Preservation Link Roundup 8/18/10

I really appreciate that Well Preserved discusses in some depth the acidity problem in canning tomatoes (Well Preserved Tomato Sauce Recipe). Yes, the USDA is pretty conservative and you can get away with fudging their safety guidelines quite often. After all, your grandmother probably violated a number of their current rules and you're reading this, right? But,

The spoilage risk is very real. The family who taught ours lost an entire batch (around 200 jars) due to low acid and things began to ferment in bottle. They lost an entire weekend of work, a virtual crop of tomatoes and sauce for the year.

The Atlantic Food Channel has an excellent article on various ways to preserve venison, from curing to corning and, of course, making sausage (both fresh and fermented) (Venison Sausage: A Whole Different Animal). Bonus for Southern California readers, the deer was shot on Catalina Island.

Another cured meat (and a favorite of mine) is pâté. The Kitchn provides a few links on the subject (Do You Have a Good Recipe for Homemade Pâté?). Be sure to check out the comment section for additional links. If you've never made pâté or a rillette or similar, I highly suggest giving it a try. They can be surprisingly easy to make and are a wonderful side dish or appetizer. And you can play with flavors quite a bit. I make my own teriyaki-flavored "spam" for use in homemade musubi.

Food in Jars has a good post on substituting other salts for pickling salt (if you can't easily find it) (Canning 101: On Substituting Salt in Pickling). At the end of the day, there are only a few things you need to know:

1. Substitute by weight. 3/4 of an ounce per tablespoon for pickling salt. Simply weigh out the other salt.
2. Make sure the salt is pure. No iodine or free flow agents. The only ingredient listed should be salt.
3. Take into account that other salts won't dissolve as quickly as pickling salt.

If you can't find pickling salt, popcorn salt makes an excellent substitution. You can also process kosher salt into something resembling pickling salt by pulsing it in a food processor a few times.

The Blueberry Files goes through the steps of pressure canning beets (Pressure Canning Beats). Beets are an excellent candidate for pressure canning, since they generally survive the process quite well. Of course, if you don't have a pressure canner you can pickle beets and can them with a boiling water bath. There are plenty of recipes out there.

A Nutritionist Eats is getting into canning and has a Ball Canning Discovery Kit to giveaway (Canning with Lucia). Visit her blog for information on winning the kit.

I can't emphasize enough how canning works best as a social event. Feast After Famine learns canning from some neighbors at a canning party, "replete with wine and cheese and good cheer... "(Canning Party). Why not invite some neighbors over to learn canning from you?

Tigress in a Jam takes advantage of the fantastic stone fruit out there to make a lovely preserve using summer savory (an inspired choice) and white pepper (Nectarine Preserves with Summer Savory & White Pepper).

I've got mixed feelings about white pepper. It is generally used in dishes as a substitute for black pepper when you don't want little black flecks in your dish, such as in white sauces, lightly colored soups or mashed potatoes. However, there are distinct flavor differences. To me, black pepper is fruitier and more well-rounded, while white pepper is a little more directly spicy with less depth of flavor. More importantly, however, I think that white pepper suffers more from being pre-ground than black pepper. Frankly, I hate pre-ground white pepper. I dislike pre-ground black pepper, but can't stand the white pepper version. So, please, use freshly ground white pepper when you do use it.

Canning seems to get all the press, but sometimes it is important to remember that freezing is an important aspect of food preservation. Putting By freezes their bell peppers (they don't can well by themselves) (Bell Peppers). I like everything they did, except place the pepper strips into gallon ziploc bags. You should usually freeze in quantities that you would use. That way you don't have defrost/refreeze what you haven't used. So, instead of gallon ziplocs, why not quart or pint bags? And I can't emphasize this enough when freezing: label, label, label! When you freeze a lot of stuff, it will save many headaches months later.

