Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth (24 page)

Canning

Canning takes equipment, know-how, time, and fossil fuel. It also heats up your kitchen in the hottest time of the year. Nevertheless, that’s the method of preserving that most people know about, besides freezing.
I won’t be talking about freezing because it requires continuous electricity to keep the food preserved, and if the electricity goes off the food would be lost. Recognizing the need to educate the public about safe methods, the National Center for Home Food Preservation was established in 2000. If you want to learn more about canning you can find the USDA
Complete Guide to Home Canning
³
as a free download on their website. This book is also available to order as a print copy
⁴
(not free). Available as a book to buy is
So Easy to Preserve
,
⁵
which has information on canning, freezing, and drying. Information from this book is available as fact sheets to download for free. Every homestead kitchen needs a good comprehensive reference and I highly recommend these books, particularly if you are just learning. I’ll limit my remarks here to how to use less energy while canning.

You will discover that there are two types of canners. A water bath canner is a big pot with a rack in the bottom. You fill it with enough water so that the boiling water comes an inch above the jars. This type of canning is for high-acid food, such as pickles, fruit, jams and jellies, and tomatoes. A pressure canner is more expensive than a water bath canner, requires less water, and is for preserving low-acid food, such as vegetables and meat. When you open a jar of low-acid canned food (vegetables and meat) you should boil it uncovered for ten minutes before eating, to guard against botulism.

Pressure canners are often advertised by how many quarts they hold. That means how much they hold if the pan was filled with liquid. A six quart pan holds six quarts of liquid, not six quart jars to can. I mention that because I’ve seen store displays with canning equipment where the pressure canner on display was actually a pressure cooker and would only hold a few pint jars. That’s okay if you want something to pressure cook meals with and occasionally put something up in pints, but if you are doing any amount of canning, buy one that will hold at least seven quart jars.

The easiest way to get started is with water bath canning. When I first started canning I put up pickles, jam, peaches, applesauce, and tomatoes using my water bath canner. After a few years I bought a pressure canner. I grew potatoes and canned some because I wanted to preserve them
for the winter. I didn’t know how to store them at the time. Potatoes and carrots take longer than other vegetables to can, using more energy. I don’t do that anymore. My winter potatoes come from stored supplies and my winter carrots are harvested fresh from the garden.

Besides snap beans, I can tomato products, particularly tomato soup, to have as a convenience food — heat and eat for lunch. I make all our spaghetti sauce. I used to can it, which took about two hours to cook down on the stove to thicken up, in addition to the processing time in the canner, putting heat and humidity in the kitchen. Now I use dried tomatoes for the spaghetti sauce and only can things that can be done in a shorter time. We can have the driest weather, but when the tomato harvest is at its peak, the clouds roll in to put the damper on solar drying. On the sunny days I dry tomatoes in my solar food dryers and on the cloudy days I can them. One good thing about canning is that you can process a lot of food in a relatively short period of time. Although I could use the water bath canner for the tomatoes, I use the pressure canner because the processing time is faster and it takes less water.

I never liked to stand over a stove while dipping tomatoes in boiling water to get the skins off. Instead of canning stewed, skinless tomatoes, I juice them. I cut them up and put them through a Foley food mill or the Victorio Strainer that I have. These mills separate the juice from the skins and seeds. The Foley mill is handiest to use and fits over a three quart pan or bowl. However, the tomatoes need to be cooked some first. The Victorio Strainer that I bought in 1986 clamps to the table and handles raw, cut-up tomatoes. I also use it to juice grapes. With the Victorio, there is no cooking required until the jars of tomato juice go into the canner. Tomato juice can be used as the base for soup with the addition of leftovers or dried vegetables. Once the tomatoes are juiced I can use the juice to make tomato soup,
⁶
adding butter, onions, and parsley or celery before canning.

