Preseved Menu Planning: The Importance of Being Realistic

This will be the last installment of the "Preserved Menu Planning" series and perhaps the most important one as well. I know I can be pedantic so, for the sake of ending with a clear message, I'll give it to you straight: in all things food preservation, realistic expectations are a must.

First, don't expect that you'll enjoy the taste of a food more once it's been processed. I don't really like cooked greens. They're okay in soup, but other than that I'm not a huge fan. Last year I froze potstickers filled with chard (a cooking green)... now the three gallon-sized bags of them are some of the few items remaining in the chest freezer. Hopefully Josh is into them... like really into them.

Second, preserving does not improve the quality of the raw ingredient. Every year we have at least one batch of pole beans that goes just a few days too long, making the beans stringy and bitter. It feels like such defeat to let a one-day overgrown batch of beans go to waste, so I always want to find a way to use them. Then I remember that there's almost nothing worse than taking the time to preserve a dish only to pull it out for use several months later and have it be relatively inedible. In other words, though you don't have to use the cream of the crop per se, it's important that all ingredients for preserving are fresh and in their prime (if you don't want to waste the rest - and really who does? - compost it!).

Finally, do what you can. Let's face it: nearly everyone reading this has priorities that do not include food preservation. And that's okay. Just because you can't preserve enough to completely replace November to June food with local Michigan produce doesn't mean that you can't supplement with 5%. Or 15%. Or 47%. It's easy to get wrapped up in the process (something I'm more than guilty of), but if you set aside just a couple of weekends each summer to dedicate to a new preserving recipe, well then you're on your way.

So, in recapitulation, to be successful in creating a year-round menu of preserved foods:

• Plan ahead.
• Record successes and failures.
• Incorporate as much variety as possible.
• Be realistic.

 With only 6 days until the official start of spring, better get to it!

Preserved Menu Planning: MVPs

In trying to create a balanced menu of preserved foods, there are a couple of standout players, the MVPs of variety and texture. Today's post is dedicated to them.

The Tomato

I cannot overstate the importance of the tomato in my planning of food preservation. In fact, tomatoes play such a critical role that in addition to the literal bushels of them that we get throughout the summer from our Tantre Farm CSA share, we ourselves are growing 35 plants. You see, tomatoes are hugely versatile. Add them to a stew for a bit more flavor. Core them and then freeze 'em whole for use throughout the year. Use them chopped in salsa, stew them to add to any grain, cook them down for tomato sauce or soup. The possibilities are seemingly endless.

"Raw" Freezer Produce

If you like to cook at all, it can get kind of tiring to just pull something out of the freezer and heat it up on the stove. So, instead of preparing dishes to freeze, prepare "raw produce." Though you have to blanch most items before you can put them in the freezer, by freezing diced carrots, sliced onions, whole tomatoes, shelled peas, and other ingredients, you have the makings for whatever you're in the mood for. And trust me, this is a good thing because what you want to eat and prepare in the 90 degree days of August  is very different than what you want after a sunless day in cold February.

Spices & Herbs

I'm sure a good number of gourmands will agree that the best way to add flavor to something is through the use of herbs and spices. The same applied when preparing preserved food (though do take note that you have to be careful with canning because those recipes are designed to create food that is safe to eat). When drying or freezing something, play with spice combinations. And, if you're in the habbit of adding a blend of oregano and basil to almost everything, try using them on their own and/or with other herbs and spices (it's amazing how different combinations bring out different flavors, even within the herbs themselves!).  If you're not sure where to start, talk to a local specialty grocer, visit a kitchen shop, chat with a farmer at the farmers' market, or ask a friend what they keep in their pantry.

Preserved Menu Planning: The Seasonality of Flavor & Texture

Rough Outline of Major Produce Seasonality in Southeast Michigan

I know this table is not especially beautiful, but I promise fellow food preservers that what it lacks in form, it makes up for in function.

You see, I've learned that the most important thing in preserving an abundance of food is making sure that it has an abundance of variety, especially in the flavor and texture departments. One of the easiest ways to get variety of preserved foods is, of course, to use a variety of main ingredients. Not only do different ingredients lead to dishes with distinct flavors (sweet/sour/savory/briny) and textures (pureed/chuky/liquidy), but they also contribute to better overall nutrition (vitamins a-e in carrots/fiber in peas/lycopene in cooked tomatoes). 

That's all well and good and I doubt anyone will dispute the premise. However, the tricky thing about local produce, especially in Michigan, is that is has a limited season. Take, for instance, those fibrous peas: If you want to freeze a bulk order of whole peas and need to get them from the farmers' market to do so, better get there in June otherwise you'll find yourself pea-less. Same thing with blueberries. And sweet corn. And parsnips. You get the idea...

That's where the table comes in handy, to give you a general sense of when you can easily find a specific product (and one of the best things about getting it during its peak season is it tends to be cheaper and better quality). Obviously, if you have a garden, you'll know when this stuff is available, but in case you're looking for some produce that you're not growing yourself or you want to supplement your own stock with a bulk order from elsewhere, to the table!

