Preserving Food from the Garden | Canning & Fermenting

Today is forecasted to be a cold rainy day. Eric started a little fire for us to get the house warm, figured it would be a great time to do some canning. So we're going to get started on that. We first are going to do relish and we're going to be using cucumbers and zucchini for that recipe. And then later, if we get to it, we're going to try to get to some cauliflower and fennel soup. So I'm going to get our cucumbers harvested. We've got a cube of yellow summer squash in there and I have another variety too. I don't know exactly what kind it is, it's a lot bigger than this, but it's like a striped zucchini. Very excited about that one. All right, we got our fennel. We're going to head inside and get started. I've had my second cup of coffee for the day. It is 4pm and we're just starting on this. I've got to get everything chopped up first and then once we finish our relish, we'll see if we can move on to our second recipe. So I'm just going to be cubing everything pretty small. I'm going to start with the zucchini and the summer squash. I'm also going to do onion that way and the fennel and the cucumber. Once that's all chopped up, we're going to set that aside with some cold water and some salt to kind of suck out the moisture of the vegetables and then we'll get started on the brine. Why are you crying, Ariel? You're on inside? All right, on to the easy stuff. Onions are no fun. In fact, I think actually I did a shallot in there as well, just for some extra flavor. While I did not realize how many cucumbers we actually picked, we've got a bunch here to chop up. We may even save some of them for pickles. I know when you think of canning, pickles is like your number one thing you probably think of. At least it's something I think of and in fact, it's something that Eric and I started with many, many years ago when we started canning. That was one of the things we really did and we did it full throttle. We made so many that we have been burned out on pickles for some time. We have, however, made a relish before with cucumbers and we absolutely loved it. We found that we ate it a lot. Toppings is big for us in the winter because we don't, I guess just certain things that we have omitted from our diet, the toppings are like the flavor, they're the extra thing we get to have. We don't really have a lot of herbs or much fresh food at all at that time of the year. We're super thrilled to be making the relish. We did not do very well on our cucumber harvest last year and this year has been more than making up for that, so pretty excited for this. We've done zucchini relish before. We shredded it last year and I think we really liked it, but we didn't really like the shredded consistency, so that's why we're doing a chopped one. We've got all the vegetables chopped and split up into two different bowls so we can put salt and the cold water on them. I'm thinking it's about eight quarts of volume of vegetables. And again, it's the squash, the summer squash, fennel, onions, and the cucumber. And I'm just going to put maybe one to two tablespoons on each bowl and kind of mix it up. We're going to soak these for about half an hour and then drain them, so I don't think you can add too much salt, but I'm not going to add that much. This is straight out of the well right here. That smells like divine. Like, doesn't it smell almost flowery? It smells delish. That's really ice cold. Oh, thank you. Oh yeah, it smells so good. It smells so fresh. While these are sitting, we're going to start on the brine for it. So we have already gotten prepared for this canning escapade we have today. I have our pints or half pints, I have half pints heating up in the back here and we're going to do what's called hot pack. So the relish is going to be hot, the jars are going to be hot, and then we're going to be water bathing the relish for 10 minutes. The brine is very simple. We're going for about a one to one ratio of vinegar to water, but we are going to be putting a little bit more vinegar. A lot of the recipes lean heavier on the vinegar side and that is because it is a relish. So I'm going to add two cups of water to our pot and then we're doing a cup and a half of apple cider vinegar and a cup and a half of white distilled vinegar. We're not adding salt since we already added it to the vegetables that are soaking and we're going to be putting about a teaspoon of mustard seed in. I have ground mustard seed, some whole peppercorns, and some celery seed and then Eric also chopped us up some fresh dill and parsley for this. As far as sugar, we're going to be adding two cups to this recipe. You can do more if you want it sweeter or you can do less. We're definitely going a little bit on the heavier side. We want our relish to be sweet. Then I'm going to let this come to a little bit of a simmer. We're going to let it