Summer brings lots of fresh produce, sometimes more than we can use before it goes bad.
Lacto-fermented Green Beans & Swiss Chard Ribs in recycled lemonade bottles. Image by
I first saw the book Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning mentioned in the older, wiser, less commercial Mother Earth News.
The Mother Earth News that had fewer glossy ads for $25,000 tractors and more practical information.
The book is a collection of traditional French food preservation techniques that actually improve the taste and nutritional qualities of food, as opposed to creating the bland, tasteless and colorless food you find so often in cans.
It also specifically excludes freezing and canning methods.
It first came about when the French organic gardening magazine Les Quatre Saisons du Jardinage (Four-season Gardening in English) asked their readers how they preserved their fruits & vegetables.
we admit, we were somewhat skeptical. Hadn't all good recipes already been published?
Much to our surprise, we received over 500 recipes. Many were classics; however some were totally new, some had been adapted, and others had been regarded as common knowledge, and thus never had been published.
Here's where the methods came from, if you're a foody, you might be interested.
Image courtesy of Google Maps
In the foreword to the first edition, Elliot Coleman writes:
Food preservation techniques can be divided into two categories: the modern scientific methods that remove the life from food, and the natural ‘poetic’ methods that maintain or enhance the life in food. The poetic techniques produce live foods like those chosen by the French shoppers – foods that have been celebrated for centuries and are considered gourmet delights today. The scientific techniques produce dead foods and literally seal them in coffins. My instincts tell me that long-dead foods cannot properly nourish long-lived people.
I tend to agree with him on that.
One of the methods I've used out of the book is lactic-fermentation, if you've ever had real sauerkraut (not the stuff in a can), you know what it is.
In a nutshell, lactic fermentation uses salt and microbial organisms to convert the sugars in vegetables into lactic acid.
This makes the environment too acidic for the bacteria that cause food to spoil.
It also produces short-chained fatty acids, essential amino acids, beneficial enzymes and it increases your body's uptake of minerals.
Oddly enough, the resulting increase in beneficial bacteria due to lactic fermentation is now being "discovered" by science as a key to maintaining good health.
That's why you're beginning to see commercials and ads for "probiotics".
The foods have a superb tangy-ness and I've even been known to drink the brine as a tonic.
As a child, I remember my Mom making Sauerkraut in an open crock in our house. She used a plate with a brick on it to keep the cabbage submerged in the brine.
I guess, like a BlindSquirl, sometimes those poor dumb farmers & peasants get lucky and stumble across a way to preserve food that's healthier & better tasting than the scientists can figure out.
Or something like that.
Oh, and if you're wondering how we get the Green Beans & Swiss Chard ribs out of the bottle, page 82.
I checked the book out from the local Library before buying a copy.