My plan, when I first started this year-long project this spring, was to eat as locally as I could for the entire year. I was so naive when I started that I assumed that foods grew all year round and it was just a matter of knowing what was growing in January and February. Now that I’ve spent some time reading and chatting with farmers and other local foodies I realize that it is not that simple. If you want food during the winter you need to plan ahead. You need to learn to preserve.
Once I figured this out I set about learning how to make jam and buying jars to put it in. I was hoping to have a large store of foods that had been put up by the end of the summer. Instead I am lagging terribly behind. I have 8 jars of strawberry jam, 1 of blackberry preserves, and 2 of tomato sauce under my belt at this point. That’s it. The problem is that since I didn’t know that I would be canning when I started this project (it seemed as likely as me learning to crochet or tap dance as that point) and I have no friends or family who do, I have leapt into this endevour with no experienced guiding hand and no resources.
In short, I am out of my league here.
Don’t worry, I’m not giving up. What I’m doing is asking for advice. I have recipes for great jams, sauces, and preserves. I need the tools that will help me make them in quantity. All I have at present are two big pots and a pair of tongs. Many of the books I’ve read that talk about canning suggest a “water bath canner.” Barbara Kingsolver seemed particularly attached to hers in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Am I being naive again? Are there more to these things than I can see in the tiny pictures? I was hoping for something more like an English kettle that you fill up, plug in, and moments later is boiling away at the exact correct temperature. Is there such a thing?
Trace from Cricket Bread has already given me some great advice on a Hersht Crock for making sauerkraut. Now I need similarly great advice on canning, freezing, and drying. I need a way to can lots of jars at once (I’m assuming some type of canner) of “high-acid” foods. I’d like to know if anyone has every dried their own herbs or peppers and how that worked for them and if you need any special tools for that. I’d also like to know if anyone has a suggestion for an energy efficient freezer that I could store meat in.
So if you preserve your own food or know some one who does, I’d like some advice on the tools of the trade. Thanks!
August 23, 2007 at 12:21 PM
Other than jam and jelly I haven’t canned in years. I do remember my grandmother’s pressure canner, you will need this to do any kind of vegetable canning to prevent botulism.
I freeze many summer items in small ziploc containers.
I also dehydrate quite a few items and store them. I’m in Idaho so storing them without the fear of mold is easy. When I get to Vermont I’m going to have to review this.
I use an Excaliber dehydrator which I purchased from Lehmans. Those round dehydrators you can get from all over are inefficient and take more energy.
Also, depending on your sunlight, you might consider dehydrating in your car, it does get warm enough in there on some days *g* Just be careful because you can actually burn things instead of them drying.
Good luck!
August 23, 2007 at 7:11 PM
Amy: I’ve got your back.
I canned 60 lbs of tomatoes a couple of weeks ago.
Basically there are two types of canning–water bath and pressure canning. If you have a high enough PH (i.e. acidic), you can use a water bath canner. You are right. It’s just a big ole pot. I don’t even use my wire thingy, and before I had a canner I used a stockpot. To make it faster, do get a canner. They run about $20. Another helpful utensil is the jar-lifter (http://tinyurl.com/3cddrz) . Before I had one, I used some tongs with rubber bands wrapped around the ends. It didn’t work so well.
The high ph retards bacterial growth.
Examples of things you can can in a water bath: jellies, jams, preserves, pickles and tomatoes (as long as you add extra acid; tomatoes lie on the edge of safe canning acidity). If you add other veggies to your tomatoes, you might lower the acidity enough so that it’s a scary botulism-ridden mess. You don’t want that.
In comes Pressure canning, which I’ve never done. This actually does require some more specialized tools–namely, the pressure canner (ta-dah!). Pressure canning is used to can things with a low PH, like green beans and….i dunno. Other things. Meat maybe? Like I said, I’ve not done it.
OK, just looked it up (http://tinyurl.com/2oh5kz)and it seems like you can can just about any vegetable. Right on.
So.
I hope that helps. Email me with any other questions.
To make tomatoes more acidic, you add food-grade citric acid. I got mine at Whole Foods.
Whew. Tired now. Wrote too much.
August 23, 2007 at 7:17 PM
Oh. And as to freezers. Chest freezer=doesn’t let all the cold out when you open it, but is a pain in the buttinsky to access your food. You’ll be digging around in there for-evah. Upright freezer: you lose some/all of the cold when you open the door, but you can get to your foods quicker. Craigslist has used freezers for sale every week. You can get them for a song. I just haven’t yet.
Also freezing is way easier than pressure canning, and that’s why I don’t can the low acid stuff, typically.
Veggies need to be blanched before you freeze them. There’s something about the texture that gets all messed up if you don’t blanch first. Blanching means to plop the veg in boiling water for a minute or so and then put it into an ice-water plunge to stop the cooking. \
And….that’s what I know. Oh: freeze things on cookie sheets if you want them not to be in a big lump. Freeze in the size portions you’ll want to use.
Ummmmmmmmmmmm. OK. Go with it.
