Showing posts with label preserving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label preserving. Show all posts
Monday, August 10, 2015
A preservative worth its salt
Salting includes both dry salting, where the food is covered in salt, and brining, where the salt is dissolved in (most often) water and poured over the food.
The way salting works as a preservative is by osmosis. You will remember osmosis from chemistry lessons at school – water will move through a semi-permeable membrane from a weak solution to a strong one. In their natural state, plants (ie, foodstuffs) contain salts and minerals in weak solution, in which bacteria live happily. The salt draws moisture from the foodstuff, drying it out slightly, and inhibiting the bacteria from reproducing.
Additonally, salting halts the action of enzymes which can contribute to the decay of foodstuffs. When you put sliced apple into brine or an acid solution like lemon juice to stop it from browning, this is using the brine or acid to stop enzyme activity.
Foods that are commonly salted include fish: salt cod is practically national dish in some countries; cabbage, in the form of sauerkraut, and also the Korean dish kim chee; beef – Jewish salt beef, for example; and vegetables – think of the many tinned vegetables you buy that are preserved in salt.
Then there are the popular middle Eastern preserved lemons, which are simply salted lemons, and which you can easily make yourself. These are made best with small lemons which you can sometimes find in middle-Eastern stores; if not, you can use ‘normal’ sized lemons, or try preserving limes, or even satsumas instead, using the same method detailed here (updated from our post on citrus gifts, December 18th, 2012.
Preserved lemons
6 lemons
Sea salt
Give five of the lemons a quick wash and dry. Slice each lemon into four wedges but don’t cut right through the lemon – leave the wedges attached at the stem end. Rub the sea salt into the wedges and pack into a wide-necked, preferably sterilised, 1-litre jar.
Put the kettle on.
Sprinkle a tablespoon of salt over the lemons in the jar, then juice the last lemon and add this to the jar. Top up with boiling water, then seal the jar. Leave for a month before using.
Unopened, these keep really well in a cool dark place. After opening, keep in the fridge.
Drying beans for winter
With the harvesting season well underway, we're choosing which of our produce to eat immediately and which to put by for winter-time when the garden is less productive. We can freeze our vine leaves, dry the chillies, pickle the garlic, steep the pears in alcohol, and dry the beans.
Our favourite beans for growing are the beautful magenta and cream borlotti beans. Beans can take up a lot of space, even when trained up a trellis, or wrapped around a sweetcorn plant in a traditional Three Sisters planting scheme. They're easy to grow and look so colourful and lovely in the garden. Then, when they're ready to harvest in August and September, the fresh beans are delicious to eat newly podded and simply cooked.
Even better, though, is keeping the bulk of the crop back to supply beany sustenance throughout the winter. Drying your own beans is a simple process and doesn't take long.
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| Fresh borlotti beans, left, with their stunningly rich crimson pods, which dry to a dusky purple colour, right, when left on the plants into the autumn. |
Leave the bean pods on the plants for as long as possible. They must be picked before the first frost, but if you can leave them until October, you'll see the bright crimson pods fade to a deep flecked purple and then almost to black. The pods will be hard and dry to the touch. Cut them off the plants, then thread the pods together and hang them up somewhere airy until all the pods are dried out. Or you can spread them out in a net and hang that somewhere. Either way, leave them be for about 2-3 weeks to ensure that the beans inside are truly dry and ready to store.
When you come to shell the beans, they should be rattling inside the pods and will fall on to the worktop with a clatter. If they land with a soft thud instead, they need to dry for a little longer.
Finally, put the shelled beans in a freezer bag and seal. Place in the freezer for about 48 hours. This quick freeze just ensures that if the beans were harbouring any bugs, mites or insect eggs, that they are killed off. Once out of the freezer, spread the beans out briefly on kitchen paper just to check they’re dry again, then pour into a clean dry jar with a tightly fitting lid.
Keep in a dark cool place and they will last for months.
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