To take full joy in fresh local food, it helps to think outside the box that is your refrigerator. Food preservation is an art that humans have been refining for thousands of years, since for most of our existence we didn’’t have refrigeration and a successful harvest or hunt often resulted in more than could be eaten in one sitting. Finding ways to keep the goodies good meant survival and health, and people got creative about ways to make it work — things you can do in your home a lot more easily than could be done in the bush or in a pre-electification kitchen, whether in a cabin or a mansion.
Raw materials: The next few months will be a great time to stock up on nutritious, delicious goodies—hit the farmstand, go berry-picking, seek out the incredible flavor of a local tomato or peach, which is an entirely different experience from the cardboard-inflected supermarket ones that are harvested too early and never really ripen, or are bred to prioritize uniform appearance and “shelf stability” over flavor.
Consider joining a CSA; there are dozens of them listed on the website of the Hudson Valley CSA Coalition, where you can search by pickup location, season, and what you’’d like to eat. Quite a few offer meat, eggs and dairy as well as produce, all of it fresh and local. Of course, you may have your own gardening plans, in which case preservation can be even more important; you don’t want any of that effort going to waste, and with any luck you’ll be harvesting plenty.
Preservation options: Food preservation is an art and a science; some methods, such as water-bath canning, need to be done carefully to avoid any risk of contamination or spoilage, and to truly learn the process you’ll need more information than we have room for here. This overview, though, will give you the basics of what’s involved in the simplest methods, and what kinds of food they’re best suited for. We’ll include a couple of great resources where you can find a deeper dive.
Cold storage or a root cellar will keep potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, squash, apples or pears fresh for months; all you need is a room or basement where you can keep the temperature down to 50 degrees or less.
Dehydration is the simplest and perhaps oldest known food preservation method after cold storage; people were dehydrating food in the Middle and Far East 12,000 years ago.
Herbs can be dried simply by hanging them in any dry, airy room. Direct sunlight, if you can count on a good stretch of it, is a great way to dry fruit or vegetables, even meat; your setup can be as simple as a clean mesh screen. You can dry food in your oven, set to 140 degrees, or get serious and purchase a dedicated dehydrator.
Cut your food into even pieces so it will all be done at once. To be sure you’ve reached that point, take a piece and let it cool to room temperature, then try bending it. Vegetables should be brittle and crisp and break easily. Fruit should have a leathery feel. Meat strips or jerky should crack, but not break; herbs should crumble easily.
Once your food’s dry, store it in airtight containers.
Freezing fruit is almost as simple as dehydration and does a great job of preserving flavor and nutrition. Most fruits respond well to freezing. Wash and dry thoroughly, remove large pits, and freeze individual slices or berries on a baking sheet if you don’t want your fruit to stick together in a lump.
Tomatoes and peaches freeze best if they’re blanched first, as do most vegetables. To blanch, submerge in boiling water for two minutes, then in ice water for two minutes to stop the cooking process. Dry and freeze.
Before freezing broccoli, you need to soak it in brine (four teaspoons of salt to a gallon of water) for five minutes, then rinse, then blanch for three minutes instead of two before drying and freezing it. Some veggies, like squashes and green leafy kale or spinach, freeze really well as a puree.
Freeze food in airtight containers that hold about as much as you’ll use for a meal or two, and label with the date. To avoid mushy fruit, dry it thoroughly and freeze it quickly; consider turning your freezer down a few degrees until your fruit’s frozen.
Water-bath canning is the way to make jellies, jams and pickled veggies. It works only for acidic produce; to can low-acid foods such as meat, fish, poultry, corn or beans you’ll need a pressure canner unless you want to try your hand at pickling, in which the vinegar provides the needed acid.
Our great-grandparents canned food routinely. It’s just a bit more of a project than drying or freezing. You’ll need a large, deep pot with a fitted lid and a rack on the bottom of it to keep the glass off the direct heat, a second large pot to cook up big batches of your berries, tomatoes or other goodies, a grinder, mill or strainer, a supply of canning jars with brand-new lids and bands, a ladle to scoop your cooked food into the jars, and jar-lifter tongs to fetch them out of the canning bath.
Canning is a process involving multiple steps, none of which are terribly complicated in themselves but all of which must be done correctly to ensure food safety. It’s a project. But just think of the joy of spreading your own fresh homemade berry jam on your toast next winter, or making sauce from those amazing tomatoes.
People can and do study methods like fermentation for years, perfecting the art of the best-ever sauerkraut, kimchi, or pickled ginger. It’s a rewarding hobby, but a bit too involved for an article of this length. To learn more about all kinds of techniques, check out the National Center for Home Food Preservation maintained by the University of Georgia or the David Suzuki Foundation.
Bon apetit!