Preserving+canning « boston localvores

Preserving+canning

Blueberry therapy

jam1

First: an aside. I noticed this week that my fingers are taking on a subtle but certain look of age and overuse. Kind of bending and twisting a bit when they’re at rest. The cumulative effect, probably, of spending half my life before a glowing screen, arms propped awkwardly on a desk, fingers rapidly firing T-O-I-L, basically, over and over again.

Some nights we come home from our day jobs and our commutes and the thought of preparing a meal with all the raw, local ingredients in our kitchen feels like another hour or two wrangling only more T-O-I-L. But lately, even in the heat, or maybe because of it, we have been coming home to this reality with a sense of a relief. Respite. Therapy for my twisted fingers. The silent, methodical rhythms of transforming all of this beautiful produce into simple, delicious stuff. We’re using our hands and ourselves in a more natural way. We’re making a mess, nourishing ourselves and tidying up in a terribly satisfying way. And probably hitting dozens of important acupressure points on our palms in the process.

And now, to the point: We’re already putting things by with a bit of a fury in preparation for the winter, should it ever get cold again. Little bits here and there, when something is suddenly abundant. A couple nights ago we made a giant bowl of pesto and our first batch of blueberry jam. The jam turned out rather miraculously to be our most successful batch yet. Per usual, we winged the recipe.

We’ve learned two important things about jam recently through the Collective Conscience of our Facebook page, a small bit of web research and the contents of this book called Putting Food By. They are: 1) That pectin does nothing for the preserving of fruit. It only affects the texture of a jam, making the “jelliness” of it, in some cases, possible. and 2) sugar changes the acid of a jam. Which is to say, sugar does something for the preserving of fruit. If you remove the sugar entirely, like we have done, you’re at risk unless you put your jam in the fridge or freezer.

Because we think 12 cups of sugar in anything (a standard quantity for jam recipes) is an obscenity, we reduced the amount most sources told us to use. And have opted to refrigerate and/or freeze.

Here’s how we did our blueberries:

2 1/2 pints of blueberries (or 7 1/2 cups)
3 cups of sugar
1/2 t of cinnamon*
1/4 t of ground cloves*

*optional, for spicing

yield: 3 1/2 pints

The morning after, when all was cooled, the jam was surprisingly viscous — jelly-like, really. And delicious. It’s now in our freezer until a dreary day in February, so we can’t be sure the consistency or flavor will stay the same. Here’s hoping.

…Now step away from the computer and go work your hands.

Fruit / Preserving+canning — 3 Comments
2
Jul 10

Raspberry jam

raspberry

We now know that we are simply incapable of following a canning or jamming recipe. Oh well.

We looked around online for ideas, consulted Putting Food By, and asked our Facebook friends. All said we could forgo pectin if we could be happy with a runnier preserve. But Putting Food By said that some lemon juice in will help low acid fruits gel. So, here’s the don’t-follow-this-recipe-yet recipe:

22 cups whole, uncrushed raspberries (it cooked down to a lot less volume than this)
5 cups sugar
3 tablespoons lemon juice

The recipes we looked at were calling, for, like, a one to one ratio of fruit to sugar! That just wasn’t going to happen. It’s super sweet with just the five cups.

There was one jar that wasn’t quite filled, and so didn’t get processed. But as it’s cooling, it’s gelling up. So, fingers crossed…

jam

Preserving+canning / Updates — 4 Comments
20
Apr 10

Creatively preserved tomatoes: an update

These little babies date from early September. On our way home from Northampton, we swung by Red Fire Farm, our CSA farm, to exercise our pick-our-own rights. There were so. many. cherry. tomatoes. So we shared them with Ryan and Erik, who stuffed them whole and raw into quart jars with a few onions and covered them with olive oil and have been refrigerating them since.

When the whole thing is in storage, it looks a little less than appetizing. The oil hardens and looks a congealed. But brought up to room temperature, as you can see, the oil looks like oil and smells like summer.

The night we met last summer’s cherry tomatoes, we were having flatbreads. They would pull out a few, sort of smear here and there across the dough, then brush the whole thing with this fragrant oil. In retrospect, it seems like you could add herbs to the oil at the outset and have very flavorful oil indeed come April. It’s just a lot of oil to part with. I think that’s what prevented us from doing this ourselves at first, but we will definitely be doing it come cherry tomato season.

