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CHAPTER 2

Planning for Success

Getting started in home food preservation is really easy, but it does require some forethought and organization. In this chapter, we’ll look into what types of food are suitable for home food preservation, the best and most sustainable way to get them, and how to choose a preservation method that fits your needs, all topped off with a short word about food safety and tips to help you plan successfully.

WHAT CAN YOU PRESERVE?

The short and easy answer is “just about everything,” from seasonal fruits and vegetables to meats and seafoods, breads, dairy products, and entire meals. Scan the fruits and vegetables listed in the appendix to get a hint of the possibilities. But keep in mind that some things preserve better than others, so while you can can them, you might not want to.

WHERE TO START

Where can you find fresh produce for preserving? Obvious canning candidates are surplus vegetables from the garden. I always grow more tomatoes than I can possibly eat—and we eat lots of tomatoes when they are in season. Those wonderful tomatoes that don’t get consumed in the summer months can be found in Mason jars in my basement as plain tomatoes or pasta sauce. Many are dried and stored with a bit of olive oil. If I don’t have time to can them, I’ve been known to simply wash them and store them whole in the freezer.

Create memories that you can cherish by picking fruit at a local orchard with your family and then preserving it together—in jellies and butters, for pies, and so on.

Of course, don’t forget about your local orchards and fruit farms during the season. My part of the country has incredible orchards and berry farms. I don’t grow my own apples (yet), but my family and I love to go picking and return with a bushel of the apple du jour. You have myriad options for that bushel of apples (including many of the methods of food preservation that we’ll cover in later chapters): canned applesauce; canned apple rings and apple pie filling; apple chutney; apple butter; and baked apple pies tucked away in the freezer for unexpected company. You can even turn those apples into a simple, wholesome baby food (see “Ava’s Applesauce” on page 88).

Choose foods that your family enjoys most and then select a preservation method that suits your needs and the food’s qualities. I adore my apples, but maybe you prefer peaches? The great thing about preserving food is that you have your own personal favorites on hand whenever you want them.

WHAT WORKS AND WHAT DOESN’T

If you’re going to get into preserving, you’ll need to learn which vegetables and fruits respond better to which preservation styles. For example, blueberries freeze very well and make delicious jams, syrups, or pies. At the other end of the berry spectrum are those fragile, voluptuous red raspberries. They are decadent when freshly picked and make exceptional jams, sauces, and flavored vinegar, but they turn to red mush when frozen. As you explore the different preservation methods and recipes in the chapters that follow, you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. If you’re a novice, start simple and build your technical skills.

Meats, seafood, and meat/vegetable-based sauces are all candidates for home preservation using various methods. The quickest, easiest, and safest one is freezing, but canning can offer a flexible and convenient alternative. If your family enjoys meats, contact a local farm and get a fresh side or quarter of beef (preferably grass fed), pork, or some free-range chickens. While you can preserve meat that you get from your local butcher or grocer, buying a local side of beef is generally less expensive and the meat is fresher.

Don’t have a garden of your own to harvest? Look for local farms where you can pay a small price and pick as much fruit or as many veggies as you need for your home preservation project.

CHOOSING THE METHOD THAT’S RIGHT FOR YOU

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.

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.

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. 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.

FREEZING AND FLASH FREEZING

Storing food in the freezer at 0 degrees Fahrenheit prevents microorganisms from growing and slowing down enzyme activity. Flash freezing is used to initially freeze food by rapidly lowering the temperature to -10 degrees Fahrenheit. This helps ensure the highest-quality frozen product. Once flash frozen, food can be stored at 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Freezing and flash freezing are best used for a range of foods, including fruits, vegetables, meats, jellies and jams, breads, and whole meals.

Pros: This is the simplest of the common preservation methods (ideal for the food-preservation novice). Flavor retention is greater because it involves minimal heat processing. And this method has high degrees of success and food safety; microorganisms that can cause food spoilage are killed or become inactive when they’re frozen.

Cons: The amount of food you can preserve is limited to the size of your freezer. Standalone freezers involve significant financial investment that may take several years to pay off. This method has the most expensive cost for storage (depending upon size, age, style, and your local cost of electricity, running a freezer can cost anywhere between $5.00 and $25.00 per month).

Who hasn’t experienced frozen peas—whether with dinner or on a bruised knee? If they’re one of your favorites, growing your own peas and freezing them may be more economical.

