The Beginner's Guide to Preserving Food at Home - Janet Chadwick [7]
Miscellaneous Items You Probably Already Own
A set of glass measuring cups is useful for measuring and pouring hot jellies, thin sauces, sugar syrups, and brines. They have the advantage of being safe for the microwave. Likewise, it’s handy to have more than one set of measuring spoons, particularly when you are measuring a lot of different ingredients for pickles and relishes.
Final Thoughts
If you were to ask me what equipment I considered indispensable in my harvest kitchen, I would answer without hesitation: my freezer, dishwasher, food processor, hand-cranked strainer, and blender. I purchased each of these appliances as soon as they became available for home use, and I can assure you that over the years, they have paid for themselves many times over.
A dishwasher is one of the best time-saving appliances that you can invest in. It will wash several batches of canning or freezing jars at once and keep them hot until needed. Also, dishwashers are helpful with the everyday cleanup chores that need to be done during all seasons.
A dehydrator for less than $100 is a good alternative to a freezer, but a freezer allows you to save time and produce a more palatable end product.
Many more gadgets and appliances are available on the market. Most are unnecessary, but occasionally, something good comes along. If you find an item that looks like it might work for you, and you can afford it, give it a try. After all, it’s the fun of experimenting that takes our daily lives out of the ordinary.
tips If you cannot afford some of the larger pieces of food processing equipment, you might consider getting together with two or three friends and sharing the cost. This arrangement will mean that you must either stagger harvest dates or plan to process foods together in sort of a mini-cooperative.
As you buy new kitchen appliances, put the directions for assembly and use, parts order slips, and warranties in a drawer; or make up a loose-leaf binder with them, and put it with your cookbooks. This action will save time when using these appliances for the first few times, to say nothing of the aggravation that comes from looking for these papers when they are scattered all over, or when you need to have the appliance repaired.
CHAPTER 2
Tips, Hints, and Other Shortcuts
THE BEST WAY TO PRESERVE FRUITS and vegetables is to pick them at the peak of their maturity and get them from garden to freezer or dehydrator or canner immediately. However, given our busy daily schedules, this is almost impossible for most of us. I emphasize “almost” because, with proper advance planning, you can find the time to preserve everything your garden produces. “But,” you say, “all the planning in the world won’t prevent the green beans from ripening in the middle of the week when I have the least amount of time. Then what do I do?” The following pages contain all the time-saving tips I have gathered during my years of preserving fresh fruits and vegetables.
Ten Harvesting Tips
Timing planting. If you stagger the planting dates of vegetables, they won’t all be ready at the same time. This will make it easy to harvest and process small batches of vegetables frequently in short blocks of time.
Timing picking. Vegetables picked late in the afternoon or early in the evening (with a few exceptions) will keep better. They have been manufacturing natural sugars and nutrients all day; once the sun goes down, they will use up part of these sugars and nutrients and are at their low ebb early in the morning.
Quality. Pick only the best vegetables for storing. Use bruised or less perfect produce for daily meals.
Avoid bruising. When picking produce, handle with care to prevent bruising.
Morning picking. Berries keep better if they are picked early in the day.
Shallow containers. When picking berries, collect the fruit in small containers to