Freezing is great, but they seem to fill up quite quickly, so back to canning it is. Putting By also has a post on canning pasta sauce (Pasta Sauce). They use those commercial square-ish pasta jars that I know many people have around the house. I know many people who use them for canning successfully, but I do have to point to the FAQ from the companies page:

Can I reuse the Classico® jar for home canning?
No. A coating is applied at the glass plant to reduce scratching and scuffing. If scratched, the jar becomes weaker at this point and can more easily break. This would increase the risk of the jar breaking when used for canning. Also, the lighter weight of our current jar could make it unsafe for home canning.

Do as you will, just passing on the information.

The LA Weekly's Squid Ink blog reviews yet another new canning book, Canning for a New Generation (Cookbook Review: Canning For A New Generation).

The book might as well be called Canning and Preserving For An Eager But Sometimes Lazy (Or Just Plain Busy) Generation. And that's exactly why we think it's pretty great.

Preservation Link Roundup 3/18/10

Well Preserved learns some lessons from something that will happen to every canner, eventually (I Coulda Been a Contenda…Broken Mason Jars…). There is only one common jar breakage scenario I would add ... processing in a boiling water bath without a rack to keep the jars off of direct heat. WP also has some great tips on what to do after you have a jar shatter.

Rufus and Clementine provide another lesson for cannners - label those jars (CurseWorthy Cooking | That Mystery Marmalade).

I made a peanut butter and spiced citrus marm sandwich. I got so excited and angry to the point of letting the expletives fly mid-bite. It was ecstasy in my mouth and I still don’t know how to get it back again.

The minimum you should put on a label is the name of the preserve and the date. I make a habit of putting the ingredients (in order of weight) and the processing time. Recently, I've also taken to add the source of the produce ... such as "Mud Creek Ranch Citrumelo Marmalade." Keeping a preserving journal (paper or electronic) is also a very good idea, especially if you are experimenting with recipes.

Rhubarb is sometimes called "pie plant." I think it should be called "preserving plant."

The LA Weekly's food blog, Squid Ink, notes that some beautiful rhubarb is showing up at the local markets in their weekly Farmers Market Report (What's in Season at the Farmers Markets: Rhubarb). I saw some amazing looking rhubarb at the Santa Monica market yesterday. By itself, with a variety of fruits (not simply strawberry) in a jam, or in a compote (sublime), rhubarb is an excellent addition to your preserving repertoire. Its tartness is a great match for the high sugar content of many preserves.

The New York Times' Minimalist Cook explains, simply, how to thicken yogurt into any consistency from Greek to cheese (A Recipe Secret Wrapped in a Towel). Save that whey! Use it for fermentation or drink it (high in protein and probiotics).

Food in Jars has opened an Open Sky store (Find Food in Jars at Open Sky). Her store is here: OpenSky: Food in Jars.

Tigress in a Jam is excited to soon receive Ashley English's new preserving book Homemade Living: Canning & Preserving with Ashley English: All You Need to Know to Make Jams, Jellies, Pickles, Chutneys & More. Tigress also lists a bookshelf worth of new preserving books coming soon (A Lot O' New Preserving Books!). Which ones are worth getting? Who knows at this point.

Preservation Link Roundup 2/12/10

As anyone who knows me knows ... I am a huge fan of pickles. So how excited was I that I could express my fandom on Facebook? Very. Express your fandom: Can this Pickle get More Fans than Nickleback?.

The Kitchn, has a good idea for keeping your freezer nice and full of a variety of home frozen meals without hitting the frozen foods aisle in the supermarket (Great Idea! Start a Freezer Meal Cooperative).

A group of six (or more) people decide on a certain amount of meals for a six-week period. Angie's group does 12 meals. Then each person prepares two of the meals, and freezes enough for all six people in the group. (It's obviously a lot easier to prepare and freeze a lot of one or two recipes, rather than 12 recipes!)

Then they distribute the frozen meals among themselves, and everyone has a frozen yet homemade meal for their family twice a week.

Ah, convenience! One of the wonderful things about food preservation plus, in this case, community ... another benefit of food preservation if you share it with others.

Food Safety News reports on a new food preservation technique developed at Washington State University (New Technology Extends Food Shelf Life).

