by Andy Gricevich, Newsletter Writer
What are you supposed to do with all this zucchini? An insane amount came in your CSA box—or grew in your garden—or you couldn’t resist the big, discounted bags in your Co-op’s produce department–or someone left it on your doorstep like a kitten they hoped you wouldn’t reject. Even after the gifted zucchini bread, zucchini noodles, frittatas and stuffed squash dishes, there’s still plenty left over. Must you simply toss it in the compost, inviting another monstrous abundance of volunteer vines next summer? No, indeed. It’s time to preserve the bounty.
We’ve traditionally been seasonal eaters; there’s been no other choice for most of human history. Even in places that never see drought or winter, though, we’ve never wanted to be restricted only to what’s in season—and wasting a good harvest is counter to our survival instincts. We’ve always found ways to keep food around, and creative uses for the food we’ve preserved. Some techniques, like freezing and canning, depend on technology that’s only been widely available for a century or so, while drying and fermentation go back as far as archaeological evidence can determine. Preserving food can be a long, sweaty labor of love or a ten-minute quick job. However it’s done, preservation deepens our relationships with the plants we eat, and connects us with traditions around eating in ways that can be profoundly satisfying.
DEHYDRATION
Linda Black Elk, indigenous food sovereignty activist and educator, urges everyone to air-dry more of their food. She says zucchini, cored, sliced into rings and hung on a string in a place with some airflow, is unbelievably transformed by drying. Indeed, dehydration not only makes food more compact and portable, but very often intensifies flavors. Think of sun-dried tomatoes, dried mangoes and raisins, or the rich umami of the mushroom powders recently appearing on many grocery store shelves.
Food can often easily be dried in the sun, on baking sheets or screens. Industrious tinkerers can easily find plans for simple solar dehydrators that do even better. Sun-drying is particularly appropriate for sliced fruit, and especially for fruit leather, made by mashing or blending fruit and spreading it out as thinly as possible on trays. Homemade fruit leather is easy, often much tastier than commercial fruit strips and gummies, and makes for great camping, hiking, or road-trip food, calorically dense and sustaining. Sun-dried veggies make good snacks, or can be mixed together to make delicious bouillions for soup.
Air-drying is great for many vegetables and mushrooms, and is the preferred method for dehydrating greens and herbs. Bundled and hung from anything that’s convenient until crisply dry, green plants can be stored in jars and used for teas, crumbled for soup stocks, or ground into green powders for smoothies. If you have a garden, it’s a great way to preserve some common garden weeds, many of which—like nettles, lamb’s quarters and quickweed—dry very well, and are as delicious and nutritious as anything cultivated intentionally. Greens are best dried out of the sun, while mushrooms produce additional D vitamins when exposed to sunlight.
Sun and air are the least energy-intensive methods of dehydration. Their main drawback is that they’re weather-dependent; even in perfect conditions, foods generally need to be brought in at night to prevent morning dew from rehydrating them, and animals from making them vanish. Convenience may call for a commercial dehydrator, which can also handle portions too large and dense to dry fully in the sun and breeze. There are great, effective multi-tray food dehydrators readily available, usually featuring variable temperature settings appropriate for different foods. Drying some foods (like whole berries) can take some trial and error, to avoid either underdoing them and ending up with mold problems, or ending up with hard, crisp fruit (which can be creatively ground and mixed with flour for baked goods). Generally, though, dehydration is tremendously easy and effective.
ACIDIFYING
Lacto-fermentation is another of the oldest forms of food preservation, and it’s made a real comeback during the last couple of decades. In fermentation, bacteria and yeasts present on the surfaces of plants and in the air around us preserve foods by lowering their pH, making them acidic and thus, slowing the growth of microorganisms responsible for decay. Fermentation also unlocks nutrients in food and alters its flavor, often in remarkable ways.
Fermentation is incredibly safe, with exactly zero documented cases of poisoning on record in the U.S. and Europe. That’s not surprising, since the microbes responsible for fermentation create a highly inhospitable environment for harmful bacteria. It’s also easy: vegetables are either chopped and then covered with salt water, or shredded, salted, and pounded to release liquid before fermenting for anywhere from a couple of days to a few years. Basic sauerkraut, cucumber pickles, and diced carrots or radishes are frequent starter projects for people who haven’t fermented before, but most vegetables work well, and it’s no real challenge to make classics like dilly beans and giardiniera, kimchis, or your own mixes. There are plenty of good sources in print and online to get you started; Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation is the classic starting place.
Pickling with vinegar (itself a product of fermentation) is another way to acidify produce for long-term storage and delicious transformation. Vegetables or fruits are packed into jars, then covered with a pickling medium that usually consists of vinegar, water, salt, a little sugar, and seasonings. When the pickles are intended for storage in the pantry, the pickling medium is almost always boiled before being poured into the jars, which are then sealed and submerged in boiling water for a period of time to kill microorganisms and create a vacuum inside the jars—the process known as water bath canning. Alternatively, pickles can be made to go in the refrigerator, in which case the pickling medium doesn’t always need to be boiled, and can contain less vinegar for a lower acidity (since refrigeration will assist with preservation).
