Leather Britches

The harvest is yet a way off and so I suppose it is all the more fitting to talk about preserving it long before it gets here. This applies as well to purchased food gotten at any time.

There are five ways of preserving food that I want to address:

1. Canning
2. Freezing
3. Drying
4. Salting
5. Pickling/fermenting

Which one is better? That, of course, is a useless question. Each gives different results. This can be illustrated by contrasting the first two which are the most common ways of preserving food at home.

We can can or freeze, let's say, green beans. Which would be more like fresh beans? Ha! It's a trick question. Pressure can some green beans and a the same time freeze some. A week later prepare them both and the frozen ones will be much more like freshly cooked green beans than the canned ones. But six months later, the canned ones will be much more like fresh than the frozen ones. Not actually resembling fresh beans, but still much more like fresh than the frozen ones.

Canning modifies food more than does freezing. Not only are the bacteria and fungi killed, buy the enzymes are inactivated. Once it is properly canned, the food will modify no more for decades. Canned food done 30 years ago is virtually indistinguishable from that canned last year. Freezing food antenuates and slows down the bacteria, fungi, and enzymes but does not destroy them. They keep working on the food even at subzero temps and after time the food loses a great deal of its quality. Blanching or cooking the food before freezing slows this process but it doesn't stop it.

So to preserve the best quality of the food for the short term or for food to delicate to withstand the heat and pressure of canning, freezing is better. For a strategic stash of food and for food to fill in the 'hungry gap' and tide you over from year to year, canning is better.

To abandon other methods of food preservation in favor of one 'best' method is to have you food management inflexible and more vulnerable.

Canned food lasts a very long time, a hundred years at least. Best, of course, to rotate one's stock but a larder full of canned goods will tide you over the worst of times, be that a personal or common worst of times. True, some food value is lost in the over-cooking of it, but not much. Obviously then food that will withstand a lot of cooking are the ones that can the best: meats, soups, sauces, and the tougher vegetables such as beans, corn, carrots, etc. Canned broccoli doesn't work too well. The heat and pressure required to preserve it will render it to mush.

The largest drawback to frozen food is that, unlike all the other methods mentioned, it requires a continuous input of energy in order to maintain it in its preserved state. Still, it's energy well spent. We freeze most vegetables without blanching them. In the case of green shell beans, berries, pearl onions, etc. we freeze them on cookie sheets and when they are frozen like gravel, we put them in bags. That way the cook can take out what is required without disturbing hte remainder. In hte case of broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, carrots (only very small ones), and such we freeze them as before and then dip them into very slightly salted water to from a glaze and refreeze them. After several layers of glaze they are packed into bags and frozen. Some meat and fish are frozen as well. We also keep strategic butter and cheese in the freezers.

If you have the freezer space, you can freeze tomatoes whole, just as you pick them. Then after the season, dip the frozen tomato in warm water to loosen the skin and remove it. Place the skinned tomato in a colander with a bowl beneath. When the tomato has thawed, you will have a colander full of tomato paste and some excellent stock in the bowl.

Dehydrating will perserve food far longer than freezing but not so long as canning. Bacterial, fungal, and enzymatic action are suspended in the absence of water. Reconstituted dried food is not like the fresh counterpart. You can make an excellent apple pie from dehydrated apples, it just isn't the same thing as a pie made from fresh apples. For cooking, there's hardly any difference. Dried sweet corn, tomatoes, carrots, peppers, onions, shallots, and the like in soup are almost indistinguishable from fresh.

You might be surprised how little salt it takes to perserve food. Concerns (over exagerated IMO) about sodium consuption can be mitigated by soaking the food in water to remove the salt before cooking it. Salted meat will keep for more than a year without refrigeration. We generally freeze it after it has salt cured to extend it even longer, but if the freezers or their electricity were to fail, the meat would be fine for months stil. A lot of vegetables can be salted as well, green beans, carrots, cabbage, and such.

Fermenting and pickling are not the same thing, although the mechanism of preserving the food is the same. The acidity is raised to the point that the spoilage organisms go into suspension. In the case of pickling this is rise in acidity is brought about by adding acid to the food, ususlly vinegar. In the case of fermented food bacteria are allowed to 'work' the food until they produce enough acid, usually lactic acid, to preserve it. Pickled and fermented foods also last a very long time and in many cases more nutrients are available than from the fresh food.

Many times, perhaps most times, some combination of the above methods gives the best resluts. As I mentioned, we freeze meat after we have slated it. Food that is slighly acidic will preserve by dehydration longer and by less heat and pressure by canning. Dehydrated food will last longer if it is frozen or heat sealed in jars.

Each method of perservation has its uses and yields its specific resluts. The photo above is a plate of dehydrated green beans, an Applachian staple for generations. The food is known as 'shucky beans' or 'leather britches'. Leather britches do not resemble fresh green beans, canned or frozen green beans. They are a food in their own right. Flexibility in preservation provides a lot of such foods.