Preserving food
There are several ways of doing this.
The general idea is to inhibit deterioration of the food by the action of bacteria. General categories include:
Wine making
Refrigeration.
Freezing.
Drying.
Pickles / chutneys
Sauces
Brining
Salting
Jams
Other natural preservatives
Unnatural preservatives
Heat processing
General
Wine making
You may have noticed that my favourite way of preserving fruit is making wines or flavouring vodkas. Not everything is suitable though. Also making wine from raw fruit is a skill that will take several years to master.
Refrigeration
Bacteria are slowed down considerably by reducing the temperature to 0C - +4C is difficult to do reliably without electricity.
Freezing
Bacteria are stunned into inactivity below -10C . Note that the bacteria are still alive. Freezing food in a nice big chest freezer is the easiest and best. Most of the nutrients are preserved and you can decide what to do with everything later. You pretty much need mains electricity for a fridge or a freezer. Bulky food like tomatoes are best reduced in size by boiling the water off and freezing into old yoghourt pots.
Drying
The bacteria cannot reproduce without water. Fruit, vegetables and fresh meat can be dried. There are electric driers available online for upwards of £40 but they use a minimum of 230 watts and that is too much for me. If you have a solid flue stove you can hang items near the chimney. Racks made of chicken wire or office fan guards can be used for larger amounts of produce. Dried produce needs to be stored in an air tight jar as they attract water back in. Dried vegetables can be used in soups etc. Dried fruit and candied peel are good for snacks or muesli. Every continent has a name for dried meat, biltong, jerky ETC. This can be really good especially if spice is added during the curing process. It also expands in your stomach so you won’t need much and drink plenty of water. Drying can be achieved by hanging produce near your chimney , using an electric food dehydrator . The are instructions for making a solar powered food dryer in “Preserves" by Dick Strawbridge .
Pickles and Chutneys
You will struggle to make pickles cheaper than the vile stuff that you can buy at discount stores. Pretty much the best you can hope for is to make nice food for the price of the cheaper ones. If a chutney recipe involves the likes of dried apricots , sherry or walnuts the chutney will be quite expensive.
Here are some of my favourite preserve recipes. They are loosely based on what is frequently reduced at the supermarket.
Pickled eggs are probably the easiest thing to pickle. This is a basic recipe, but I use way more spices in the vinegar.
www.allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/2043/pickled-eggs.aspx
Pickled onions
Preserves by Dick Strawbridge page 55
Pickled limes
www.deliaonline.com/recipes/cuisine/asian/oriental/pickled-limes.html
Spicy pickled garlic
www.allrecipes.com/recipe/pickled-garlic/
Swedish pickled herring. I use any white fish
www.honest-food.net/2011/03/08/swedish-pickled-herring/
Pickled spring onions
www.food52.com/recipes/17234-pickled-spring-onions
Pickled cucumber
Preserves by Dick Strawbridge page 55
Hot lemon pickle
Preserves by Dick Strawbridge page 56
Sweet pickle is what is commonly called sandwich pickle or Branston pickle. This online recipe has twenty two ingredients and is very prescriptive. I use whatever is available and it always turns out OK. Adding grated ginger at the last minute of cooking is an improvement.
www.cookipedia.co.uk/recipes_wiki/Branston_pickle_recipe
Elderberry chutney
www.hedgerowharvest.org.uk/hedge-recipes/item/109-elderberry-chutney
Rhubarb chutney. I don’t even believe that rhubarb is actually a foodstuff, but you can make an interesting chutney with it.
www.britishfood.about.com/od/eorecipes/r/Easy-Rhubarb-Chutney-Recipe.htm
Tesco’s pickled eggs and picked gherkin. £2.49 for six pickled eggs (41.5 pence per egg!) and they are nowhere near as nice as mine. The gherkins were £1.29. My pickled cucumber is cheaper and better.
Interpreting your pickle recipes
A lot of recipes call for you to grate, shred or slice a vegetable thinly, lay it in a colander and cover it in salt until morning. The purpose of this is to draw water out by osmosis. When the salt is washed off and the vegetables bottled in vinegar the osmosis is reversed.
Sauces
Tabasco sauce
This is £1.69 for 59 grams. The ingredients are "chilli , vinegar" . Pickle your chillies in vinegar. When they are soft push them through a sieve of crush them in a mortar and pestle. Then you have made you own tabasco sauce.
Reggae reggae sauce
Early version of this stated that the ingredients were "brown sauce 96%, tabasco sauce 4%". So you can make your own from cheap brown sauce and you own tabasco.
Chilli dipping sauce
There are more of these on the supermarket shelves than you can shake a stick at. The ingredients are sugar syrup, chillies, garlic , thickener and sometimes vinegar. I make mine by pulverising chilli and garlic in my mortar and pestle and mixing in some golden syrup.
Brining
Not my favourite method as the vegetables become limp and very salty. Salty diets are also a health concern. It is just about OK if you use the vegetables later in cooking another dish. Just don’t add any more salt! It only works for small vegetables which are preserved whole in the brine. Heat a litre of water add 100 grams of salt; continue heating and stirring until the salt is dissolved. That should be about 40C. Leave to cool and poor into a container marked "brine 10%". When you get some small vegetable such as string beans, small tomatoes etc. Wash them and put cram them into a jar. Fill up with brine until it covers the vegetables completely, poke it with a stick and jiggle to remove bubbles. Hold everything under the brine with a broken lollipop stick or similar. Put the lid on. The brine enters the vegetables by osmosis and they are preserved.
