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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Growing your own food is more popular than ever. But what do you do if you find yourself with a glut of beans, peas or carrots? How can you make the most of your garden produce and cut down on those trips to the supermarket? This book provides everything you need to make your home-grown produce last, covering fruit, vegetables, herbs and even eggs. Storing and Preserving Garden Produce For Dummies: * Covers the main methods of storing and preserving, such as clamping, cool storage, freezing, drying, salting, pickling, fermenting and preserving with sugar * Includes information on a huge range of produce - almost everything you could ever want to grow in your back garden * Explains what methods of storing and preserving are most suitable for each item of produce * Also contains a wealth of recipes to help you on your way to making the perfect jams, chutneys and pickles
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Seitenzahl: 644
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Storing and Preserving Garden Produce For Dummies®
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Table of Contents
Storing & Preserving Garden Produce For Dummies®
by Pammy Riggs
Storing & Preserving Garden Produce For Dummies®
Published byJohn Wiley & Sons, LtdThe AtriumSouthern GateChichesterWest SussexPO19 8SQEngland
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Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, West Sussex, England
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS, UK, without the permission in writing of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, England, or emailed to [email protected], or faxed to (44) 1243 770620.
Trademarks: Wiley, the Wiley Publishing logo, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, A Reference for the Rest of Us!, The Dummies Way, Dummies Daily, The Fun and Easy Way, Dummies.com and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-119-95156-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-95387-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-95388-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-95389-0 (ebk)
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Author
Pammy Riggs’ younger years were spent on Scottish farms where growing, storing and preserving – everyday parts of life – went on around her. Her teenage years were spent in a Georgian house in Wiltshire with over an acre of walled garden and orchards tended manically and efficiently by her father. Helping in the garden, orchard, apple loft and kitchen was expected and much storing and preserving knowledge rubbed off in an organic manner.
Always with a vegetable garden of her own, and now a 17-acre smallholding (www.providencefarm.co.uk) where home-grown sustainable food is the main focus, Pammy is an active member of the Transition Town movement. This movement has instigated the first Communal ‘Potato Plot’ for Tavistock TT, where successful group growing and harvesting of organic potatoes is hosted by the generous Laura at Tregillis Farm in Cornwall.
Believing that now is the time for getting reconnected with a more natural and creative life, Pammy’s website, www.providencefarm.co.uk, plans to open up the knowledge of the countryside and sustainability to a wider group. Pammy’s passion is to empower us all to get out from behind our computers and desks and get our hands dirty in the rich soil of life. This book is one step on the way to achieving that.
Author’s Acknowledgments
Firstly, my thanks go to the For Dummies team – especially Claire Ruston, Steve Edwards and Andy Finch. Also, to my sister, Di Quinn at Punch’s Pickles for sharing her lifetime of expertise, and to the Queens of Preserving – Mo Rice, Jill Gigg and Bathford Communty Shop – for their help.
My friends who shared their recipes and knowledge with me were: my husband and partner in preserving, Ritchie Riggs; Neil, my favourite seedsman at www.tamarorganics.co.uk; Arjen Huese, for special biodynamics info; Diana Lee, my herbalist friend, and her partner, Rob Meredith for supplying heritage seeds; Linda Travis of Westlake Apple Juice and Cider with her vinegar lore; Gill of www.bangorsorganic.co.uk for all things physalis and other recipes; Joy Moore for the original bean chutney recipe; John Bennett for remembering his Mum’s Marrow Rum; Jenny Brooks and Malcolm at www.hogsbot.co.uk for endless discussions around the subject; Mike Sealey, my Environmental Health Officer, for educating me in food safety; Rosie Beat for her technical review; and last but never least, my Mum’s old and tattered recipe books with all their memories attached.
Dedication
To the generations who taught us how.
Publisher’s Acknowledgements
We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our Dummies online registration form located at www.dummies.com/register/.
Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:
Acquisitions, Editorial, and Vertical Websites
Project Editor: Steven Edwards
Commissioning Editor: Claire Ruston
Assistant Editor: Ben Kemble
Development Editor: Andy Finch
Copy Editor: Charlie Wilson
Technical Editor: Rosie Beat
Recipe Tester: Emily Nolan
Nutritional Analyst: Patty Santelli
Proofreader: Kim Vernon
Production Manager: Daniel Mersey
Publisher: David Palmer
Cover Photos: © iStock / j Viktorija Kuprijanova
Cartoons: Ed McLachlan
Composition Services
Project Coordinator: Kristie Rees
Layout and Graphics: Carl Byers, Timothy C. Detrick, Lavonne Roberts
Indexer: Estalita Slivoskey
Special Help
Brand Reviewer: Jennifer Bingham
Publishing and Editorial for Consumer Dummies
Kathleen Nebenhaus, Vice President and Executive Publisher
Kristin Ferguson-Wagstaffe, Product Development Director
Ensley Eikenburg, Associate Publisher, Travel
Kelly Regan, Editorial Director, Travel
Publishing for Technology Dummies
Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher
Composition Services
Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services
Introduction
No doubt about it: growing your own food is hugely satisfying and great fun, which is why more and more people are digging up their lawns to make vegetable patches, building raised beds on them or becoming allotmenteers. Although watching nature’s cycle of growth and decay over the year is fascinating, seeing your lovingly home-grown crops going to waste is frustrating when all your fruit or vegetables are ready at one time and you can’t eat everything.
This book steps into the space between growth and decay with some simple and some slightly more involved methods to store and preserve your food and make use of it for longer. Our ancestors knew all about the importance of storing food, working out safe ways to preserve the fruits of their labours. Today, though, you’ve the advantage of modern appliances to help with home drying, freezing and preserving, and you can use this technology in conjunction with the wisdom of times gone by. People no longer build homes with apple lofts and root stores, but you can find ways to improvise whatever your situation.
About This Book
Storing and preserving food isn’t rocket science; with a bit of confidence and practice, this book helps you fill your store cupboards with your own home-made jams and chutneys. You need only the desire to experience your own home-grown food for as long as possible around the year to make a start. Some solutions are really simple: for example, save up a few brown paper bags and you’ve all the equipment you need to dry herbs and seeds. For those preserving methods that do require specialist equipment, I explain what you need and when. I also lead you through the processes and techniques that ensure that you do the best job with the produce you have, such as the following:
Choosing the best, freshest fruit and veg for preserving
Finding the most suitable equipment you already have in your kitchen and knowing which essential tools you need to buy
Recognising what’s safe practice in the preserving line and knowing when to discard any dubious results
Describing and explaining the main methods of preserving, all written in a fun-to-follow way
Providing recipes and methods of storage for commonly grown fruit and veg
Setting out extra knowledge for the more adventurous in spirit who like to get out and forage in wild places or even travel the world in search of food and preserving-related knowledge
I guide you from the garden to the store cupboard, upstairs to the apple loft and downstairs to the root cellar, including a trail of delicious preserve recipes and hints on how to organise your methods. With this book, you can make the most of your own lovely home-grown food and any that you glean from the wider world.
Conventions Used in This Book
The recipes in this book include preparation times, processing times and the yield you can expect from your efforts. When a recipe is a little less straightforward, I explain any unusual timings clearly. Here are details that apply to each recipe but aren’t repeated every time:
Always use vinegar with at least 5 per cent acidity.
Use salt with no additives: sea salt or preserving salt is best.
Use heavy-bottomed, preserving pans for all cooking.
Always use non-corrosive non-reactive materials (such as stainless steel, glass or ceramic equipment and utensils), because vinegar and fruit acids react with certain metals.
Use purpose-made jars, lids and new rubber seals when working with heat-treated preserves.
Note that times for heat-treating or boiling start when the liquid reaches the boiling point: you see this moment in the bubbling movement of the liquid.
Test for a vacuum seal on every jar when heat-treated foods cool down.