Our experiment, however, failed. Not sure why. We put whole tomatoes (not cherries) in a jar, covered in a simple salt brine, then filled the jar the rest of the way with oil. First, the expanding tomatoes pushed the oil up and out of the jar, leaving a huge mess where we had them stored. This month, when we went to open them, we found very tough, like, tomato husks. They were like hollow little footballs in the shape of tomatoes. It may be that they have a shorter shelf life. But we won’t be wasting tomatoes like that again.

Preserving+canning / Updates — 4 Comments
7
Apr 10

Spring also means rot + decay

roots

At the top left is the last of our unidentified root vegetables that we’ve thrown into soups and slaws. WHAT IS IT?! A rutabega? We feel like such fools, but for some reason, we can’t figure it out. The carrots are holding up beautifully, don’t you think? Moving clockwise, mystery root (Shared Harvest Winter CSA), onion (Enterprise Farm, via Metro Pedal Power), carrot (Red Fire Farm, via Metro Pedal Power as well) and potato (this could be either Red Fire or Enterprise).

Bulk / Citrus / Farmers markets / Meat / Preserving+canning — 7 Comments
17
Jan 10

Eating locally in winter: It’s just not that hard. In fact, it’s possibly easier than eating locally in spring and early summer

Kristi went to the Winter Farmer’s Market in Wayland yesterday. This is what it looks like there, in mid-January. An abundance of food, not just of the root variety, but fresh and green and vibrant, as well.

Sometimes in the spring and early summer, when the markets start up and the CSA starts rolling in, I experience this guilty sensation. I want to just dive into full-on local eating, but you can’t really eat greens, garlic scapes and strawberries for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s just not enough calories.

The nice thing about the deep winter is that you can count some serious local calories to be the backbone of a meal. Like potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squashes, beets, turnips, kohlrabi. Then fresh and green things are welcome additions.

So I have a bone to pick with consumers and with farmers/infrastructure builders. Consumers: it is not difficult to buy 50lbs of potatoes (for example) and tuck them away in a reasonably potato-friendly spot in your home. Farmers/People with Resources and Power: It would be even better if YOU invested in root cellars and stored the food for us. Then we could be sure that our carrots and onions were well preserved. And we could get our asses out to you, or you could get our turnips to us here in the city. [Mental blip: Perhaps we need municipal root cellars.]

Last bit of this for everyone: It’s not hard to eat locally and well in the winter. With events like the Wayland Farmer’s Market, it doesn’t even require the advance planning or upfront capital of a winter CSA.

CSA / Preserving+canning — 5 Comments
20
Dec 09

What we put by

I’m not going to lie: we’re feeling a little impressed with ourselves right now. We took the opportunity, on this first and perfect snow day, to assess how much food we have accumulated, frozen and canned over the summer and fall and to try to strategize about how best to make it last until next spring.We succeeded with the first task, but will happily take advice on the second. (Particularly: Rutabagas? We know nothing. Some of our carrots are a little damp. Is this OK? Is it a good thing?)

Here’s the final tally from our fridge, freezer, kitchen shelves and our foyer, which is very cold and very dark and serving as an excellent root cellar. The fruit and veggies herein came largely from our CSA through Red Fire Farm, which ended this week, and our winter CSA from Shared Harvest, which delivered three loads of mostly storage crop once a month, October, November and December. The rest came from assorted farmers’ markets, pick-your-own farms and our fish share through Cape Ann Fresh Catch.

