Читать книгу Canning Essentials - Jackie Callahan Parente - Страница 18

You know your goal: to preserve food in season to enjoy out of season. That’s simple. But within that overarching goal—and sometimes tangled in a sticky mess—are a number of other factors. Issues such as availability of a freezer or other storage space, dietary and/or nutritional preferences, and amount of time available—to name a few—have an impact on your choice of preservation method.

Another point to remember as you review the various methods and their pros and cons is that these methods are all different tools in your preservation toolkit.

CONSIDER THE SOURCE

You can find lots of good information about food preservation and interesting recipes on the Web, but do be careful. Anyone can post anything to a website, but that doesn’t ensure accuracy or safety. For example, I found an online jam recipe that called for sealing jam by turning over the newly filled jars for five minutes to kill the bacteria on the lid. This is an old-style method that’s not approved by the US Department of Agriculture—the folks who help ensure food safety. Every method and recipe you’ll read about in this book is written with your safety in mind.

The fact that they each have benefits and drawbacks does not make one inherently better than another. Each method simply serves a different need. Think about the appliances in your kitchen. There are times when a toaster oven is just perfect and others when your conventional oven makes more sense. The toaster oven draws less electricity per hour, but that doesn’t mean that it’s always the better tool to use. The same is true with preservation methods. The more options you have at your disposal, the more flexibility you’ll have in developing your methods of preservation. Following are the various preservation types I’ll cover, their pros and cons, and the foods most suitable for each method.