WATER-BATH CANNING

After preserving food in glass jars using two-piece metal lids, you submerge the jarred food in a boiling-water bath for a specified period of time to destroy any harmful microorganisms and inactivate enzymes. Subsequent cooling creates a vacuum seal, which prevents air and other microorganisms from entering and causing spoilage. This method works well for a range of fruits, tomatoes, and other high-acid foods. You will also use water-bath canning to preserve jams, jellies, and other fruit-based soft spreads using primarily fruit and fruit juices together with a high sugar content. The high concentration of sugar helps prevent the growth of microorganisms. Pickles must also be water-bath canned. Using salt, vinegar, and other naturally occurring substances, the pickling process raises the acid level of the pickled food, creating an environment that is unfriendly to harmful microorganisms. Pickling is suitable for a range of vegetables, including cucumbers, peppers, cabbage, and cauliflower, as well as green tomatoes.

Pros: Water-bath canning requires a low initial investment for equipment, electricity consumption for processing is modest, and there is no cost for storage.

Cons: This method can cause some flavor and texture loss compared to freezing. The pickling process can take more than a month, depending upon the recipe.

Think of all the pies you can make with home-preserved cherries or other tasty fruits. Turning your harvest into pantry staples is simple with water-bath canning.

PRESSURE CANNING

In this method, you also preserve food in glass jars with two-piece lids. Pressure canning must be used for low-acid foods and involves using an appliance called a—what else?—“pressure canner” to achieve a temperature of 240 degrees Fahrenheit, which is substantially higher than the 212 degrees that the water-bath method can achieve and is sufficient to kill both microorganisms and their spores, including botulism, to which low-acid foods are vulnerable. As with water-bath canning, subsequent cooling creates a vacuum seal, which prevents air and microorganisms from entering and causing spoilage. This is the only safe way to can low-acid foods such as vegetables, meats, and seafood because of their susceptibility to botulism.

Pros: Pressure canning can also be used for high-acid foods such as tomatoes to lower the processing time. The electricity consumption for processing is moderate and there’s no cost for storage.

Cons: The initial investment for a pressure canner is somewhat costly. In addition, foods experience some flavor and nutrition loss compared to freezing. Pressure canning takes longer and is slightly more complicated than water-bath canning and freezing.

Corn is one of many vegetables that should be pressure-canned. To can corn, you’ll need to cut it off the cob (individual recipes will explain how to do this).

FOOD PRESERVATION IS NO PLACE FOR NOSTALGIA

So Grandma gave you her stack of worn and loved recipes for her pickles, jams, and canned corn. Brings back fond memories, doesn’t it? You can put those recipes in a lovely commemorative book, but don’t use them in your kitchen. To ensure food safety, you must follow accepted recipes—those that have been approved by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Further, you must follow the recipes exactly, without adjusting the ingredients, proportions, type of processing, or processing time. Use only current information from reliable sources, such as your local Cooperative Extension Service, USDA Guides to Home Canning and Preserving, and other references listed in the Resources section of this book. Any instructions or recipes dated prior to 1988 are suspect because methods have changed.

SPOILAGE: SIMPLE BIOLOGY AND CHEMISTRY

Safe home food preservation is simply a matter of obeying the rules of biology and chemistry. If left to nature, food will spoil, become inedible, and possibly transmit bacteria. This is caused by naturally occurring processes and organisms. Home food preservation involves identifying them and creating environments that stop or retard the processes and destroy the organisms so that the food remains safe to eat. If you’ve looked into home food preservation, you’ve surely heard about food that has spoiled and had to be discarded—or worse, horror stories about food poisoning and botulism. The truth is that some preserved food does spoil; on very rare occasions, this causes serious consequences. That’s why it’s very important to understand the mechanics of food spoilage and to always follow safe food-preservation practices. There is no one more vested in the safety of your food than you are!

Thoroughly washing your produce is one of the most important steps to creating a delcious and healthy product.

HOW ACID AND HEAT WORK TOGETHER IN FOOD PRESERVATION

If you’re around food preservation circles it won’t take long before you hear folks talk about high-acid and low-acid foods. This is a fundamental concept in food preservation because it serves as an index for measuring whether a particular food will provide a friendly or unfriendly environment for the invasion of microorganisms that cause food spoilage. The portion of this discussion that deals with high-acid and low-acid foods applies to canned foods only, not to frozen foods.

Some recipes will call for blanching vegetables (boiling or steaming and then rapidly cooling them). One of the reasons for blanching is to kill off some harmful microorganisms.

