This is the sixth of seven Field Notes articles by John Marek focusing on sustainable living, community agriculture and food security. These “Summer of Sustainability” columns feature practical advice on growing, harvesting and preserving your own foods, as well as more philosophical essays on life and how we live in the modern world
For much of my childhood, midsummer was canning time. My mother would head down to the basement and retrieve cardboard boxes of Ball jars and lids and her big white enamel pot. Mom was not a hardcore canner, but the tradition ran deep in her blood and she went through the motions. I was sometimes enlisted to help out with washing and cutting the tomatoes, beets and peppers. Botulism was a word spoken with great deference and fear in our household, so she only canned those safer “water bath” items where the natural acidity or the brine made the growth of harmful bacteria highly unlikely. Mom would “put up” three or four dozen jars and feel she had done her part to keep the tradition alive.
That all changed in the mid-70s when my parents bought a large chest freezer and installed it in our basement. Rather than going through the laborious canning process, Mom only had to clean the fruits and vegetables and put them in freezer-proof bags. The discovery of something called Fruit Fresh, a sprinkle of which kept frozen fruits looking and tasting fresh, opened up a world of opportunities for things like strawberries, cantaloupe, peaches and blueberries Mom would have never dared to can. By the end of August, our freezer was half full of neatly labeled bags, giving us a sweet taste of summer well into the bitter Ohio winters.
As a method of food preservation, freezing has some definite advantages; it’s simple, all but fool-proof and can be used for almost any foodstuff. Its major fault is that it requires an external power source, which can be an issue during natural disasters when those provisions are most needed. While a chest freezer will maintain temperature for a power outage of several hours, more prolonged failures such as you might see with a hurricane, earthquake or civil unrest will result in spoilage.
Frozen foods also lack portability. Advances in insulated cooler technology have made it possible to keep things cold for days as opposed to hours. Still, those coolers are bulky, expensive and not well-suited for hiking, backpacking or getting out of Dodge in a hurry.
Home canning has its adherents and advantages. Once “put up,” foodstuffs will last several months to several years with no external power needed, and while not an exceptionally lightweight option for backpacking, canned foods are certainly more portable than hauling around a 30-pound cooler. Having said that, I am hardly in a position to advise on canning techniques. I have never done it myself, and as I indicated a couple of paragraphs ago, it has been 50 years or so since I was even proximate to the process. If you are interested in learning about home canning, I highly recommend “Ask Jackie: Canning Basics” from my friends at Backwoods Home Magazine. For less than $10 you get a wealth of practical advice from someone with decades of experience.
Having decided that canning wasn’t for me, I searched for a method of food preservation that was safe, cost-effective and portable and came across dehydration. Humans have been using dehydration to preserve food since the beginning of recorded time, although methods have evolved significantly over the years.
The earliest form of dehydration was likely sun-drying. Fruits, vegetables and even meat placed on a rack in the sun will lose 70 percent to 80 percent of their moisture within a couple of days and remain edible for days to weeks. The limitation to sun-drying is that you need to have extended hours of sunlight over multiple days, a condition that can hardly be guaranteed in any environment. Later, people discovered that salt efficiently draws moisture from meats, preventing them from spoiling for even more extended periods.
While sun-drying and salting are common techniques to this day, most home dry preservation is accomplished with an electric dehydrator. Home dehydrators take a couple of forms, with some looking a bit like a microwave oven and others more like a round plastic layer-cake. Mine is one of the latter, a NESCO Snackmaster. A significant advantage of home dehydrators over other forms of food preservation is the low initial cost. My NESCO cost around $50 and requires nothing more than an electric current. You can spend more, of course, but even a top end model will only set you back a couple of hundred dollars.
Preparing foodstuffs for dehydration is straightforward and relatively fool-proof. Leafy herbs like sage, basil, oregano and thyme and smaller fruits like grapes and figs can be placed directly on the trays after washing, but most fruits and vegetables need to be sliced to even thicknesses of a quarter-inch to a half-inch to ensure a consistent finished product and prevent spoiling.
I usually blanch vegetables – especially those that take longer to cook, like carrots and green beans – because it helps prevent flavor loss before drying. The easiest way to blanch is to place vegetables in the basket of your steamer and heat water beneath. Fruits with a tendency for browning, like apples and peaches, can be soaked in lemon water for a few minutes to prevent discoloration.
Once prepped, simply place fruits and vegetables on your dehydrator racks, set the temperature, and wait. Sliced apples, peaches and the like generally take 8-16 hours on medium heat, while whole fruits like grapes and figs take 10-20 hours.
To make jerkies, I cut meat into thin, uniform strips, then dry cure using a salty “rub” for 6 to 12 hours in the refrigerator. Once cured, I brush off the strips and dehydrate at medium-high heat for 8-12 hours.
Achieving a good quality product will take a little practice and experimentation. My first batch of apple and pineapple was a miserable failure. The second batch was marginally edible, but I got it by the third. Lately, I’ve been drying the surplus of herbs coming from the garden because, let’s face it, you only need so much sage in the middle of summer. In a couple of weeks, though, we’ll have tomatoes coming out of our ears, which will be another test. I can’t wait.