In the fridge/foyer

• 50 lbs of potatoes
• 15 lbs of carrots
• 15 heads of garlic
• 8 rutabagas
• 7 lbs of parsnips
• 5 butternut squash
• 4 celeriac
• 4 turnips
• 3 popcorn cobs
• 2 large red cabbage
• 1 pie pumpkin
• 1 large green cabbage
• 1/2 bushel of onion
• 1/2 bushel of sweet potatoes

What we* preserved

• 12 qts of dilly beans
• 8 qts pickled cukes
• 8 qts of peaches
• 4 qts pickled carrots
• 4 pints of pepper jelly
• 4 qts peach chutney
• 3 qts of tomatilloes
• 3 jam jars of ground cherry jam
• 3 qts of tomatoes
• 3 pints of simple syrup•
• 2 pints of mediterranean chutney
• 2 qts pickled peppers
• 2 qts applesauce
• 1 qt + 2 pints of salsa
• 1 qt of brined tomatoes

In the freezer

• 7 cod fillets
• 7 lbs of beef (the meat is from Stillman’s)
• 6 quarts of strawberries
• 5 quarts of blueberies
• 5 lbs of spinach
• 4 qts applesauce
• 4 quarts of assorted hot peppers
• 1 qt garlic scape pesto
• 1 qt basil pesto
• 2 bags of green beans
• 2 qts of tomato sauce
• 2 pieces of mozzarella (from Fiore di Nonno)
• 2 lbs of cranberries (from Cranberry Hill)
• 1 quart of corn
• 1 qt of cod stock
• 1 chicken
• coupla smelts

Our preserving was rarely a solo act. We had generous support from Team Pickle.

Bulk / CSA / Preserving+canning / Updates — No Comments
13
Dec 09

Brilliant greens

bags

At one of the recent Shared Harvest Winter CSA distributions, where we are dutiful checker-inners and box movers, Gretta had some extra goodies for sale. But these smart people came early and bought ALL the kale. Something like 80 bunches.

This couple were there on behalf of their coop, where they live with 13 other people who have localvore sympathies. They planned to take all this home and process and freeze it for the coop’s use this winter.

They shared with us their plan to blanch the greens, then squeeze them into balls, freeze the balls on cookie sheets, then store the balls of greens in bags. We do this kind of flash freezing with all kinds of things (berries, ice cubes of pesto), but it had not crossed our minds to store greens this way. Brilliant.

Preserving+canning — No Comments
28
Sep 09

Pepper jelly, at last

We have been collecting peppers for weeks now with the sweet memory of last fall’s pepper jelly in mind. A small jar was gifted to us from our friends, a woman called Michal and a man called Jay. They work and live at this very special farm that does sort of extraordinary stuff in Monterey, Mass. And they grew, to our great fortune, a handsome crop of jalapenos in their personal garden whence this jelly was born.

But it has been no easy task locating a proper recipe for our own. Surely, we could have asked Michal and Jay for theirs. (They used the preserving book referenced in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle — the name escapes me, but the proportions were all different and, more importantly, our pepper collection was all different.) We found these bizarre recommendations on the interwubz, calling for 6 cups of sugar to every 1 cup of minced pepper (NO), others that encouraged the use of food coloring (WHY?) and approximately zero that offered flexible proportions in a pectin-free scenario (FUCK PECTIN). Seriously, people were preserving long before pectin was commercially produced. Plus, it costs money, its origins are mysterious and we had these perfect apples from Stillman’s in the kitchen — a natural source of pectin to use in its place.

In the end we pieced together our own recipe and are, presently, hoping for the best. Just an hour or so later, it appears to be setting.

Here’s what we did. You may do this too, but no guarantees.

Ingredients

Lots of bell peppers, of various colors and sizes. Once minced in our food processor, they totaled 4 cups

Minced habaneros (or anything hot, it seems) with the interior flesh and seeds removed — 1 cup (about 6)

3 WHOLE apples (cores and all), sliced

3 cups of sugar

4 1/2 cups of white vinegar

Throw everything in a pot. Bring to a boil. Let it simmer (on medium heat) for about 25-30 minutes, or until the apple starts to fall apart. It will not look like jelly yet! Meanwhile, get the canner boiling, prep your jars. Pour the mix in when the jars are hot, seal ‘em and process for 10 minutes. These quantities filled nine 8 oz jars with a tiny bit leftover. It’s in our fridge now. It’s pretty friggin hot, but also delicious.

Editor’s note: be mindful of your hands when dealing with the hot peppers. If you neglect to use caution, you will surely regret it later, during an intimate moment with yourself or someone else.

Community / Preserving+canning — 5 Comments
28
Aug 09

We Can Together (Like a Bunch of Grandmas

(Nice peaches. And kitchen towel.)

