It’s not just that I grow everything under the sun; I am also a prolific
preserver, canner, and fermenter. I take summer harvesting seriously
and consider it a real failing to have to buy produce at a grocery store
between summer and February. Yet, I am always looking for ways to make
that process easier. I have tried it all, from freeze-drying to
dehydrating to water preservation, and while I believe in preserving
food, you also have to eventually eat it, so preserving the taste is at least as important. While there are all kinds of ways you can preserve your summer vegetables, here’s my recommended ways to do so—and why.
Stop freezing tomatoes, and do this instead
Yes,
peeling tomatoes is a grind—but freezing your tomatoes to avoid peeling
them is a bad idea. The whole point of preserving your tomatoes is to
ensure you have delicious, homegrown tomatoes to work with come winter,
and freezing them ends up changing the texture in an unpleasant way.
Even worse, it changes the taste, making it mealy and lacking in
sweetness. Even when I’m chucking tomatoes into soups,
stews, or sauce, I worked hard to grow those tomatoes and want them to
be as flavorful as possible. There are ways to more easily preserve
tomatoes and skip the painful peeling process, and I have two of them.
First,
don’t peel them at all: Slice them in half, put them in a large
stockpot and crush enough of them with your hands to cover all of the
tomatoes in tomato juice. Allow the tomatoes to simmer for four to five
hours. Let it cool, then pass the mixture through a food mill. A food
mill will take fifteen minutes per forty pounds of tomatoes, and you end
up with gorgeous passata, which can be canned.
Passata is a traditional Italian pureed, strained tomato sauce, but has
no other ingredients. You can use it in almost every way you would
peeled, whole tomatoes. A second method is to halve the tomatoes and lay
them cut side down on a cookie sheet and roast them until a black spot
appears in the middle of each tomato skin. Remove the sheet and
immediately pluck the skins off with a pair of tongs. Then you can
continue canning them as peeled tomatoes.
If you're going to freeze tomatoes (which again, I don't recommend),
cook the tomatoes first instead of freezing whole, raw tomatoes. Cooking
the tomatoes preserves the flavor, color, texture, and vitamins in the
vegetables, as well as removing almost all bacteria. Make sauce or
paste, and then pack it into freezer bags or vacuum-sealed bags, and
remove as much air as possible from the bags.
Frozen peppers can be fantastic
I
always plant too many peppers, and they don’t can well unless you
pickle them, but that means you have limited applications for cooking.
Last year, I discovered they freeze beautifully and defrost well—if you
roast them first. I found this was most easily accomplished on a grill.
Get your grill to a high temperature, and once it's hot, lay all the
peppers in one layer on the grill. Depending on the size of the pepper,
they will take between 5-15 minutes to char on one side. Turn all the
peppers over and allow them to char on the second side. Turn the grill
off, remove the peppers, and place them in a paper grocery bag, folding
the top over. Let the peppers sit for twenty minutes to steam in the
bag. Now lay the bag down on the table, and use your hands to agitate the bag
against the peppers. This will peel the loose pepper skins away. At
this point, you can easily pluck the stems off the pepper, taking most
of the seeds with it, and toss them.
Now, lay all your peppers in
a single layer on a cookie sheet lined with some parchment paper and
par-freeze them for thirty minutes. This will freeze them just enough
that they won't stick together in a big block in a bag. Place them in a
freezer bag. It's best to use a vacuum sealer for this, because in a
freezer, air is the enemy. If you don't have a vacuum sealer, try to get
out as much air as you possibly can. I keep these in the front of my
freezer, on the door, so they're easy to grab while I'm cooking.
The best ways to preserve berries
The
most obvious way to preserve fruit is to make jam from it; if you eat a
lot of jam, this is a perfect solution. You can go overboard and make too much
jam, though. After you've made as much as you'll eat over the next two
years, you should freeze the rest of your fruit in whole pieces. The key
here is to par-freeze it so you don't end up with a big block of fruit
you can't separate. Place your clean strawberries, pitted cherries,
blackberries, and the like on a cookie sheet with a sheet of parchment
on it. Freeze the berries for an hour, then put them into resealable
bags. Reusable vacuum bags are a great solution to suck the air back out each time you take some out.
A winter full of fried eggplant
Eggplant is a tough one because simply cooking it doesn’t save it from becoming mush in the freezer. The
solution is going one step further—breading it seems to insulate the
eggplant and make it usable: Cut it into rounds, salt and drain it, then
use an egg wash, flour, and breadcrumbs and fry it, then drain the
fried rounds on a paper towel. Once cool, take the fried rounds and
freeze them. I place them between sheets of parchment paper, which makes
it easy to pull out what I need from the freezer during the winter
since they won't stick together. These rounds can be used in dishes like
lasagna and eggplant parmesan.
Can pumpkin, don’t freeze it
You can
freeze raw pumpkin, but it loses its texture and some of the sweetness.
You’re probably going to use it in a pie anyway, so this might not
bother you, but it did bother me. If you’re going to freeze it, roast it
first, by splitting your pumpkin in half or quarters, removing the
seeds, placing the pieces on a baking sheet cut side up, and baking at
350°F until you can insert a knife easily into the flesh (40-60
minutes). At that point, you can scoop the flesh away from the peel,
place the pumpkin in a freezer bag (or a vacuum sealed bag, if you have
it), with absolutely no air around it. A better solution, though, is
canning it.
Canning pumpkin has to be done a very specific way to be considered safe by the USDA: You can’t can the mash—only raw, cubed pumpkin. You need to use a pressure canner, too—you can’t use an open kettle
method. But since you're just canning the pumpkin in water, it won't
change the taste of the pumpkin like freezing will, and since you only
use pumpkin once or twice a year, I believe it's better for it to sit on
a shelf out of the way than take up precious freezer space.
How to preserve peas
With
peas, there are only two ways to go: dehydrated or frozen. Plenty of
people can peas, and in my opinion, they taste no better than store
bought, which is to say, not great. Dehydrated peas can be dusted with
salt or wasabi powder and turned into snacks, and dehydrators aren’t
expensive anymore. If you’re going to freeze peas, the
key is to blanche them. Raw vegetables lose flavor, color, and texture
quickly in the freezer, and blanching only takes a few minutes. Get a
rolling boil going, drop your clean peas in for thirty seconds (no
longer), then plunge them into an ice bath to stop the cooking. Pack
them into freezer bags—if you can vacuum-seal them, even better.
How to preserve herbs
If you’re
looking to preserve herbs, I advise skipping the dehydrator. Hanging
them to dry isn't a better solution, as they tend to attract dust and
even mold if the air in the room isn't dry enough. A
better solution is to microwave herbs between two pieces of paper towel
in ten-second bursts—you’ll find they dry, but they retain most of their
color. Once they’re fully dry, pack them into vacuum-sealed bags and
store them out of the sunlight. An alternative solution for herbs like
garlic, turmeric, ginger, galanga, and horseradish is to dice them and
freeze them with water into tiny ice cubes. I like to use silicone ice cube trays,
and pack them as full as possible with the finely chopped herbs, using a
spoon or spatula. Fill with water to cover the herbs. Toss those cubes
into a bag, and keep the bag near the front of the freezer so you can
easily grab them. You’ll find yourself using garlic and
ginger more often if you don't have to peel and chop it—and in the case
of horseradish, this type of preservation is the only one that will
keep your root spicy (and only for a few months, such is horseradish).
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