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Preserving food is a staple skill in homemaking, and is a way to get the most out of your groceries and garden harvest. Food preservation may seem intimidating to beginners. After all, you can get yourself or others very sick if not done properly. It is worth putting in the effort to learn how to preserve your food safely Here are four beginner food preservation techniques that are low risk to start learning how to preserve your food for long-term storage.
Drying
Drying is one of the easiest ways to preserve a harvest with little to no special equipment required. A suitable drying space will be out of direct sunlight, have little to no moisture, and moderate airflow. Tie bunches of herbs together by their stems using string, then tape them to the wall or hang them on hangers to dry. Other types of produce can be left to air dry, sundry, or oven-dried at the lowest oven temperature available.
Pickling
Pickling is another easy technique to preserve your food for long-term storage. When you pickle something, you submerge the food in an acidic flavored brine, let it sit for some time and then you have pickled product! Once you get the foundations and ratios down, you can change up the spice mixes for different flavors. Pickling is a great way to save produce getting past its prime, and can also be canned for even longer storage. This is the base pickling recipe I have been using as an introduction to pickling:
Basic Pickle Brine Recipe (southernliving.com)
Fermentation
Fermentation produces a similar sour product that preserves your food for long-term storage. Still, it is different than pickling because the change happens as a result of a chemical reaction in the food using its naturally occurring bacteria rather than just being pickled with acid and heat. Another difference between the two is that fermentation has the added benefit of producing probiotics, which is great for gut health.
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Water Bath Canning
Water bath canning is a great way to preserve food with a high PH for months, and even years. This does require a small investment in canning equipment, however the benefits and money saved make it a worthy investment. A basic water bath canning setup includes jar tongs, a large stock pot, a pot rack to prevent the jars from directly touching the bottom of the pot, a nonmetal stick to remove extra air bubbles, jars, and canning lids. You can purchase almost everything on the list second-hand to reduce the costs, except for the canning lids. I do not recommend canning with non-canning jars, such as tomato sauce jars from the store. These jars are great for storage, but not meant to withstand canning and long-term storage will not be guaranteed.