If you want to make thick spaghetti sauce, instead of cooking it so long on the stove you could put the juice in the refrigerator overnight. The solids will sink and you can pour off the tomato water, canning it separately as soup stock. Use the rest for your sauce and it won’t take so long to cook down thick. There are other brands of food mills on the
market besides the ones I mentioned. You might even be able to find one at a yard sale.

Even if you have a place to store canning jars, you have the canners and other equipment to contend with. In our first house, we had a tiny kitchen. Not only did I have a water bath canner and a pressure canner, I had a four-gallon stainless steel pot that I prized. We put a shelf over our kitchen door and put them there. Where we live now, we have high ceilings and all my large pots sit above the kitchen cabinets. If you have space between your kitchen cabinets and the ceiling make the best use of it. I happen to be tall and have long arms, so I appreciate high storage. If necessary, keep a fold-up stool handy to reach up there. My Foley food mill hangs with my saucepans in full view in my kitchen. The Victorio Strainer and all its parts are stored in its original box on a shelf in the pantry.

Solar Food Dryers

For many years, I had an electric nine-tray Excalibur dehydrator that I bought used from a friend. I rarely used it because I didn’t have time to learn something new, and because it pumped hot, humid air into the kitchen and made noise. Since I was already canning, which involved a lot of heat and humidity, it was probably the noise that bothered me the most. I couldn’t put the dehydrator in another room because there was no other room available. Now, with the children grown and only two of us at the dinner table, I discovered that I preferred making spaghetti sauce from dried tomatoes rather than fresh. I no longer needed quarts of sauce. I could have canned it in pints, but with dried tomatoes, I could make any amount I wanted without spending hours in a hot kitchen in the summer cooking and canning sauce. I control the thickness of the sauce by how much water is added. For spaghetti sauce, I usually add water at twice the amount of dried tomatoes. I’m trying various paste tomatoes to see which I prefer to work with. So far, Principe Borghese is my favorite because it matures in 60 days (although the seed catalogs list it as 78 days), giving me a head start on the tomato drying season. The tomatoes in the solar driers might take more than a day to dry, but I can leave them drying overnight.

Home-canned spaghetti sauce is a wonderful convenience food. When I made it to preserve in large batches, I added basil, onions, garlic, and sweet peppers — all from the garden. Now that I make it from dried tomatoes I still have those ingredients available. I grow enough garlic to last from one season to another, so that is added fresh. I dry the basil and peppers easily enough. The onions I added to the sauce I was canning were ones that I suspected wouldn’t store well. Those are the ones I dry now, so I have dried onions to put in sauce made from dried tomatoes. Recognize that creativity reigns in your kitchen and you can make up recipes as you go along. I can put just about anything in the sauce from dried ingredients. Dried zucchini and okra come to mind, which would also be good if I were making a sauce from tomato juice, since they are good thickeners.

With an increasing interest in dried food, I also had more interest in learning to dry it with the sun. I still didn’t enjoy the electric dehydrator and I wanted to lessen my use of fossil fuel. Drying things on screens in the sun, and bringing them in the house overnight to go back out the next day, was not going to work for me. I read
The Solar Food Dryer
by Eben Fodor and wondered if that would work here in humid Virginia. I made his SunWorks (SW) design and it worked! The SW dryer has 60 percent of the drying capacity as the Excalibur that I had. Wanting to dry more produce at one time, I could have made another dryer just like the first one, but I wanted to explore other designs. I found plans online from
Home Power
magazine — issue numbers 57 and 69 — for a solar dryer designed at Appalachian State University (ASU). There is a photo of both dryers in the color section of this book. The ASU dryer has 2.25 times the drying capacity as the SW dryer and 1.35 times the capacity of the nine tray Excalibur. I used an old storm window for the glazing on the SW dryer. That design could be made bigger by using a larger window, but then it would be harder to move around. I leave the ASU dryer out all winter, but the SW dryer is stored in the barn since it is easily moved.