Like all creatures, the microorganisms that cause food spoilage are looking for a happy place to live and multiply. Many of them like it warm but not too warm. That’s why we refrigerate our food—to delay spoilage. Some are sensitive to the amount of acid in a food. Most need some oxygen to thrive, which is why we seal the jars that we process. But some, such as the dreaded bacterium that causes botulism, prefer no oxygen. This can make things a bit tricky. Understanding how microorganisms respond to heat, moisture, acid, and air helps us understand which food preservation method will be best for us.

HOT STUFF

First, let’s look at how different microorganisms are affected by heat. See the table “Processing and Storage Temperatures for Food Preservation” for an illustration. There are three things that can cause your food to spoil: enzymes, fungi (molds and yeasts), and bacteria.

Enzymes promote the changes that are a necessary part of that plant or animal’s life cycle. Eventually, however, these enzymes change the food’s color, flavor, and texture and make it unappetizing.

Molds are fungi that grow on foods and look like fuzz. Some molds are harmless, but many more are not. These harmful molds produce mycotoxins, which can cause illness, and they thrive in high-acid environments, meaning they may eat the acid in a food that would otherwise protect that food from spoilage by bacteria. Molds are easily destroyed when heated to temperatures between 140 and 190 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yeasts are fungi that cause food to ferment. This fermentation—while good in certain circumstances, such as those used in making pickles, bread, and beer—will often make food unfit to eat. As with molds, yeasts are easily destroyed when heated to temperatures between 140 and 190 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bacteria are very different and can be more difficult to destroy. Some bacteria, notably the dreaded Clostridium botulinum, which causes deadly botulism poisoning, require a low-acid environment to live but can withstand temperatures much higher than yeasts, molds, and enzymes. As we said earlier, some bacteria thrive in environments where there is no oxygen. So, sealing the jar on these guys would just make them happy. And, bacteria produce spores, which—if not killed during processing—become bacteria that produce deadly toxins. While some bacteria will die at the same temperature as yeasts and molds, those pesky spores are much more resilient and require significantly higher temperatures to succumb.

HOW ACID FITS IN

The next component in canning is the acid level, or pH. Foods that are high in acid (acidic) call for different (some might say easier) means of preservation than foods that are low in acid (alkaline). See the table “Acidity and Safe Food Preservation” for some specific fruits and vegetables, but as a rule of thumb, fruits (including tomatoes) are high in acid while vegetables and meats are low in acid. Acidity is measured on a scale of pH values from 1 to 14, with 1 being the most acidic and 14 being the most alkaline. The midpoint on that scale (7) is neutral, but for our purposes, the tipping point is a pH level of 4.6. Thus, if a food has a pH value of 4.7 or higher, it will require different processing than foods that are 4.6 or lower. Note: Foods with a pH value of 4.7 or higher cannot be safely processed in a water-bath canner.

TAKE BABY STEPS

When you try a new recipe, start small. Even recipes from reliable sources may not work out as well as you’d hoped. Just as you’ve tried recipes from great cookbooks and find that you simply don’t like the way a recipe tastes, or that it doesn’t look like the picture, the same can be true for any of the recipes involving food preservation. First time around, make just one batch. You’ve heard this before, but it’s worth repeating: if you are a novice, start simply. Try water-bath canning or freezing. Freezing green beans is a snap (pun intended) and the results are great! Canning tomatoes or peaches is easy. Making strawberry freezer jam is even easier, but cooked jam is a breeze, too. You’ll find recipes for these in the following chapters. Yes, it’s tempting to want to triple the recipe or try something exotic. But starting small and simple helps you to quickly find what works best for you, and then grow your new skills with confidence.

PUTTING THEM TOGETHER

Now let’s bring together the two key factors of acidity and heat. Remember, the high versus low acid determination only impacts food preserved by canning. If you are freezing food, acidity is irrelevant.

Foods that are high in acid (generally fruits—including tomatoes—and pickled stuff that has a large amount of vinegar or lemon juice) can be successfully and safely preserved when you use a process that heats the food to a level that will kill the yeasts or mold (for example, water-bath canning at 212 degrees Fahrenheit) or reduce the temperature to a level that inhibits the growth (as with cold storage). Bacteria won’t survive in the acid environment.

Foods that are low in acid (generally vegetables and meats) can be successfully and safely preserved only when you use a process that heats the food to a level (240 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit with a pressure canner) that kills yeasts, molds, bacteria, and bacterial spores or that reduces the temperature to a level that inhibits their growth (as with cold storage).

A FINAL NOTE ON FOOD SAFETY

If this is beginning to sound complicated, remember one fundamental truth: if you follow accepted, tested methods and recipes, all of the types of food preservation discussed in this book are safe and will provide you and your family with convenient and nutritious food. There is no reason to fear that your food will spoil or will contain harmful contaminants. You know where your food comes from and you know the care that has gone into its preservation. And I’m going to say it again: there is no one more vested in the safety of your food than you! Not the commercial farms, not the jam-manufacturing plants, not your local grocery store.