Juming Tang, a professor in the WSU Department of Biological Systems Engineering, led a team of industry, university, and U.S. military scientists to create this technology. The outcome not only results in food with a longer shelf-life, but also food with better flavor and nutritional value when compared to more traditional food processing methods such as canning....

The team's Microwave Sterilization Process technology submerges the packaged food in pressurized hot water while concurrently heating it with microwaves at a frequency of 915 MHz--this frequency penetrates food much more deeply than home microwave ovens. This combination eliminates food pathogens and spoilage microorganisms in five to eight minutes and produces foods with much higher quality than conventionally processed products.

It doesn't sound as if this technique will be reaching the home soon, if ever, but I like keeping up with food preservation news.

Dancer and local foods activist Leda Meredith has a guest post on the Farm to Table blog on how food preservation and local foods go together (Why Food Preservation is an Important Part of Eating Local and Two Ways to get Started). She's preaching to the choir. I also like that she has a recipe for a fermented fruit chutney, something I've never tried, but will now.

Delilah Snell visits a friend's mother's garden and kitchen and helps in making some fermented dills and lemon curd made with agave syrup rather than sugar (A Rainy Afternoon with Joanne - Lemon Curd Recipe). The curd isn't for canning, but can be kept in the refrigerator or longer in the freezer. There are cannable curds, but because they contain butter and eggs (generally a no-no in canning), their shelf-stable life is only 2-3 months.

My curds usually don't last that long, so I don't bother canning them.

Preservation Link Roundup 2/8/10

Tres cool. Tres tres cool. The Kitchn has discovered a versatile set of lids for mason jars that can turn them into even more useful containers (Jar Tops: Universal Lids for Mason Jars):

These jar caps can be screwed on to nearly any standard-sized jar to create a pitcher, an oil or vinegar cruet, a creamer, and a sugar or cocoa shaker. Each set includes:

• 1 long-handled cap
• 1 oil & vinegar cap
• 1 cocoa shaker cap
• 1 creamer cap
• 1 sugar shaker cap

Go take a look at the lids ... available in charcoal and green - $25 a set from Unica Home.

Local Food Cleveland hosts a working group (Community Kitchen and Incubator Project) dedicated to planning and funding community kitchens, particularly in order to:

a.) enable local community gardeners to have a space where they can work on food preservation
b.) provide educational opportunities -- food safety, sanitation, canning, preserving

Why doesn't LA have at least a working group planning a community canning center?

Ideas in Food, a brilliant blog about experimentation with new and/or unusual cooking techniques, has been playing with their pressure cooker again - this time to make a blonde roux (Roux in a Jar). This isn't for long term storage, but simply another use for cans and a pressure canner. Making a consistent roux can be difficult, especially if you've got a lot of other cooking going on at the same time. I usually make my roux in a dutch oven in a regular oven ... but since I've only got one oven, that can be a pain. I'm definitely going to give this new method a try.

Ideas in Food has also "toasted" milk solids in a jar (Toasted in a Jar). Again, this is not a canning recipe, but rather, a technique utilizing Mason jars and a pressure canner. Their article also suggests some other potential uses for this technique. I'll have to give some a try.

Prairie Daisy Handspun, a ranch wife, among other things, has a short posting on making homemade baking mixes in canning jars for convenience purposes (Baking Mixes).

"A pickle on every plate," I've been known to say. Kevin West apparently agrees, at least when it comes to BBQ (BBQ Pickles). As a Southerner, Kevin knows what he is talking about:

Down in Texas cow-country, they slather slabs of beef in a complex sweet-sour tomato sauce and cook it in a smoker until the exterior is charred and sticky It's a good way to eat, but to my mind such barbeque calls for something tangy to cut through the sweety-fat flavors.

And that, of course, is where the pickles come in ... Kevin had both pickled peppers and turnips.

One more note on BBQ. As Kevin alludes, South Carolina BBQ sauces tend towards the vinegary. I suppose you could use plain vinegar for such a sauce, but why not base the sauce on left over pickling brine ... I'd use some from those pickled peppers. Call this use #48 for left over pickling brine.