go for maybe 10-15 minutes and once the vegetables soak, we're going to add those to a pot and add our brine. Our relish is ready and we're going to be adding it to our hot jars. All right, we ended up with about 16 half pints and I'm going to leave about a quarter inch head space. I'm just adding a little bit of brine to top these off. They don't need much. Then we're going to wipe them with vinegar and get them into our water bather with some already hot water going because these are very hot. Then we're going to process them for 10 minutes. First round of relish is done and we're going to get the second batch in there and we're going to head outside to grab our ingredients for our soup. Oh gosh, let's be real. All right, came back with the big pruners. We've got a lot of cauliflower heads to harvest and a lot of them have started to spread out or get older. They're mature, they'll be perfect for this soup and the greens are going to go to the chickens. That's a lot of chicken food. All right, so I think two or three days ago, sadly we had to dispatch one of our hens. Sadly for the hen, but it's good for us because we're making soup and chicken broth is going to make that soup taste a lot better. So we're out here feeding the chickens and I'm going to check for eggs and I'm going to head over to the freezer. We're going to grab that chicken because it's frozen now and grab a couple of herbs and we're heading inside. 13 eggs today, not a bad day. What do you think, do that or we can add more water to the soup? Okay, yeah, sure. I'd say a little more because we're going to add a lot more water to the soup. We're starting with our chicken broth for this soup and we've got one whole chicken to add. So I'm going to get this one in there and this is a nice, this is an older hen, so she had fat on her and I mean, I'm sad, very sad that she passed away, but on the bright hand, this is going to make the soup so much better. We're going to be straining this broth before I add it to our actual soup that we're canning, but I'm going to add a whole onion in there, just sliced in half. And then we've got a bunch of herbs that Eric picked. We've got sage, we grew some white sage this year, it is really strong stuff. And tarragon, thyme, parsley, and some rosemary. So that will add some nice flavor and then we're going to be adding some dried summer savory as well. I'm just going to plop the herbs in this muslin cloth in there and then we're going to add a hefty dose of salt and pepper for this. And we're going to get it cooking, probably going to let this go for two hours or so. Just when I feel like it's done, that's when we'll turn it off. Okay, I almost forgot, I want to add some celery leaves to this too, and some coriander. We've already got some of our veggies chopped, but there is plenty more to cut up. We're going to be using onions, shallots in this recipe, the fennel and the cauliflower. I picked some extra broccoli we had and I thought it would be a good idea to add some of the immature celery that we had. I thought that would add a nice flavor. This recipe is just something I kind of looked up online and I'm doing a mishmash of some of the things I found. One thing that's neat though about this soup is you roast the ingredients before. So we're actually going to be cutting everything up, roasting it with olive oil, garlic in the oven, and then we're going to be making our soup with our broth and immersion blending it before we can it. And the cauliflower, I'm just cutting up just chunks of it. I don't think it really matters at this point since it's going to be roasted and then cooked. This is actually a really great use for this cauliflower because our cauliflower did not turn out that beautiful this year. I don't really know what happened there. Maybe it was heat, maybe it was just a timing thing, but it's still going to be awesome for this recipe. Soups are awesome for Eric and I in the winter, not only because it's winter in Alaska and it's cold, but because they're kind of like a pre-made canned food and anything in our realm that's pre-made and ready to go is awesome if you made it yourself. So like of course canned soups, but canned meats or just canned meals. We find those super convenient on days where maybe we're busy, but we want to eat some of our own food. I've got a lot to chop and we are going to start our oven at about 400 degrees because it's going to take a little while to roast all of this. So we're just going to do it in small batches. Okay, we finished up roasting all of our vegetables last night. They turned out awesome. They are just lightly soft and they're still going to cook quite a bit in the soup. And I pulled our broth off. We let that go for about two and a half hours last night and maybe 20 minutes this morning just to reheat it. And we're going to strain it now and get it ready for the soup. Take the herbs out