Preserving the Harvest

As the summer winds down, I’ve been filling my crisper, root cellar and freezer with bushels of the bounty my garden, family’s garden and local farm market has to offer. Fruit and vegetables, like beer, taste best fresh. They also taste best locally grown – heirloom and farm fresh varieties tend to be grown for taste as opposed to simply transport and storability. However, no matter how many good foods came into fruition this past month or so, we’re all limited to how much of them we can eat. Greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, peaches and now apples, pears and squash; it seems like you’ve just arrived and already the weather is cool and your harvest is nearing its end. Human culture is based on this seasonal change, and before Trans- national and continental refrigerated transport, everyone was required to eat “seasonally”.

Nobody, however, was happy with just squash for four months of the year, so techniques such as freezing, drying, fermenting, pickling, salting and canning were slowly developed and perfected by the world’s cultures for preserving and storing the harvest for the long winter months ahead. As kitchen authority Harold McGee writes, “Fruits and vegetables can be preserved indefinitely by killing the living tissue and thus inactivating its enzymes, and then making it either inhospitable or unavailable to microbes.” Peoples of the past utilized the natural preserving qualities of salt water, dark caves, lake ice or simple holes in the ground to achieve this end. Today, canning and fermenting would allow me to savor my modest harvest over the darker months to come.

To get started canning, gather the necessary knowledge and supplies (the university extension publication found at: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/pdf/pnw/pnw355.pdf is an excellent guide.) Minimally, you’ll need a burner, enamel canning pot, jars and lids and canning salt along with the various spices called for by the recipes. Almost anything can be canned for prolonged preservation. I decided to make some simple tomato sauce from my neighbor’s excess Roma tomatoes, also Colorado Hot Mix, banana pepper rings and bread and butter pickles which would preserve my green, red and hot peppers along with small cukes from the market. The process is simple: wash and prepare the vegetables, heat with spices on the stove and ladle into hot jars. Secure the top on the jars (making sure to wipe the contact lip clean) and process in boiling water for the time designated by the recipe (usually about ten minutes). As the jars are removed, the contents cool and compress, vacuum sealing the lid. Throw the ones that don’t seal into the fridge and eat them first. Wait a few weeks for the flavors to meld and enjoy!

Beyond hot pack canning, my next step was to try fermenting some food. Pickles and cabbage for sauerkraut, two of my favorite foods, were currently cheap and abundant. To ferment pickles or cabbage, the vegetables are submerged in acidic salt brine which inhibits the growth of unwanted microbes. Lactic bacteria naturally residing on the vegetable’s skin, however, go to work fermenting the vegetable’s sugars into lactic acid, carbon dioxide and alcohol. McGee explains, “(lactic bacteria) leave most of the plant material intact, including its vitamin C (protected from oxidation by the carbon dioxide they generate); they often add significant amounts of B vitamins; and they generate new volatile substances that enrich the food’s aroma.” A whiff of my week-old sauerkraut and I knew exactly what McGee was getting at. Pungent and sweet veggie fumes now slowly seep up from my basement and trips to the kegerator inevitably end up with a fermented dill pickle sampling.