I use degrees Celsius (Fahrenheit) for temperatures, with Gas Marks for oven temperatures. Fan ovens may run at a slightly higher temperature: look at your appliance maker’s instruction booklet and adjust accordingly. Gas hobs react quicker when lowering temperatures than electric or stove heating units, which is particularly important when reaching the crucial setting point for jams and jellies; be sure to understand your equipment and work out a system of removing the pan safely from the heat if necessary.
I also use the following typographical conventions to make navigating your way around the book’s content even easier:
Italic highlights new terms that I define nearby.
Boldfaced text indicates the action part of numbered steps.
Monofont shows website addresses.
Foolish Assumptions
In writing this book, I made the following assumptions about you:
You view growing and preserving food as an honourable task that’s worth taking time over. You know that it gives you common-sense access to fresh food and exercise, and a way to relax and connect with ‘real’ life and similarly minded people.
You’re growing your own fruit and veg based around what’s available in an ordinary seed catalogue and in a natural way, using no poisonous chemicals.
You want to make the best of your outdoor efforts by preserving all the food you grow in a simple, straightforward way using additional ingredients you choose yourself (and therefore trust).
You’re familiar with basic food preparation and cooking methods and have access to an average kitted-out kitchen.
You haven’t made jams or other preserves before or recently and want basic, easy-to-follow instructions and knowledge to make sense of what you’re doing.
How This Book Is Organised
I organise this book into six parts. The first part gives you the basic message, encouraging you to embark upon the road to storing and preserving your home-grown produce. The next four parts run you through all the different methods that have traditionally been the backbone of every gardening year, with a visit to the orchard, soft fruit area and greenhouse if you have one. I take you round your vegetable beds, herb garden and hen house, and on a trip down country lanes for wild harvest foraging just like your grandparents did as a matter of course.
Along the way, I provide recipes for every taste, sweet tooths and savoury lovers, and if these recipes whet your appetite for foody adventures farther afield, you find the information to set you on the right track. Good luck for your next adventure!
Part I: Understanding Preserving
Sometimes you need a bit of motivation to start a new pursuit, and so Chapter 1 gives you plenty of that. You get to look at the kinds of equipment you need in Chapter 2 – most tools may already be in your kitchen and are inexpensive to buy anyway. If food safety worries you, Chapter 3 gives honest information about potential problems, but also the knowledge and tools to make informed judgements on the safety of the large variety of food you can preserve and the confidence to give it a go. I suggest starting with something low risk and easy, and building up from there. You can pop back to these three chapters for a reminder at any time.
Part II: Discovering Storing and Preserving Methods
This part contains the nitty-gritty of preserving, sometimes describing such basic methods that you wonder why you need a book at all (things are always simple when you know, right?) and at other times providing you with the enjoyment of discovering how a process works. I cover all the standard preserving methods: basic storage (Chapter 4); sweet and sour preserving techniques (Chapters 5 and 6, respectively); freezing (Chapter 7); drying, salting and modern vacuum-packing (Chapter 8); and making drinks (Chapter 9). With some experience behind you and when the logic of a method is clear, you can use this part to adapt recipes to the particular fruits, vegetables or combinations that your garden provides. A natural element like a garden doesn’t stick to a rigid timetable, so expect to deal with surprises.
Part III: Working with Home-Grown Fruits
This part describes, and provides a huge range of recipes for high-up orchard fruits such as apples (Chapter 10), lower-bush plants headed by berries and currants (Chapter 11) and a mouth-watering range of exotic-tasting fruiting vegetables, where tomatoes and aubergines conspire to bring the Mediterranean into your home (Chapter 12).
Part IV: Keeping and Eating Garden Vegetables
You can easily store your rooting plants with just a few guidelines; or take a more complicated approach if you prefer to transform them into unlikely and delicate heady brews (Chapter 13 has all the info). I also discuss beans (Chapter 14) and the best of the rest of other vegetables (Chapter 15), whether they go into the jam pan or chutney and relish jars. Throughout this part, I provide recipes for every occasion from a royal visit to a ploughman’s lunch.