first and I'm also going to take out the entire chicken. Now this chicken is definitely not going to go to waste, but we're not using it in this recipe. We're going to be saving that and using just the broth for the soup. I have the same muslin cloth that I used earlier for the herbs. I just cleaned it and we're going to strain it through that and another little strainer. So I don't know if you can see that, but there's already a lot of flavor in there with the oil and the fat from the chicken and the olive oil that we roasted the vegetables in. But I'm probably going to even add a little bit more olive oil to this recipe. I want it to be really savory. Okay, all of our veggies are in this pot and I'm just going to be adding quite a bit more olive oil. We're going to get them a little more toasty and heated up and then we're going to add the broth. The vegetables are ready to add the broth and I don't think this is going to be enough liquid to cover them. So I'm probably going to add water as well and I'm just going to cover the vegetables with the liquid. We're going to let this cook probably an hour or so or until the vegetables are soft and soft enough to actually immersion blend and get them all blended up. Well we let our soup go for about two hours and I think it's all finally soft enough. I even took some of it out and pre blended it to see if it would work and it did work very well. So I'm just going to let this cool a tad bit and then I'm going to use our immersion blender and immersion blend the entire thing until it's a nice consistency. At this point the soup is really flavorful. It's emitting all sorts of awesome scents if you're walking up to the house. I added more salt and pepper. We added a few more seasonings. So just kind of season it to your preference I would say. All right it's time to get these in jars. It's all blended. It tastes fabulous and I've got to get my pressure canner on the stove. The soup that we're jarring is very hot. I'm going to heat the pressure canner water up just a tad bit. The jars I already cleaned them with soapy hot water but I did not heat them up so I have to account for the fact that they're just a little bit cooler and I am heating up our lids because I feel like they just get a better seal that way. So I just heat them up a tad and in these are going to go. We have seven of them for each pressure canner and I think that's about exactly how much soup we have about 14 quarts and I left about an inch headspace on these and we're going to process them for 75 minutes because they're a soup that we created that we're canning. They look really good. They look just like I imagine cream of celery or something would look like and in fact on that note we did not add cream. I was a little bit worried that it would curdle with the high processing time so we're going to add cream after the fact once they're canned and when we're ready to eat them. Alright we're looking good. We have both pressure canners loaded up. It's been really nice having two of these bad boys. One of them we've had for five years. The other one's a newer edition and this is all taking place on our 20 inch stove right now. We're going to let these vent for 10 minutes and then we're going to put our weight on, build our pressure to 11 pounds and let them process for 75 minutes and then we'll be done. While these are both finished, we're going to be wrapping up our canning day today and we're going to be switching gears tomorrow and doing a day of fermenting and we'll catch you out in the garden. Chicken noodle soup. Smells good. Here you go. Present you my cabbage. Pretty immaculate. So beautiful. That's a lot of cabbage. I'm finding the chickweed I'm pretty sure. Oh that's a nice one. Look at that, that's like two pounds. Not even. That's a lot for a cabbage. Okay. Those are big. Wow. Oh my gosh. The crazy thing is, you can buy a bunch like that at the grocery store for 99 cents. You mean the effort that it took to grow them? Yeah. You mean like starting them from seed, like transplanting. These are way better. Tiny little hair on the ends. Yeah, the flavor is the difference. Can I use this for my stuff? Of course. Look at this. Oh my gosh. We're back in the kitchen with our cleaned vegetables and we are ready to start fermenting. Eric and I are very familiar with fermenting in this house. We do sourdough, milk kefir, and in the past we have done June tea, which is very similar to kombucha. Today we're going to be doing three classic fermented foods, which is sauerkraut, pickles, and kimchi. Kimchi is going to be a new one for us, but we have made sauerkraut several times and we're first going to get started on that. I have eight cabbages behind me, but I'm only going to be chopping six of them for our sauerkraut. And if you've never made sauerkraut, it is super simple to make. Very, very easy. It is salt and cabbage in a container. That's