Guide to Preserving Fruits and Vegetables
I don’t just grow everything under the sun; I am also a prolific canner, preserver and fermenter. I take summer harvesting seriously and find it a real disadvantage to buy produce at the grocery store between summer and February. However, I am always looking for ways to make the process easier. I’ve tried everything from freeze drying to dehydrating to water preservation, and while I believe in preserving food, eventually you have to eat it, so preserving the flavor is just as important. While there are many ways to preserve summer vegetables, here are my recommended ways to do it and why.
Stop freezing tomatoes and do this instead.
Yes, peeling tomatoes is a chore, but freezing tomatoes to avoid peeling them is a bad idea. The whole point of preserving tomatoes is so you have tasty, home-grown tomatoes to work with over the winter, and freezing them causes an unpleasant change in texture. Worse, it changes the taste, making it mealy and lacking in sweetness. Even when I add tomatoes to soups, stews, or sauces, I worked hard to grow those tomatoes and want them to be as flavorful as possible. There are easier ways to preserve tomatoes and avoid the painful peeling process, and I have two of them.
First, don’t peel them at all: cut them in half, put them in a large saucepan and crush them with your hands enough to coat all the tomatoes with tomato juice. Let the tomatoes sit for four to five hours. Let cool, then run the mixture through a food mill. Forty pounds of tomatoes will take fifteen minutes to cook and you’ll end up with a great passata that can be canned . Passata is a traditional Italian pureed tomato sauce containing no other ingredients. You can use it in much the same way as peeled whole tomatoes. The second method is to cut the tomatoes in half, place them cut side down on a baking sheet and bake until a black spot appears in the middle of the skin of each tomato. Remove the leaf and immediately remove the skin with tongs. You can then continue canning them as peeled tomatoes.
If you are going to freeze tomatoes (which again, I don’t recommend), cook the tomatoes first rather than freezing whole raw tomatoes. Cooking tomatoes preserves the vegetable’s flavor, color, texture and vitamins, and removes almost all bacteria. Prepare the sauce or pasta and then pack it in freezer bags or vacuum seal bags and remove as much air from the bags as possible.
Frozen peppers can be fantastic
I always plant too many peppers and they don’t grow well unless pickled, but that means you have limited use for cooking. Last year I discovered that they freeze well and defrost well if you toast them first. I have found that this is easiest to do on the grill. Preheat the grill to high, and when hot, place all the peppers on the grill in a single layer. Depending on the size of the pepper, it will take 5 to 15 minutes to char on one side. Turn all the peppers over and let them char on the other side. Turn off the grill, remove the peppers and place them in a paper grocery bag with the top folded down. Leave the peppers to steam in the bag for twenty minutes. Now place the bag on the table and use your hands to stir the pepper. This will remove the skin from the pepper. At this point, you can easily pull the stems off the pepper, taking most of the seeds with it, and discard them.
Now place all the peppers in a single layer on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and freeze them for thirty minutes. This will freeze them enough that they won’t clump together into a big block in the bag. Place them in a freezer bag. It’s best to use a vacuum sealer for this because air is the enemy in the freezer. If you don’t have a vacuum sealer, try to remove as much air as possible. I keep them in the front of the freezer on the door so they’re easy to grab while I’m cooking.
The best ways to preserve berries
The most obvious way to preserve fruit is to make jam from it; if you eat a lot of jam, this is the perfect solution. However, you can go overboard and make too much jam. Once you’ve earned enough to eat within the next two years, you should freeze the rest of the fruit in whole pieces. The key here is to freeze it initially so you don’t end up with a big chunk of fruit that you can’t separate. Place clean strawberries, pitted cherries, blackberries, etc. on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Freeze the berries for an hour, then place them in resealable bags. Reusable vacuum bags are a great solution for sucking out the air every time you take it out.
Winter full of fried eggplants
Eggplant is a tricky one because simply cooking it won’t stop it from turning to mush in the freezer. The solution goes one step further: the breading seems to insulate the eggplant and make it usable: cut it into rounds, salt it and drain it. , then use the egg mixture, flour and breadcrumbs and fry, then drain the fried rounds on a paper towel. Once cool, take the fried rounds and freeze them. I place them between sheets of parchment paper so that in the winter I can easily get what I need out of the freezer because they don’t stick together. These rounds can be used in dishes such as lasagna and eggplant parmesan.
You can pumpkin, don’t freeze it
You can freeze raw pumpkin, but it will lose some of its texture and sweetness. You’re probably going to use it in a pie anyway, so it might not bother you, but it did for me. If you’re going to freeze it, roast it first by halving or quartering the squash, removing the seeds, placing the pieces cut side up on a baking sheet, and baking at 350°F until you can easily insert a knife. into pulp (40-60 minutes). At this point, you can separate the flesh from the skin and place the pumpkin in a freezer bag (or a vacuum bag if you have one) so there is no air around it. However, the best solution is to can it.
Canning pumpkin must be done in a specific way to be considered safe by the USDA : You can’t can puree—only raw, diced pumpkin. You’ll also need to use an autoclave – you can’t use the open kettle method. But since you’re just canning the pumpkin in water, it won’t change the flavor of the pumpkin like freezing will, and since you only use the pumpkin once or twice a year, I find it’s best to leave it on the shelf. By the way, what to do with taking up precious space in the freezer.
How to Preserve Peas
There are only two options with peas: dehydrated or frozen. Many people can eat peas, and in my opinion they taste no better than store-bought ones, which is to say, not very good. Dehydrated peas can be sprinkled with salt or wasabi powder and made into snacks, and dehydrators are no longer expensive. If you are going to freeze peas, it is important to blanch them. Raw vegetables quickly lose flavor, color and texture in the freezer, and blanching only takes a few minutes. Bring to a boil, throw in the clean peas for thirty seconds (no longer), then plunge them into the ice bath to stop the cooking. Pack them in freezer bags—even better if you can vacuum seal them.
How to Preserve Herbs
If you want to preserve your herbs, I suggest skipping the dehydrator. Hanging them to dry is not the best solution, as they tend to attract dust and even mold if the air in the room is not dry enough. The best solution is to microwave the herbs between two pieces of paper towel at ten-second intervals. – you will find that they have dried out, but have retained most of their color. When they are completely dry, vacuum seal them and store them out of direct sunlight. An alternative solution for herbs such as garlic, turmeric, ginger, galangal and horseradish is to dice them and freeze them with water into tiny ice cubes. I like to use silicone ice cube trays and fill them with as finely chopped herbs as possible using a spoon or spatula. Add water to cover the herbs. Throw these cubes into a bag and keep the bag near the front of the freezer so you can easily grab them. You’ll use garlic and ginger more often if you don’t have to peel and chop them, and in the case of horseradish, this type of preservation is the only one that will keep your root spicy (and then only for a few months, such horseradish).