We’ve been preserving together, and it’s been great. “We” as in random collections of friends who care to do such things. Collectively, we’ve done cucumber pickles, dilly beans, and peaches and tomatoes are on the horizon. So is some sort of tomatillo salsa.

Earlier this year we attended a screening of Our Daily Bread, and afterward Jamey Lionette spoke to an unusually contrary crowd about the whys and wherefores of local/sustainable eating. In response to someone’s question about why in the name of God they would dedicate themselves to such a laborious drudge-fest, he spoke about people getting together to put up food, and the gist of it was, “Hey, I’m not asking people to work more. I’m suggesting that they work less. All I’m advocating here are people spending time together, having a few beers and canning a few tomatoes.”

He’s right. Getting together makes it a party, every time. And it makes it go SO fast.

Here’s some advice:

Get your shit together before this all goes down. Nothing kills the fun like not having enough new lids. Or jars. (Tags in Porter Square is the most reliable place we’ve found in the Cambridge/Somerville area for supplies.)
In pickling, be generous with garlic.
Beer should be cold and well-stocked, but there have been several instances of red wine and lemon soda on ice this month.
Dinner/Lunch should be a buffet of things like cheese, tomatoes, bread and pickles. All day snacking, plus your stove will be too busy to cook anything.
Get the canner boiling, like, the night before. They take forever to heat up and it’s no fun to be ready with everything else while you wait for the water bath to boil.
Assembly lines are a helpful concept.
We’ve gotten some bulk stuff through our CSA with Red Fire Farm, but ask your farmers at the markets around here for a good rate for and they are likely to give it. We scored $1 per pound peaches.

Please enjoy some scenes from the initial experiment in communal canning. Left to right: Team Pickle, Lunch, and Fin.

Preserving+canning — 3 Comments
24
Aug 09

Mediterranean chutney + eggplant smokes

Very suddenly this week and perhaps like many other CSA shareholders, we found ourselves with a glut of eggplant. Armed with a copy of “Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning,” we set out today to do something productive with it.

The result: five beautiful jars of Mediterranean Chutney.

More on that momentarily. But first, a word about eggplant. From The Wikipedia.

Eggplants are native to India.
18th Century imperialists named them eggplants because the cultivars of the day were actually white and yellow and it was an aptronym. These days, of course, British imperialists call them aubergines. It is unclear why American imperialists have not caught on.
Eggplants are berries. Their seeds, you may have noticed, are quite bitter. That’s because they contain tobacco — Eggplants are close relatives of tobacco plants.
In fact, if you had 20lbs of eggplant you would have the same amount of nicotine as one cigarette. We have noted this for future preserving projects and/or smoking cessation drug patents.

Mediterranean Chutney is simple and unintimidating: an excellent gateway into preserving.

What you will need:

Tomatoes (we used about 10 San Marzanos purchased from Grateful Farm at the Cambridgeport Farmers’ Market)
An onion or two
An eggplant or three (we used 2 1/2 medium sized)
Three cloves of garlic, at least
A zucchini or two
1 cup of vinegar
1/3 cup of brown sugar
Salt, pepper, red pepper, tarragon, rosemary, oregano, whatever you have on hand
Canning jars and lids

What you do:

Wash and chop the veggies. Put them in a large saucepan with the spices and boil over low heat. When everything is soft and well blended (after about 40 minutes or so) add the vinegar and brown sugar. You can keep it on the low heat until it looks like jam or until it’s more liquid-y. We gave it another 40 minutes or so, until it was somewhere inbetween.

Wash the jars and lids in boiling water. (We timed this so they were still warm when we were ready to load them up with chutney.) Leave about a quarter-inch of space at the top of each jar when you’re filling them. Put on the lid and the band — and tighten them. Let them cool on a counter and then store them in the fridge.

The recipe we’re using says the flavor will improve with age, but it doesn’t indicate how long they’ll last. Fingers crossed.

Addendum

We nearly used this eg gplant pickling recipe, posted on the interwubs by a Josephine Caravetta. Anyone with that many vowels in their name can surely be trusted and we may call on her next week. Please report back if you are inspired to try it.