Part V: Preserving and Using Herbs, Eggs and Wild Extras
I get a bit eccentric, a truly British trait, in this part. I show you how to save handfuls of your herbs for adding taste to meals and as a bit of gentle beauty treatment in Chapter 16. Hens are appearing at the bottom of lots of gardens (in pens usually!), so preserving eggs and understanding how to smooth out their flow is an important part of lots of lives nowadays (check out Chapter 17). Going outside your garden and into the countryside allows you to find free food treats and the recipes I include show you how to turn your gathered bounty into delicate treats (Chapter 18).
Part VI: The Part of Tens
No For Dummies book is complete without these short chapters. They help you succeed in your preserving endeavours (Chapter 19) and guide you around some common pitfalls (Chapter 20). Chapter 21 is for the adventurous among you, helping you to open doors to experiencing a wider world of food, growing and processing.
Icons Used in This Book
The following four icons appear throughout this book and point out specific aspects and information that you don’t want to miss.
Of course, this book is filled with great tips, but this icon directs you to a particularly useful hint or shortcut born from my experience, thus helping you to smooth the way to perfect preserving.
This icon indicates something that’s important enough to really commit to your memory.
When you see this icon, pay special attention: it helps you to avoid potential problems, keeps your food safe and helps your recipes succeed.
I keep the technical stuff to an absolute minimum in this book, but sometimes bulking out a method with deeper understanding is helpful. But skip these paragraphs if you’re impatient to get cracking with the hands-on material.
Where to Go from Here
I want you to be able to use Storing and Preserving Garden Produce For Dummies as a reference book of chapters that you can read in any order you like. If one aspect of a method is unclear in a recipe, simply flick to the appropriate chapter of Part II to get the method clear in your head.
If you’ve just gathered in your biggest harvest ever of one fruit or veg, use the comprehensive contents or index to go straight to the section you require. For example, if your crop is apples, visit Chapter 10 for recipes and pointers, read Chapter 6 if you fancy making chutney and check out Chapter 5 for jam-making information.
If you want to use this book while sitting by the fireside on a cold January evening studying a seed catalogue, cross-reference the different fruits and vegetables. I provide hints on good specific varieties for storing to take the hard work out of your decision-making and Chapter 21 contains innovative ideas for filling your pockets with free seeds.
If you spot a recipe that looks jolly tasty and want to get on with it, do so, but please flick to Chapter 3 first for a run through of safety procedures. This chapter covers basic safety practices, such as avoiding cross-contamination with raw meats and produce and keeping pets out of the kitchen, to help reinforce safe preserving and keep your family’s food safe.
Just remember that having fun and enjoying the fruits (and veg) of your own labour is the most important thing, whichever page you start on.
Part I
Understanding Preserving
In this part . . .
This part focuses on the reasons you may want to go down the route of storing and preserving the home-grown produce that you so lovingly tended throughout the year. After all, nature never stands still and no sooner is your fruit and veg ready to harvest than it begins to deteriorate. The chapters in this part motivate and encourage you to begin preserving, even if you have only basic kitchen equipment to hand. And because you often give some of your preserves away (which is all part of the tradition), having enough basic knowledge to enable you to feel confident in the safety aspects of preserving means that you can do so without worry.
Chapter 1
Experiencing the Good Life with Good Reasons
In This Chapter
Discovering good reasons for storing and preserving
Planning ahead and choosing wisely
Looking at the different ways to store and preserve
Deciding what works for you
Getting back to nature and growing your own vegetables has become fashionable these days and with good reason. Not many generations ago, humans had to preserve the food they grew in the clement months to feed them through the rest of the year. With modern shopping, storing and packing techniques (and the fact that most people now live in larger urban areas with less garden space), that knowledge hasn’t been passed on from kitchen to kitchen as it used to be . . . which is where this book comes in. It can even help you decide what to plant in the first instance, right down to the details about which fruit and veg varieties make best use of your space and time.
If you still need a bit of encouragement to set off on the preserving adventure, you can find it in this chapter because I provide some compelling reasons. I also summarise some of the different methods by which you can preserve your home-grown food and introduce you to the content of this book as a whole, to help you make the best use of all the information it contains.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