August 23, 2007 at 11:26 PM
I use a giant 20 quart stainless stockpot for a boiling water bath and the bottom wire piece from my pressure canner. It is basically just to keep the jars off the bottom of the pot so that heat can exchange more efficiently. Any wire rack will do. I can fit 7 quarts in the stockpot at once. And like Stew says, get a jar lifter. Best tool ever.
As for drying, I dried chile peppers just by hanging them from a string. Lots of fruits and veggies can be dried just sitting on a baking sheet with the oven light turned on for a day.
I’m starting to get into preserving without freezing or canning. I just bought a book on the subject, but I have yet to get into it.
August 24, 2007 at 6:37 PM
First off, you are in Greensboro right? I don’t know how many farmers markets you have there that are open through the winter , but here in Durham the local market is open every other saturday and the state market in raliegh is open every day. There is local food avaliable in NC in the winter: sweet potatoes, winter squash, brocoli, cooking greens, turnips, irish potatoes. But that gets pretty monotonous, so you do want to put some food up.
You say you have two jars of tomato sauce. Did you freeze them? Jams and jellies can be put in jars and sealed with out a water bath–the worst thing that will happen is they will mold and need to be tossed out. But with tomatoes you either need to freeze them or follow a tested recipe for canning. Botulism is really nasty, but it’s easy to avoid so long as you make sure you know what you’re doing.
If you have a big pot you can can in it. You want to put something on the bottom (a towel for example) to keep the jars from breaking from the heat of the metal touching the burner. You need enough water in the pot to cover the jars by at least one inch. Try that before you go out and buy anything. If you starting canning regularly you’ll probably want to get a water path canner and the little set of accessories (canning funnel ,jar lifter, etc) they sell to go with it.
I’d really recommend going to the harvest forum on gardenweb ( http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/harvest/ ) The folks on there are really helpful, and there are loads of recipes posted.
Low acid foods (vegetables) need to have a lot of added acid to go in a water bath canner. Pressure canning is easy, but you want to be familiar with the basics of canning before you try it. So you probably want to stick to freezing veggies this year. Freezers are really simple appliances and they are basically all energy efficient. You want to avoid a self defrosting one though–they work by turning on and off constantly so they use a lot more electricity and shorten the life of your food. I find it really helps to keep a list of what I have in there so that I’m not looking all over for something that doesn’t exist whilst totally forgetting about other things til they’re past their prime.
Good luck, it’s all really easy once you’ve got the hang of it.
August 24, 2007 at 9:02 PM
Wow, you’re getting tons of good advice here!
I thought I would chime in on the pressure canner thing. I’ve canned stuff for years, mainly the tomatoes and pickles things, and jam, of course, then…I got the pressure canner. Now I can EVERYTHING in it. Everything I don’t freeze, that is. Beets, corn off the cob, veg stock, tomato sauce with lots of peppers, salsa…you get the picture. Dried beans, cooked first then put up…instant chili. blah blahdy blah.
I am finding that I use it in lieu of the two big canning pots I have. Boiling-water baths are somewhat scary to me. I have great faith that my canner will never “blow up,” so somehow I am not afraid of it. But I do know that pressurized stuff heats up a LOT more than a simple boiling-water bath, so lots more cooties get killed in the process.
My pressure canner is from the Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry (here’s the link: http://www.wafco.com/Specs/915.html).
I also have a sealing thingy that I use for my frozen stuff. It’s called a FoodSaver. Blanch serving-sized amounts of prepared veggies, put them in these bags, suck the air out and seal, throw in freezer. It’s something I do nightly.
Hope this helps. Haven’t killed or even sickened my family yet…after years of doing this!
September 1, 2007 at 9:53 PM
As far as drying is concerned, Alton Brown has an episode that covers all of the basics. The setup (or what I can remember about it) is very simple. I would check that out if you can find it.
September 4, 2007 at 8:57 PM
Late to this discussion, sorry!
You can find canning and preserving supplies at McKnight Ace Hardware on Bessemer Avenue. I recommended that you buy a jar lifter instead of using tongs. I learned that the hard way.
Good references are Putting Food By and the Ball Blue Book (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know). Be careful of recipe web site instructions – I’ve noticed that some of them don’t use good canning practices. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can can anything in a boiling water bath. It has to be acidic.
I love my Nesco food dehydrator. I’ve dried lots of halved cherry tomatoes, sliced paste tomatoes, and peach slices this year. I’ve also dried cherries and bananas – it’s great!
September 4, 2007 at 8:59 PM
Actually, shoot me an email. I’ll lend you my big water bath canner if you want to come pick it up. I’m not using it this year.
September 5, 2007 at 3:39 PM
On the subject of freezing, you could always look into getting a big old freezer. My roommate just purchased a humongous chest freezer at salvation army/goodwill/one of those kinds of places for a mere $120 (I think). You could probably find a good deal if you shop around (assuming you have the space for something like that).
Also, this comment is testing you new, ultra modern, spam prevention thingy! If you can read this comment, it should be working.