Preserving: Corn

 August is the month for fresh, sweet corn. But if you can only eat so many ears right off the stalk, consider preserving the rest. Just cut the corn kernels off of the cob and freeze. Each ear of corn yields about 1 cup of kernels. For best results, use a vacuum sealer or drinking straw to extract as much air as you can from the bag. Then think about how nice it will be to have a warm corn chowder or creamed corn come December...

Preserving: Horseradish

We have harvested our horseradish roots and are storing some to re-plant in the spring and preserving some to eat over the winter.

To store horseradish for spring planting: Cover root in sand and store at 32-40 degrees or keep in the back of your refrigerator (but be sure it doesn't get  wet).

To preserve horseradish for eating: Grate the washed root finely. Process in a food processor with vinegar and salt (1 Tbsp:1 tsp). The food processing stage really brings out the roots heat (just grating it won't get you there). Store in a sterilized jar in the refrigerator.

Preserving: Daikon radish

Harvested daikon; ready to dry.

My all-time favorite pickle is the Japanese takuan. It's the yellow pickle that comes with onigiri or some bentoo boxes. It's made out of daikon radish, of which we had plenty. So I searched online for an "authentic" recipe for making it. I used the recipe on this site - it was very similar to most other sites and gave clear directions.

The first step was to dry out the daikon: after harvesting, wash the roots, leave the greens on, and let them dry in the sun for about 2 weeks until the radishes are very flexible and can be bent easily. Once dry and flexible, cut off the leaves (save for later step)

1st layer of daikon, bent and packed in.

and roll on a hard surface to soften any hard spots. Make the pickling mixture: rice bran (the healthy part of rice that is processed off when turning brown rice into white rice; this is not easily available, even in health food stores so I had to actually order it online), salt, sugar, chili pepper, konbu and persimmon peel (this is for coloring). In a clean heavy vessel, layer the pickling mixture, daikon and leaves (in this order), being sure to leave as little air between the daikon as possible, packing the leaves down. Put a weight on the soon-to-be pickles and cover with a cloth to keep clean. Leave in a cool, dry place for about 4 weeks.

Full jar of soon-to-be takuan.

I had harvested 11-lbs. of daikon; their dry weight was only 5-lbs. And this fit perfectly into the only heavy vessel I could find easily (since it's glass, I'll cover it with a cloth to keep out the light). Sushi party in January!

Preserving: Refrigerator pickles

Not everyone has time to process jars of pickles, so you can cheat a bit so long as there's space in your refrigerator.

Fill a mason jar with some extra veggies - green beans, radish, red onion (sliced), cauliflower, carrot sticks - and spices - bay leaf, coriander seeds, peppercorns, red hot pepper flakes, cloves. We add 1 fresh shiso leaf to the jar (our secret ingredient), and you could also add fresh dill or thyme.

Boil vinegar and water (1:1 ratio) with a handful of salt and a few tablespoons of sugar. Pour the boiled pickle mixture into the jars and seal them. Once cool, stick them in the fridge. They'll keep for months and are a perfect treat with cocktails.

Preserving: Peaches

Peach season is coming to an end, so we took a quick trip up to a local farm and harvested 50 pounds of yellow peaches. Saving some fresh ones for a Labor Day crumble, we preserved the rest. In Argentina we preserved many peaches in the same manner I describe below. They were a perfect mid-winter treat, reminding of us childhood. We even had one jar remaining as we left the farm in Patagonia and managed to take it all the way to Buenos Aires with us (a 30-hour bus ride) so we could enjoy it on our favorite park bench before flying home to NY in January.

First, I make a simple syrup (300g sugar :1L water; ~1.5c sugar: 4c water), adding fresh lemon juice once it boils and then let it cool. We drop the peaches in boiling water for about 20 seconds to loosen the skin, cut them in half, removing pits and bruised bits, and stuff them in sterilized jars. Then we pour the simple syrup over the peaches (peaches maintain their color and texture best when preserved with sugar), seal the jars, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Preserving: Grapes

Labor Day weekend is the best time to harvest concord grapes in the Hudson Valley. So we took a trip to our secret spot, where we found dozens of grape vines crawling up highbush blueberries, hawthornes and lilac bushes. The grapes were perfectly ripe (but oh-so-sour!), falling off of the vines into our hands and baskets. We ended up with 45 pounds of them after 2 hours of picking.