it. I'm going to be trying to slice our cabbage uber thin today. I want to get it nice and thin for the sauerkraut. We made a lot last year, but apparently it wasn't enough because we went through it really quickly this winter. So we're aiming to make more. In fact, this won't be enough. We're going to have to do another batch. I've got two cabbages chopped up and I'm going to take this as a breaking point and add some of the salt. You can see it's occupying a lot of this bucket already. When it comes to sauerkraut, there is a preference on how much salt you want to use. Generally speaking, you use one tablespoon per cabbage head, but that can really vary because cabbage heads vary, obviously the density and the size. So I'm going to use probably a little bit extra for each of our cabbage heads. I'm just going to sprinkle it on top. And what I'm going to do is just mix it, so making sure that salt gets on all the cabbage. We're going to be massaging it or working it for a really long time, but right now I'm just letting it sit. It's just going to start to pull some of that moisture out of the cabbage. I tend to put a little bit more salt as we keep going along and I will show you in just a little how you can kind of gauge whether you think you have enough salt or not. Finished chopping the cabbages. I put half in this pot here. We're not going to leave it in this one because it is a stainless steel pot. It's all going to be transferred to my five gallon bucket, but I did that just in terms of working the cabbage. So at this point, since they've both been sitting with their salt, each has a little over three tablespoons. You want to make sure you mix it all in and you want to kind of like punch it or massage it. And it takes, I mean, it takes a while. I like to use the self brine. So what I mean by that is we're going to actually make the cabbage to create its own juices and use that as the brine. You can make a salt water brine and add it to them. I've just never done it that way. So we're going to keep keep mashing until we get some juices to form and it's going to take a while. We've got Eric doing the other batch of sauerkraut down on the floor. And one way to kind of tell, I mean, you can always add more salt, but you cannot subtract the salt, obviously. So that's why I like to wait and kind of add salt as needed. I will taste it often as I'm doing this and see how it tastes. You want it to taste like salt water. You do want it to taste fairly salty. You can see it's starting to, starting to secrete those juices or water, I guess. You see that? Yeah, mine's got a lot of liquid in it. So that is what we're looking for. We're looking for the brine or the liquid to completely cover the cabbage. And if you didn't end up with enough, again, that's never happened to me, even with store bought cabbage, you can add a brine and you want to do about one tablespoon to three tablespoons of salt per quart of water. So again, it just goes a little bit off of your preference and what you are fermenting. So in this case, we probably used, I mean, I want to say we probably used maybe one and a half tablespoons per cabbage and they were pretty big. Final taste test. Those are really good. I am going to put a plate, a ceramic dish on this. We'll put the top back on and I will seal it or I'll lightly leave it on. If you seal it, you'll probably need to remember to just pop it because sometimes there are bubbles and gases that form in here that you need to release. We're going to let this sit on our back counter for at least a week and you can let sauerkraut go way longer than that. You can let it go for months. We don't exactly have a long-term storage for where we can put sauerkraut. You need to move it to a colder room or colder setting if you're looking to prolong its life. It will rapidly ferment in hot temperatures. So we are actually going to be canning this. We're going to water bath it at about 20 minutes in a few weeks when it's done. We're moving right along to our pickles and we are not making pickled pickles. We're making fermented pickles. So they are true pickles. We are harnessing yeast and bacteria to make these bad boys and we've got some really nice shaped little cucumbers. I think they'll be great for this. We've actually never done this so I'm pretty excited about it and it's very simple from what I've read. I'm just going to cut off the ends of the cucumbers and then we're going to put them in this jar. Now there's no vinegar in this recipe at all. It is just the salt brine water that we were talking about earlier with the sauerkraut. I'm going to add a garlic clove in and some of our dill about halfway. The spices that we're going to be using is mustard seeds, we've got some coriander seeds, we've got some black peppercorns and some celery seeds. And all of this is pretty potent so I'm just going to add a tiny bit. And at this point