It's week #1 of the new challenge at Nourished Kitchen: Preserving Summer's Bounty! We've had a great response to the challenge with several hundred real food enthusiasts banding together to preserve summer's harvest (many of them have listed their names and blogs here so check them out!). Better yet, we're putting up the harvest entirely without our hot water baths and pressure canners this month; instead, we're taking back the old-school traditional methods of food preservation.
Our methods:There's many, many methods for preserving food without canning; however, in this challenge we're focused on only a simple handful: freezing, sun drying, salt-curing, oil-curing and fermentation. Each one of these methods helps to maintain nutrient content better than the process of hot water or pressure canning.
How it Works
Each Monday evening, you'll receive a newsletter like this one outlining a basic technique for preserving food. This week, our focus is fermentation. Your mission is to try the technique in your own kitchen using your garden's vegetables or fresh produce from your local farm or market.
Then report back to Nourished Kitchen the following week letting everyone know how well you fared. For a little incentive, participants who check-in on the dedicated thread once a week will be eligible for a prize at the end of the month. Let us know where you succeeded, where you struggled and how much you managed to put up!
Support & Community
In the mean time, head to Nourished Kitchen's Forums and check in on the brand-new Preserve the Bounty thread. Introduce yourself, let us know a little bit about you and just how you got interested in food preservation. We can also help to answer questions and troubleshoot issues (like ... what happens when it rains and you've planned to sun dry tomatoes?)
Food preservation is a lot easier with more hands in the kitchen, so don't forget to ask a friend to join you in the challenge. Or, if you blog, post about it and elicit the support of readers and other folks who might be interest in traditional food preservation methods.
Fermentation, the practice of strategically allowing beneficial bacteria to transform foods we eat into rich colonies of microbes, provides us with many of the foods we've come to love. Consider sauerkraut, cucumber pickles, cheese, sourdough bread, lox, cured meats and yogurt.
Fermentation is almost a magical effort on behalf of beneficial microbes. With minimal effort, a teeny bit of luck and a lot of patience, these microscopic do-gooders will change sweet to sour and make fresh foods, in all their vitamin- and enzyme-rich glory, last for years. I have a quart of preserved lemons in my fridge that is two and a half years old, and still vibrantly fresh.
Fermentation was born of practicality - a way to preserve the harvest of summer well into the deepest and darkest days of winter which may be why fermented foods play such an enormously important role in the traditional culinary practices of cold-climate cultures. Germans revel in sauerkraut, Koreans in kimchi and Russians in sour beets and kvass.
To prepare a basic ferment you need four essential items, and a fifth only if you like to inocculate your ferments with a starter: a vegetable, unrefined sea salt, a wooden spoon, a crock or fermentation device (see sources) and starter culture (see sources), if you like.
Preparing a vegetable ferment is simpler and less scientific than some writers would have you believe; afterall, our foremothers didn't have the resources to track acidity or precisely measure ingredients. Essentially, you'll need enough vegetables (whole or, preferably, shredded) to fill a gallon jar, a handful of unrefined sea salt and starter culture which is helpful if you're fermenting whole vegetables (like cucumber pickles) where the surface area is greater.
Mash your shredded vegetables in your crock with a wooden spoon, sprinkling generously with salt until they release their juices. Those juices will combine with the salt to create a brine that should submerge your vegetables, weight down the vegetables in your crock or use a carboy in your fermentation device and allow them to ferment at room temperature for at least a week and about a month for longer ferments. Once fermentation is more or less complete, place the fermented vegetable in individual jars and store in a root cellar, frige or other cold area. A good ferment can last for years.
Fermented Recipes to Try:
While the above simple method can be used with nearly any vegetable, if you feel like you need a little bit of a nudge in the right direction, you might want to give this recipes a try.
In case you missed them, here's some goodies from the archives at Nourished Kitchen.
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