When we arrived home, we got started on preserving them. We made grape jelly, using grapes and sugar as the only ingredients. First, we washed the grapes and put about 1/3 cup of water for every 4 cups of grapes into several big pots. We heat them until they softened and could be strained through a colander to extract the juice and pulp from the seeds and skins. Ninety-six cups of fresh grapes resulted in 46 cups of grape juice/pulp for jelly-making. We made the jelly in four separate batches, adding about 3/4 cup of sugar for every cup of grape. We boiled the mixtures until they jelled (testing it on a cold plate) and ended up with seven 4oz jars, 35 8oz jars, and eight 16oz jars of jelly... I hope everyone likes a good ol' pb+j.

Preserving: Canning tomatoes and tomato sauce

Alas, more preserving. This is a good thing for our vegetable-starved mouths in February, but a tiring thing in mid-August at the height of tomato harvesting.

Processed Bellstar and Yellow shorts.

We have tomatoes coming out of our ears. Every couple of days we have about 30 pounds of "canning" tomatoes. We planted Bellstar paste/roma tomatoes - not so flavorful tomatoes that are firm and less watery than most, so good for making sauce and canning. We also have a lot of Yellow short tomatoes - not-so-firm, but sweet and flavorful, so we hope pair nicely in the jar with some Bellstars.

We process 7 quarts of canned tomatoes at a time, which pretty much requires 20-30 pounds of tomatoes, depending on size and water-content. I peel the skins off of the tomatoes (after dropping them in boiling water for about 30 seconds), cut out the stem and any bad spots, and then stuff them into sterilized jars. It's important to mash the tomatoes down with a clean wooden or plastic utensil to remove the air pockets. I pour in a bit of lemon juice once the jar is full (to add more acid which helps canned vegetables preserve longer) and then process the jars for 45 minutes in a boiling water bath. We have about 30 quarts of tomatoes right now... more than we use in a typical year, but this will not be a typical year, so we'll see.

We have also been making heirloom tomato sauce and then processing the jars in the same manner. After cooking down carrots, onions and celery from the garden to release their sweetness, we add some red wine and oregano, then garlic, salt and pounds and pounds of roughly chopped heirloom tomatoes. The sauce simmers for about 3-4 hours and then we blend it with an immersion blender and process it. So there's more work up front, but there will be less work once we open the jar this winter.

Preserving: Sun-dried tomatoes

We harvested 80 pounds of tomatoes yesterday. We gave some as a thanks to our compost collectors and have been preserving the rest. One way to make tomatoes last through the seasons is to sun-dry them.

We didn't want to use the oven (it takes about 20 hours in an oven at low heat), so we set up a station for the sun. In our cold frame we blocked up two raised screens, cut the Fargo Pear and Yellow Short tomatoes (saving the Bellstars for canning and the heirlooms for sauces and salads) in half, squeezed out some of the seeds, and laid them on the screens. We put another screen on top to keep the bugs and animals away. And now we just let them sit, baking in the sun. Sources say it should take 2-4 days.

Preserving: Pickling cucumbers, beans and zucchini

Pickling is a method for preserving vegetables by canning. Only acidic fruits and vegetables (e.g., tomatoes) can be safely canned with the boiling-water bath method. Other non-acidic fruits and vegetables need to be acidified for safe home-canning (plus, frozen vegetables just taste better).

So our half-bushel of cucumbers and abundant green beans and zucchini got the pickling treatment. Adding a vinegar-water-salt (and sometimes sugar) solution to sterilized jars with spices and vegetables and then processing the jars in boiling water for a minimum of 10 minutes ensures safe vegetables through the winter months and spring food gap. Here's our process:

(1) Wash vegetables and cut to size so they fit into your sterilized jars with some room to spare at the top (it's important that all parts of the vegetable come into contact with the pickling solution). Seed cucumbers if you prefer.
(2) Bring to boil equal portions water and vinegar with 1/4 cup salt for every 5 cups of liquid.
(3) Pack sterilized jars with a garlic clove, 1/2 jalapeno, a few coriander seeds, a few peppercorns, a hefty pinch of mustard seeds and dill flowers. Pack in vegetables.
(4) Pour boiling pickling solution into jars, leaving about 1/2 inch of space at the top. Be sure all vegetables are covered with the solution. Seal tightly.
(5) Process in boiling water bath for at least 10 minutes (we processed the cucumber pickles for 20 minutes, as suggested by The Joy of Cooking).
(6) Leave jars to pickle for at least 1 week before opening. Store at room temperature.