PLANNING: YOUR KEY TO SUCCESS

With the basics under your belt, you’re ready to begin. While it’s possible, sometimes even necessary, to work on the spur of the moment on a food-preservation project, you’ll find greater success and less stress if you plan ahead. Depending upon what you are doing, this can involve a small or large amount of investment of both time and materials.

STEP 1: WHAT AND HOW MUCH?

Decide what you want to preserve and how much you want to end up with. If you don’t have enough of what you want on hand, supplement your stock (see step 2). Check out the “Fruit Yields (Canning and Freezing)” chart in the appendix for approximate yields from a specific quantity of produce to help you answer some of these “how much” questions.

Don’t forget to check the recommended storage time for the product that you are storing. For example, current guidelines recommend storing canned and most frozen food for no longer than one year. This will help you decide how much to put up so that you don’t run the risk of having to throw it away.

Picking your own produce at local farms and orchards can be a fun and easy way to gather the fruits and vegetables want to presserve without growing a thing yourself, or it might simply supplement your own supply. Just pick as much or as little as you need.

Farmer’s markets are an amazing resource for fresh, healthy produce of all kinds. When canning and preserving, just-picked produce like this is best.

STEP 2: WHERE TO GET IT?

If you aren’t growing your own fruits and vegetables, look around your area for “pick-your-own” farms or farmer’s markets. Don’t forget that you can negotiate; if you are buying a large quantity, be sure to ask if there’s a quantity discount. As tempting as it may be, don’t buy seconds or drops (produce that is not top quality or produce that has dropped to the ground). They are sure to be less expensive, but there is a greater risk of spoilage with bruised or cut produce, and older produce has already lost much of its nutritional value.

STEP 3: WHICH METHOD TO USE?

Based on what you know about the product that you want to preserve, decide which method is best. Use the safest recommended method available to you. For example, if you’re going to preserve green beans and you don’t have any freezer space (and you don’t want pickled beans), then your choice will have to be pressure canning.

STEP 4: WHEN’S THE BEST TIME?

Try to synchronize your “canning calendar” with Mother Nature’s ripening calendar. It can be tricky, but aim to schedule the time for your food-preservation project and mark it on your calendar. For example: The tomatoes are starting to ripen. Enough of them should be ripe on Saturday to make a number of jars of stewed tomatoes, so plan to devote a few hours on Saturday afternoon to can the tomatoes. Making the time to put them up now means you’ll reap great benefits later.

Check on the fruits and vegetables in your yard often to gauge when you may need to schedule a canning day.

Just how much time you’ll need depends upon the quantity of food that you are processing, how large your equipment is, and how experienced you are. If you’re just starting out, plan on two to four hours. It really won’t take long before you become a pro and can zip through your food-preservation projects!

STEP 5: EQUIPMENT AND INGREDIENT CHECK

The instructions for each type of food preservation will give you a full list of equipment that you’ll need. Likewise, each recipe will spell out the exact ingredients. Read both of these ahead of time to make sure that you have what you need on hand. Nothing is more frustrating than starting a food-preservation project and realizing that you don’t have enough sugar for the jam or enough lids for the jars.

STEP 6: CONSIDER THE LOGISTICS

Check out your kitchen or other preparation area to make sure that you have enough space to work in. You don’t need a commercial-size kitchen or a sanitized science laboratory. You just need a clean and uncluttered area for staging and preparation. In general, you’ll need a place to gather the produce, a sink for cleaning and draining it, a place to clean and line up your storage containers (jars, lids, plastic containers, and so on) before filling, and a place to cool the processed jars. In addition, be sure to look at your long-term storage space. Do you need to make some room in the freezer or on your canning shelf?

Organizing your food and equipment before you begin helps ensure a successful and enjoyable canning experience.

STEP 7: JUST DO IT!

Your preparation is done. Now comes the fun part of actually starting your home food-preservation project. Each of the chapters to come provides step-by-step instructions, details, and recipes for:

freezing

water-bath and pressure canning

jams, jellies, and soft spreads

pickles, relishes, and salsas

INVITE A FRIEND!

In earlier times, “putting food by” was often a social affair. Folks worked together cooperatively at and after harvest to fill each other’s larders. It was a time to work and a time to “gab,” as my mother would call it. At the end of the day, friendships were stronger and food stores were swelled. This can work just as well today!