydrating, fermenting, freezing, and vacuum sealing herbs and other food products. In the future, we hope to explore smoking and other traditional techniques.
You can find any number of lists describing skills needed for preserving food. The lists pretty much agree on primary techniques, but it’s hard to find a single standard list. In our list of six preserving techniques, we show the ones that are important for us here at SFH. For other folks, the list will be different.
6 Important Preserving Skills
| Technique | Description |
|---|---|
| Canning | Preserves fruits, vegetables, and meats by sealing them in jars and heating to kill bacteria. This technique is vital for ensuring long-term storage without refrigeration while retaining nutritional value and flavor. |
| Dehydrating | Removes moisture to prevent spoilage. This is essential for preserving herbs, fruits, and vegetables, making them lightweight, compact, and easy to store, with a long shelf life. |
| Fermenting | Utilizes natural bacteria to convert sugars into acids or alcohol, preserving food while enhancing its nutritional value and flavor. Perfect for making pickles, sauerkraut, and other fermented goodies. |
| Freezing | Slows down enzyme activity and bacterial growth. Freezing is indispensable for maintaining the quality and nutrition of fruits, vegetables, and meats, making them last well beyond their natural season. |
| Root Cellaring | Uses the earth’s natural coolness for storage. This energy-efficient method is perfect for keeping root vegetables, apples, and other hardy produce fresh over winter. (We don’t have a root cellar or basement, so we have to use the coolest places we can find in our old farmhouse.) |
| Vacuum Sealing | Removes air from packaging or containers to extend the shelf life of foods. This method is critical for preventing freezer burn and oxidation, keeping frozen and dried foods fresh for a longer period. |
Farmhouse Preserving Skills
Here are some preserving skills we used during the week of September 15th.
Canning – Spicy Dilly Beans
We’ve been canning spicy dilly beans for three years now. It’s a great way to preserve those garden-fresh beans and to kick them up a notch. Sure, they can be used as a side for dinner. But with these spicy dilly beans you can also serve them as an appetizer or as a snack at lunchtime. It’s really worth the effort to can beans this way because it ensures that we will have a crunchy, tangy snack or side dish all year-round.
See our post Spicy Dilly Beans @ Serendipity Farmhouse for the recipe.
Dehydrating – Sage
Sage is an essential herb for adding flavor to dishes. Dehydrating this herb takes little time and it’s about as easy as it gets. Now that we’ve started dehydrating products from our own gardens, we can be sure that we always have a supply of aromatic, home-grown herbs to season the foods cooked in the soon-to-be-world-famous SFH Test Kitchen.
For some background on our work with herbs, see SFH-TK SKills – Herbs.
Dehydrating – Tomatoes
This is our first year dehydrating tomatoes. We’re compiling a list of ways that we can use them in various recipes. They reconstitute easily and they’re going to be found on top of our pizzas and in clam chowder and other dishes. Looking further into the future, we expect to turn some of our dried tomatoes in tomato powder for making tomato paste, tomato sauce, and other basic tomato products.
As we see it, dehydrating tomatoes is a way to preserve summer’s sweetness for those colder months. It’s a great way get the most from our summer garden.
Fermenting – Cucumbers
Fermenting cucumbers, or making pickles, is an excellent way to add tangy, probiotic-rich foods to our diet. During the summer we get a large number of cucumbers from our CSA. In fact, we get more than we can use during a normal week. Fermenting those excess cucumbers means we can preserve them for several months and use our own homegrown dill and garlic to add flavor. So, we end up with a healthy, flavorful treat that’s perfect for snack platters and sandwiches.
Fermenting – Garlic
In mid-September our homegrown garlic meets a critical point in its lifecycle. Without a proper cold storage room, this is when our garlic starts to go down hill. We’ve found a few good ways to preserve garlic from two to six months beyond this point. One way we used to preserve the garlic was in red wine. Now, we prefer to ferment our garlic. That’s because, not only does it last longer, in the fermenting process it gains the healthy benefit of becoming a probiotic.
Fermenting garlic enhances the flavor and gives it a little more kick. Now our garlic is long lasting, has great flavor, and it’s healthy. Who could ask for more?
To learn why preserving garlic is important to us, the our posts 7 Reasons Why We Want to be Garlic Self-Reliant and Garlic & Hackers.
Freezing – Okra
We dehydrate, pickle, and freeze our okra. But, we never ever ferment it. The one time we tried that, we regretted it deeply. So for now, freezing is our go-to method for preserving okra. It’s a simple, effective way to preserve this nutritious vegetable. Freezing okra ensures that we have a supply of this versatile veggie for soups, stews, and gumbos all winter long. Of course, frying is our favorite way to use okra.
For a tip on how not to preserve okra, see our post Report to St. Isidore – 2022.
Freezing – Crookneck Squash
Once you learn a preserving technique, you can apply it to a host of other food products. Freezing some veggies like okra is very simple and straightforward. Other vegetables, however, require an added step of blanching to lock in color and flavor. Crookneck squash requires that little bit of extra preparation. After that, it’s just like freezing okra and tomatoes.
You’ll really want to try this. That’s because everybody knows that by mid-summer they’ve seen too much summer squash and zucchini. Freeze it now, and enjoy it in February.
Farmhouse Food Skills Series
We hope that you’re enjoying this series of post and videos about farmhouse food skills.
- 1 – What Farmhouse Food Skills are important to you now?
- 2 – How to improve your life with farmhouse food skills
- 3 – This post
For great ideas and ways to build your food preserving skills visit the National Center for Home Food Preservation.
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