I find that the table alone isn't enough. For me, the best way to keep track of these things is to make rough notes on my personal calendar of which weekends (or weekdays) I plan to commit to securing the ingredient I need to make a specific dish.

Speaking of which, I need to add "pickled asparagus" to my calendar for Saturday, June 11. We've missed the season every year except our first, so I am hell bent on eating asparagus in January 2012...

Preserved Menu Planning: Documenting the Stores

Let's say that you really like sauerkraut. Like, a lot. So, you've done your homework and according to the Ball Blue Book of Canning, it takes 20 pounds of cabbage to make a batch. Your seed packages says that each cabbage plant will grow to be about 4-5 pounds so you figure 5 or 6 cabbages ought to do it. 

Sound thinking. Great start.

However, how many quarts of sauerkraut did the recipe actually make? Was this enough or did you find you wanted more when you cleaned out the last jar in January? Could you have fit more than the suggested 20 pounds of cabbage in your 3-gallon crock, thereby getting additional sauerkraut and only marginally increasing the effort? How many pounds of cabbage did you end up using? 

Manageable in and of themselves, if you're trying to do food preservation on a large scale, imagine all of these questions times 40 for each of the various items you'll make to preserve. Even just with the sauerkraut example, it starts to get tricky when you try to remember the following year how many cabbages you need to plan to grow for the 9 quarts of sauerkraut you have decided you want to make...


So, like my last post, the primary goal here is to share the utility of some simple documentation in a) increasing the garden to preserved food learning curve and b) becoming more successful in the pursuit of minimizing the amount of non-local and processed food consumed throughout the year.

Without further ado, here it is: Food Preservation. (There's only one version this time as there are multiple tabbed workbooks at the bottom of the document.) May it be as useful to you as it has been to us...

Our Goal (in case you missed it)

Preserved Menu Planning: Documenting the Garden

Our Gardening Learning Curve

Take note of this year's garden for a better one next.

Admittedly, I am more than finicky when it comes to making lists, so it's possible that I'm over-exaggerating this point. But, that said, with our first garden, we made no records of what we grew, how much we planted, or when we planted it so that when it came time to plan our second garden, we had to rely on memory alone. Obviously, there are limits to memory, and for novice gardeners like us, almost everything is trial and error. So, when something works, it's important to know what it was and it's perhaps even more important with the miserable failures you swear you'll never do again.

Last year - Garden #3 - is when I got fed up enough with not remembering the details that I started  to consider  doing some serious documentation (thanks in large part to my father-in-law's meticulous example). I guess I realized how much darn work gardening is and figured that, if were going to keep it up, we might as well do it right.

The document was simple, a Google Docs spreadsheet called Garden Plants 2010. As you can see by clicking the link, many of the variables it tracked didn't quite pan out (I so quickly got behind on weighing harvest yields that I totally gave up about 5 tomatoes in). However, for the most part, Garden Plants 2010 has been terribly useful in creating the new and improved Garden Plants 2011, my planning document extraordinaire for Garden #4 which, I'm convinced, will be our best garden yet.

The beauty of garden documentation - both record keeping and pre-planning on paper - is its cyclical nature. Taking notes on the current season enables better choices for the coming one. And, pre-planning using mistakes from the past helps identify new experiments in improved methods whose results you can record to in turn inform future gardens.

Garden Documentation Cycle

For us, one example of this is tomato blight, a disease the turns plant leaves yellow and sickly. Research suggests that one factor in preventing blight in making sure tomatoes have enough space between them. Last year, our records show about 2 square feet per plant. This year, my pre-plan is to give each plant about 3 square feet. During the season, I know to take note of the blight we get (or hopefully don't get), and we'll know better for planning next year's garden. (Ahh, the beauty of closed cycles...)

Sounds logical, right? But wait! You're not getting the whole picture. You see, there is one more set of instrumental recording/planning documents in the process. How do you know how much of each type of plant to grow for preserving? Well friends, I will share that method tomorrow....

Preserved Menu Planning: 101

Over Josh and my three winters of eating primarily our own preserved food, we've learned a bit about the process. By and large, this knowledge can be boiled down to three take-home lessons.

Preserver's Food Pyramid

First and foremost, substantial food preservation requires year-round planning, from what to grow (February) and how to preserve it (June-November) to figuring out satisfying pairings for frozen entrees with pickled side dishes and taking note for the following season (November-June).

Second, in order to avoid wanting to swear off food all together by February, variety in flavor and texture is essential. Easier said than done when everything is dropped in boiling water, dehydrated, or frozen, let me tell you...

Finally, realistic expectations are a must. Enough said.

So, in part because it'll be another 4 weeks before I can start seeds and have prime blogging content (photos too!),  I present another installment I'm calling "Preserved Menu Planning." Each post in the series will take on one of the three issues outlined above, sharing the food preservation wisdom we've gathered (albeit limited) along the way. Though I'll be discussing these things in the context of our efforts to minimize the amount of food we buy at the grocery store, I hope the communal knowledge will be useful to anyone and anyone interested in the topic, regardless of scale. 

Until next time...