Salting
Raw unprocessed meat can be preserved by rubbing curing salt into the surface. If you curing pork you are making dry cure bacon. See Strawbridge in “further reading".
What is curing salt? Its 94% ordinary salt and 6% saltpetre. It may also be dyed brownish. Some butchers will sell it some pretend they don't know what it even is. Pooh pooh heads! Don't worry you can get it online.
Jams
I stopped eating wheat some years ago and lost three stone. Wheat has a hormone called leptin that stimulates your appetite (amongst other urges). Since bread is made of wheat I don’t have anything to put jam on. If you have an excess nice fruit and lack the urge to make wine, jam is always an alternative. If you want to keep it for a long time it will need to be heat processed in a pressure cooker like other preserves.
Interpreting your jam recipe
Jam needs pectin to set. If the fruit has not got enough natural pectin the recipe will include cooking apples and or pectin. Certo is the only brand I have used. You test to see if the jam will be thick enough when cool by dropping a bit onto a cold saucer and leaving it for a few minutes. Runny jam is no good so you should keep reducing it by more boiling. As with chutneys and pickles the less water you add at the beginning the less you have to boil off.
Other natural preservatives
Alcohol, syrup and oil can also be used to preserve produce. I have included these techniques for completeness, but apart from preserving fruit in brandy by making a rumtopf I haven’t any first hand experience.
www.food.com/recipe/rumtopf-traditional-german-fruit-preserve-beverage-140344
Unnatural preservatives
Preservatives. Potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate are available from homebrew shops and online. In wine making it is used to kill yeast so that you can add sugar without fermentation starting again.
I have used this for fruits and vegetables not for meat or anything riskier.
Directions for using potassium sorbate are available on Lance Armstrong’s website www.livestrong.com. Apparently potassium sorbate is approved of by the Food and drug administration. Unlike Mr Armstrong himself!
www.livestrong.com/article/196169-uses-for-potassium-sorbate
Heat preserving
Heat preserving kills any bacteria by heating the food and not allowing the bacteria back in. Once opened the food should be refrigerated and be eaten within a few days, just like if you had opened a can.
For this you will need some jars and a pressure cooker big enough to stand them upright in. The object of the exercise to cook the food throughout to 120 centigrade. You can preserve anything like this but soups and stews are best. Prepare the food as normal and when it nearly ready put 25mm of water in the pressure cooker and bring to the boil. Taste the food. If it doesn’t taste nice now it won’t taste nice when you open the jar. Ladle the food into a clean jar using a chutney funnel. Fill to the bottom of the neck. Screw the lid on and then unscrew it half a turn. Put the lid on the pressure cooker and bring it up to steam. The increased pressure brings the boiling point of water up to 120C. Let the pressure cooker cool down until you can open it. Wearing oven gloves hold the jar in one hand and the lid in the other. Unscrew the lid until you can feel it click on the threads then screw up tightly holding the safety button down. The button will click up again. As the jar cools the button will click in on its own. Recheck all your jars every few days. If any buttons have clicked out and you are sure this has happened in the last day or so you can still eat the food. Heat it until it is piping hot. Otherwise feed it to the chickens or throw it away. A decent can of stew costs upwards of 70 pence but you can make your own for much less .
Use jars that won’t fit in your pressure cooker or don’t have a safety buttons for other preserving methods.
General
I you have some perishable ingredients but perhaps have little time or lack the other ingredients you need the food can be preserved by cooking in a pressure cooker up to the point where it is hissing. Then turn it off and just leave it. Pressure cookers cook to 120c so all the bacteria are dead. If you take the lid off the whole lot needs re-sterilizing so if you have as many pressure cookers , as I do , you night need to label them .
The first step is to stop throwing jars away especially safety button jars that fit in your pressure cooker. Kilner jars look nicest but are expensive and very fussy to use. The medium sized jars are best for pickles and chutneys but its best to keep all sizes. Small ones can be used for pickled horse radish, big ones for gherkins or dried vegetables. So keep them all.
Sunlight will bleach most preserves and make them very unappetizing so keep preserves in a dark cupboard.
Vinegars
Vinegars are used in cooking and preserving foods. They preserve food because they are 5-6% acetic acid. There are different types of vinegar though.
Pickling vinegar is for making pickled onions/eggs etc. You generally prepare the vegetables, which may involve blanching and soaking in brine for a day, put them in a jar and poor the vinegar in. 1.14 litres for £1.49
Malt vinegar is what you add to pickles and chutneys. 0.568 litres for £0.49.
White wine vinegar is for more delicate pickles like pickled cucumber. Its 0.350 litres for £0.80
Cider vinegar is called for in some recipes. It’s not so different to white wine vinegar. Use your judgement.
A product described simply as "vinegar" is for putting on chips, not for pickling.
I have tried making white and red wine vinegar from my own wine. I scored 0 out of 10 and will try later.
Some vinegars are described as "whatever herb" vinegar. This is not "whatever wine" made into vinegar. It is a white wine made into vinegar then "whatever herb" is steeped in the vinegar for several weeks. Usually all the herb is removed and one strand added for display.