With the solar dryers sitting in the garden and the sun shining, I am always looking around for something to put in them. I have dried tomatoes, peppers, peaches, apples, okra, zucchini, onions, collards, kale, and grapes for raisins. I’ve also dried snap beans, but didn’t like them enough to use on a regular basis, so I’ll stick with canning and salting
for those. I dry parsley and celery leaves in the dryers, but hang other herbs, such as basil, sage, and thyme in the kitchen to dry. The collards and kale were successful; however, since they’re available fresh through the winter in the garden, I find I rarely use the dried ones. I have met one woman who dries all sorts of greens to put in the smoothies she makes every day.

Early in my canning years, I thought it was great that I could buy apples from an orchard in the fall and can enough applesauce for the year. Now, I think that’s too much work and too much fossil fuel. I dry apples in the solar dryers and store them in glass jars. I make the best-tasting applesauce as we need it throughout the year with dried apples.

It cost me about $120 to make the SW dryer with wood framed screens. Adding the electric option was another $23. I find I don’t use that, preferring to go with solar power only. The ASU dryer cost me $385 to make. You can find more details about these dryers on my blog at
HomeplaceEarth.wordpress.com
. Once I began to use the solar dryers in earnest, my old Excalibur stopped working. We tried to fix it, but to no avail. That certainly freed up a spot in the kitchen.

Grain Mills

Grain mills are included in this chapter because they are necessary kitchen equipment to grind the grains you will be producing and storing. My first mill was a Corona mill, which is actually designed as a corn mill. It is not something I would want to use regularly for grinding wheat for bread, but it gave us an opportunity to make cornmeal and crack wheat to make hot cereal. It was an affordable starting point and you have to start somewhere. When I became more serious about grinding wheat for flour in 1999 I bought a Country Living Mill and was not disappointed. I mounted it on a piece of ¾ inch plywood and clamped that to the kitchen counter with C-clamps. That way I could move it if I wanted and I didn’t have to drill holes in the counter.

In 2010 I had an opportunity to buy a GrainMaker mill. Remembering what a huge decision it was when I bought the Country Living Mill, I thought this would be a good opportunity to compare the two. I tested
the mills side-by-side
⁷
and found that for the same effort (number of revolutions of the handle) the GrainMaker mill delivered twice the flour as the Country Living Mill. The fineness of the flour from both mills was the same. If the Country Living Mill had the extended handle attached, the effort to turn the handle was the same as the GrainMaker, otherwise the GrainMaker was easier. The GrainMaker sits on my kitchen counter now. The Country Living Mill has gone to live with one of our grown children. There are many grain mills on the market. If at all possible, try one before buying it. If not, carefully read the descriptions of folks who have used them and written about it. If a mill is too hard to use, it won’t be used regularly and is of little use if you are trying to grow a sustainable diet.

Once grain is ground it begins to lose nutrients. Being able to store grains whole and grinding them as you need the flour allows you to offer your family healthier meals. These grain mills are not cheap, no doubt about it, but you should consider them as part of your health care. Your meals will be more nutritious, keeping you healthier; and you will be getting exercise, also keeping you healthier. If you are considering the cost of a good grain mill, check out the prices people pay for exercise equipment and gym memberships. Your grain mill purchase will prove to be a bargain in many ways.

These methods of storing and preserving are quite different from what I did 30 years ago. It is exciting for me to have evolved in this way and to have food from the garden that needs little equipment and fuss before we eat it. My knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to expand before I could reach this point. I hope that I’ve helped you to arrive at a similar place a little faster.

12

Sheds, Fences, and Other Stuff

W
HEN YOU GARDEN
, you have some tools you use and you have to keep them somewhere. An old (or new) mailbox, mounted near the garden can hold trowels. When our mailbox needed to be replaced, we mounted the old one in the garden. The door had fallen off already, making it easy for me to grab a trowel as I walk by. There are other things besides trowels that I use, and for those things, I need to dedicate space somewhere. For me, all these years, it has been a corner of the garage. A shed would be much better and it is actually in the plans for this summer.