Preserving: Freezing vegetables

With our storage room all set up and the freezer running efficiently (estimated $37 worth of annual electricity usage), we are in prime freezing mode right now.


There are many sources on freezing vegetables to refer to; we use Seymour's Self-Sufficient Gardener and The Joy of Cooking. As Seymour writes: "all fruit and vegetables should go to the freezer as soon as they are harvested. To leave them sitting about allows the sugars to start turning into starches and thereby the flavor is lost." So right from our garden harvest, we cold water rinse, blanch, flash cool and pack our vegetables. The JC gives appropriate blanching times for vegetables. Here are the ones we've tried or plan on trying this season:

Beans, green - 2.5 min
Beans, broad in pod - 4 min
Beet greens - 2.5 min
Beets, small - until tender
Broccoli - 3-4.5 min
Brussels sprouts - 3-4.5 min
Cabbage, leaf or shredded - 1.5 min
Carrots, sliced - 3 min
Celery, diced - 3 min
Chard - 2.5 min
Chinese cabbage, shredded - 1.5 min
Collards - 2.5 min
Kale - 2.5 min
Mustard greens - 2.5 min
Parsnips - 2 min
Peas, green - 1.5-2.5 min
Peppers - 2 min
Spinach - 2.5 min
Pumpkin, pureed - until tender
Squash, summer, sliced - 3 min
Squash, winter, pureed - until tender
Turnip greens - 2.5
Turnips, diced - 3 min

Once the vegetables have been blanched, cooled and packed, we use Seymour's tip of sucking out the air using a drinking straw (rather than buying a vacuum sealer). Yesterday, although the hottest day on record in our area, we harvested our collards after we noticed some pest damage and ended up with 40 packed cups worth. We even saved the stems and may try pickling them.

Who doesn't think frozen veggies are far superior to canned?

Preserving: Black currant jam

A big part of our longhaul way of life is to try to eat from the food we grow year-round. This means preserving fruit when it's at its peak so it can be enjoyed throughout the year. Since our fruit garden is in its infancy, we decided that picking local fruit and preserving it is the best and only way to get vitamin C and other antioxidants during the winter and early spring.

In the Hudson Valley right now black currants are ripe and ready. Some strawberries are, too, and this week we should have blueberries (but our early June cherry crop didn't come this year due to lots of rain and cloudy days). So I went to a local pick-your-own farm and harvested 5 pounds of currants in about an hour. After the first 15 minutes of picking, I remembered that it's hard and tedious work. Each currant bush had dozens of branches with hundreds of berries on them. Not all of them are ripe at the same time, so you have to pick your way through. And since I was planning on making jam right away, I painstakingly made sure there was nothing in that bucket but berries.

We preserved a lot of dulces (jams) and fruit down in Argentina, so I just followed the same method up here:

(1) Wash and sterilize your jars. (Wash jars with warm soapy water, then rinse them in water with a bit of bleach to sterilize them. Then rinse again in clean water. Wash tops with warm soapy water and then sterilize in boiling water. Let jars and tops air dry - don't dry with a towel, etc.)


(2) Use a large pot - big enough so that the fruit and sugar only fill it halfway (the jam rises as you cook it). Add your fruit and sugar in a 5:4 ratio. Since I had 5 pounds of black currants, I added 4 pounds of sugar. (This ratio preserves the jam sufficiently to store jars of it at room temperature for four years.)

(3) Cook the fruit and sugar over high heat, boiling and stirring constantly. You can add a bit of butter to prevent foaming. Cook time can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the amount you're cooking and the type of fruit. (Black currants are naturally high in pectin, so they take a shorter amount of time. Strawberries, on the other hand, are low in pectin so take longer to reach the right consistency.)

(4) Test for the right consistency by spooning a small amount on a cold, clean plate. Once it cools, tip the plate to see if it runs:  when it runs ever so slightly, cook for 1-2 minutes more.

(5) Pour the hot jam directly into your sterilized jars and close immediately. Be sure to use gloves and keep the jar in a metal pot while pouring in case it shatters.