Where Fermentation Meets (Online) Forums

Last September, with twenty or so pounds of cabbage fresh-picked from the garden sitting on my kitchen counter, I opened the Ball Blue Book of Preserving (one of the few absolutely essential tools for anyone even thinking about preserving their own food). Though this was my first foray into vegetable fermentation, I had canned things before - dilly beans (p. 54) and whole pears in syrup (p. 20), to zesty salsa (p. 80) and seasoned tomato sauce (p. 23) - so I wasn't really expecting any surprises. Then, I opened to page forty-six and saw the following:

Sauerkraut

Ingredients:

• 20 pounds of cabbage
• 3/4 cup canning salt

... and that was it. A vinegar lover myself, I actually couldn't believe that the rich sour taste I'd enjoyed in several varieties of store-bought sauerkraut was truly the product of only these two simple ingredients. It wasn't possible, right?

So like any good child born after 1985, I indulged my skepticism by going straight to the best source of popular commentary on all things great and small: Google. Typing in something along the lines of sauerkraut ingredients, I found a plethora of blogs, forums, and chat groups who had covered this very concern. After a quick scan of a few separate pages (you've got to be sure to cross-reference sources), the issue was resolved. According to overwhelmingly popular opinion, sauerkraut is the product of cabbage, salt, and time.

3-gallon pickling crock

Despite my minor technological detour, I was soon back in the kitchen. Following the recipe, I shredded cabbage, wilting it in batches with a couple of tablespoons of salt, then firmly packing it into my 3-gallon Ohio Stoneware Crock (purchased at Downtown Home and Garden in Ann Arbor, MI - an inspiring small, local business with everything you need to be both self-reliant and surprisingly gourmet). Once I could fit not even an ounce more into the crock, I covered the now juicy mixture with a wooden sauerkraut board, some cheesecloth and set it in a disposable aluminum turkey pan on my counter (note: this type of salt brine will take the finish off most things, including my counter tops, thus the turkey pan).   

That was it. No cooking. No boiling. Now all there was to do was wait three weeks, occasionally scraping a totally normal but no less slimy layer of scum off the top. That's the interestingly satisfying thing about sauerkraut. Walking by it everyday, you can smell the vegetable rotting taking place making it hard to imagine that anything even remotely edible, much less delicious, is going to come out of that immensely heavy object emitting indecent odors and hogging all of the counter top space. And then, before you know it, it's ready. Making about 9 quart-sized canning jars of the stuff and tasting fresher and crisper than store bought varieties, you've successfully engaged in a very old form of food preservation by way of fermentation.

Kinda neat, aye?

We liked our first batch of sauerkraut so much (I'd sneak spoonfuls by night when Josh was in the other room) that in early December we went to the Farmers' Market with the mission of finding some of the season's last cabbages to make another batch. Find them we did, though this batch came out with an almost sweet taste  that neither Josh nor I is nearly as fond of (now I'm sneaking it into Josh's sandwiches and conveniently forgetting to put it on mine). I followed an identical process to the first batch, so the explanation that I've come up with for the difference in flavor is that frost had something to do with it. Some suggest that certain hardier vegetables be harvested after a hard frost since something about this kind of cold actually improves the taste (e.g. horseradish, brussel sprouts). These cabbages were certainly picked after a hard frost, so my admittedly imperfect theory is that this explains the fundamental taste difference.

However, because even I am not entirely convinced of this explanation (another Google search - this time for "sweet sauerkraut frost" - returned no satisfaction), I am working hard this season to find a good sauerkraut variety of cabbage since we plan to commit a sizable piece of our plot to it (about 66 square feet, twenty or so plants).

One variety we will be planting (mostly because I already have the seeds) is simply called Late/Storage green cabbage (from Johnny Select Seeds).To hedge our bets, I've been doing yet more online forum perusing, and the consensus seems to be that late varieties are better, and among them Dutch Flathead is the best.

Though many criticize the unreliable nature of truly free and democratic knowledge bases (like the internet and, specifically, Wikipedia), I have both built confidence and taken comfort through the resources provided by open social forum. The confidence part is pretty straightforward: with the ability to do a quick double-check of the procedure, I am more willing and eager to try something new, knowing with relative certainty (or so I tell myself) that my time, energy, and precious harvest of cabbage will not be wasted through some simply avoided misstep of mine. The comfort part is a bit more complex but, essentially, I feel better knowing that others have the same or similar questions as I have, knowing that there is a network of novices who, like me, rely on others' tales of their successful (and failed) experiments to help inform my own.

I think I've come to see that a large part of why I'm doing this online in narrative form as opposed to in a spreadsheet on my personal computer, is that I want to contribute my own small pearls of knowledge, hard gathered through ample trial and error. I am constantly working towards crafting a lifestyle that is less dependent on things and resources that are too often taken as fact and not as the conveniences they are. And almost ironically, in this process, the need for a community of people engaged in similar pursuits, for a certain type of communal wisdom becomes more apparent than ever.

So, with that, I'll conclude with the wish that when life gives us cabbages, may we always be able to make sauerkraut.