Pickling offers an incredible range of possibilities. Starting with traditional recipes for common vegetables will give you a basic sense of what kinds of vinegar and other flavorings work best with different ingredients, as well as how to make sure you have the right level of acidity for safe preservation. From there you can branch out into less familiar classics like Southern pickled pears and peaches, or—returning to the garden weeds—Spanish and South American verdolagas, a marvelous relish of pickled or fermented purslane. Explore further, and find out what herbs best complement pickled grapes or cherry tomatoes. Serve small amounts of ferments and pickles as appetizers; their sourness encourages salivation and cuts through and brightens rich flavors (which makes them great mixed with cream cheese or sour cream for unique dips and spreads). USDA pamphlets and boxes for Ball canning jars contain very basic information for pickling, while books like Leda Meredith’s How to Pickle Everything can provide inspiration for further discoveries.
MORE STEAM, OR NOT, AND SUGAR, OR NOT
One wonders if general humidity rises during the fleeting seasons for locally grown fruits, as so many people sweat over boiling pots to make jars of delicious jams and jellies. Water-bath canned fruit preserves are shelf-stable and make great gifts, and making them at home offers the opportunity for using much less sugar than we can typically find in stores. In fact, it’s perfectly possible to preserve fruit this way without any sugar at all.
The main role of sugar is to promote a firmer texture. Sugar interacts with pectins (usually added to recipes in the form of powder or liquid, though present in varying degrees in fruit skins) to help preserves gel. Their juices may be sweet enough to interact with that pectin sufficiently, or commercial pectin may be required. Even failed preserves can simply be used for different purposes (like topping ice cream or yogurt). Easily available canning guidelines provide basic information on how much pectin to typically add to different varieties of fruit to ensure a good “set” (degree of firmness).
Jellies almost always require the addition of sugar and pectin to set properly. While jams are made from pieces of fruit crushed to some degree, jellies only use sugar and juice, extracted either with a steam juicer or by straining out the fruit pulp and skin after boiling and mashing it. Whatever form the preserves will take, the critical factor for food safety is acidity. Basic canning instructions (in USDA pamphlets, or on the labels for jars of pectin) give guidelines for how much acid–typically lemon juice–to add in order to ensure a proper pH level that will make preserves shelf-stable for a year or significantly more.
Stone fruit like peaches, plums, apricots, and cherries can be preserved in large slices or entire halves (pits removed) by being cooked briefly in their own juices, in sugar syrup, or in some combination. Added sugar will help preserve the texture of the fruit—as will selecting fruit that’s barely fully ripe (i.e., don’t can the juiciest, best peaches—just eat all those and deal with the consequences). Whether to sweeten or not depends on your goals.
Where sugar can act as a preservative is in the production of fruit syrups. With a sugar to water/juice ratio of at least 2-to-1, syrups can be shelf-stable for a while, especially if properly canned. If you want to skip the cooking and canning, and have space, make freezer jam! With this method, raw (or sometimes minimally cooked) fruit is mixed with pectin and sugar (as with cooked jams), allowed to sit for a while, then frozen. Freezer jam preserves the color and texture of fresh fruit much better than canning, and doesn’t require heating up the kitchen on a summer day.
Going back to fermentation, another, more off-the-beaten-track way to preserve fruit without canning is to make your own vinegar. You start with either fruit juice or slightly-mashed fruit in water, often with some sugar, let it start fermenting in a food-grade bucket or other container, stirring daily for a few days until it’s bubbly, then straining out the fruit pulp. From there, the methods for taking it through an alcoholic stage to vinegar vary. The results can be astonishing (and the same thing can be done by beginning with edible flowers steeped in sugar). Homebrewed Vinegar, by Kirsten K. Shockey, is a great place to begin.
Vegetables can be preserved by canning as well, but many of them aren’t acidic enough to be safely preserved in a hot water bath, if they aren’t pickled. Tomatoes can usually be water-bath canned, but it’s important to make sure their pH is low enough, as varieties vary widely. A pressure canner is the right tool for putting up many other veggies. In an era when most people eat only a small variety of vegetables, most of them available year-round thanks to long-range shipping, pressure canning can seem like a thing of the past—but it’s not really as outmoded as it seems. Nutritional analyses show that produce often loses as much potency in shipping and storage as it does as a result of briefly boiling and quickly canning when fresh. In addition, while boiling greens does mean losing some water-soluble vitamins, it actually makes their valuable minerals more accessible to our bodies—evidence in favor of the dietary habit of eating plants in every way they taste good, at different times of year. Blanching (a very brief dunk in boiling water), draining, and freezing vegetables is another good option—though it also uses more energy, and takes up often-valuable freezer space.
USING THE PRESERVED HARVEST
Dried, canned, pickled, fermented, and frozen summer produce can play wonderful roles in meals during the dormant times of year. A creative home cook can draw from their pantry to make meals that take us beautifully back through the seasons. It’s as simple as a pasta Bolognese in the winter, made with tomatoes canned at peak ripeness—or as complex as glazing a roast with spiced fruit jelly and layering it with the deep flavor of dried mushroom powder, served with nourishing canned wild greens brightened with homemade vinegar, with a few lacto-fermented blueberries on the side. It’s dried cherries in oatmeal and perfect pickles on a sandwich. It’s the memory of how hard you worked and sweated, ideally together, and always in the company of people whose lifeways have been preserved in the long traditions of preservation.