we're going to add our brine water. We went with two tablespoons per quart of water. This is just half and I have one tablespoon in here since it is only two cups. I'm just going to pour it right over that. Perfect amount. We want to completely submerge our pickles. And that's crucial when you are doing ferments, you want to make sure that all of your ingredients stay below the brine. That's it. These are pickles. They look absolutely beautiful. I am going to seal it and what I'll have to do is just monitor it probably every day, release the gases and I can seal it back up and I'm thinking these are going to take at least three days to start but we'll probably let them go a little bit longer to really get some of that fermented flavor. We will also be keeping these in a cool indirect sunlight place of our kitchen which is behind me and then we're working right on to our kimchi. That's our next thing. We've gathered all our ingredients to make kimchi and this is not going to be quite traditional kimchi because we don't have the exact right ingredients. I cannot grow Napa cabbage but we can grow a beautiful green cabbage. So that's our cabbage we're using and instead of the daikon radishes we are using turnips. It's a good substitute to use. We're also going to be using green onions, garlic, ginger, a few peppers, hot peppers from our high tunnel and of course the Korean chili pepper flakes. This is a fermentation so we are also using salt. I'm going to first chop up my cabbage, I'm going to leave the chunks a little bit thicker. I think that's a little more traditional with kimchi and I'm going to do really thin strips of these turnips. We're going to get it in a bowl, we're going to add about two tablespoons, maybe a little bit more of kosher salt, blend it, mash it, let it secrete some juices and then we're going to mix all of our ingredients together. We've added our green onions to our kimchi mixture and I'm going to add a few peppers. And Eric grated about a teaspoon of ginger and four to five cloves of, you know, bigger hardneck garlic, so quite a bit of garlic. I'm going to just put this paste in there, I'm going to mix it all up. We've actually never tried kimchi but from what I've read and heard it's supposed to be a very flavorful, strong, spicy fermented food. And we're not going to be adding fish sauce, that's a common ingredient, we're just adding the Korean chili pepper flakes and those are supposed to add some sweetness and some spice too. I'm going to add some of these flakes in now and I'm going to add probably two to three tablespoons. They're absolutely beautiful, they look like a, like a flake of salt or something but red. So that's adding this really nice red color and I've got to be honest, I may put another tablespoon of those flakes in. They just smell absolutely awesome. This is ready to be put in our jar. This is the size we're using, I think it should all fit. I just wanted to say that fermenting does not have to be tricky, it is so simple if you've never done it before. You know, I know if you're researching it you may find that you need all this stuff but the truth of it is that you do not actually need all that. We've been fermenting for a long time just using mason jars and lids. You just have to keep a close eye on it when it is fermenting. But having a fermentation crock or those, I think they're called the airlocks, that can be helpful, especially if you're having some trouble with your ferments not going right. This stuff smells so good, it smells like green onion and ginger, just fabulous. We don't even know what we're going to be eating this on, I haven't really quite thought about it. We were looking at maybe beans with eggs, something like that, looks fabulous. And there you have it, a beautiful jar of kimchi. So unfortunately this is not ready to eat yet, it's going to take a few days to start its fermentation. I'll probably wait at least a week on this one. I'm so thrilled for this one, very very excited for this. So same thing, we're going to be putting it in the back on our kitchen counter, keeping it out of direct sunlight and in a room temperature is ideal for them, at this stage at least. And once you're done fermenting it, you can transfer it to your fridge if you're at the point of eating it. We hope you guys enjoyed this video, and maybe try a ferment or two if you have not. And our kitchen is a mess, we're going to tidy up, and in a few days we'll be enjoying this awesome fermented food. Uber thin, like super tiny, like really extreme, uber. You know he's an outstanding or supreme example of a particular kind of person or thing? He was an uber fan of his favorite thing. You can't say uber thin? Yeah you can. You don't even need to show them the magic. Eat that thing like it owes you money. Yeah I wouldn't show any of this stuff. We'll show what it looks like midway and you can be a part of us.