FOOD PRESERVATION- KEEPING WHAT YOUR GARDENS GROWSI LOVE to garden! In fact there is a sign in my garden that states that "Gardening is cheaper than Therapy" I truly believe that! I am in no way, an expert gardener but we do appreciate the bounty that our small garden gives to us year round. What I do know about though, is how to preserve that bounty every year. Personally I prefer to dehydrate most of the fruits and vegetables we grow, however, I do use the freezer for some things and I do use the canning kettle for others, but drying the food is the faster and easiest way to keep the freshness of the food and I find it is really easy to use in my cooking. HOW DOES DRYING FOOD WORK? There are several reasons I prefer the food presserved by dehydrating. Drying the foods, only removes the liquid or moisture from the food. When the moisture is removed from food, the bacteria that is in all food, can not work, so it hibernates until moisture or water is added back to reconstitute it again. That is why you can keep dried food very easily and for long periods without special equipment or containers. In the canning process, the high heat and boilng waters kills all the bacteria so the food will keep, and in the freezing process the bacterial is frozen and with warmth cannot react either. NUTRITION--When you dry your food you retain a much larger percentage for the nutrition in the raw food, than you would if you canned it or froze it. The USDA did a study a number of years ago comparing the 3 forms of food presservation and how much nutrition is left in the food. They used 3 types of fruits and/or vegetables to do the study like peas, peaches, tomatoes. They found that when the foods were dried with just the moisture removed, they still retained on the average 80% of the nutrients that were originally there in the raw food, When frozen, the foods lost 50% of the nutrients and when canned with all the high heat that is involved, they lost 80% of the nutrition. That is why the dried foods also have a better taste than the same foods, canned or frozen. SAVING TIME--These days none of us can spare a lot of time to do some of the work our ancestors did when preserving their foods. Canning and freezing requires much preparation time and effort, depending on what you are working with. When we dry foods in a dehydrator we basically cut it up the same size and place it on the trays, go to bed, and when you get up in the morning, it is done. We simply remove the food from the trays and put it in a plastic bag, on container with a lid or even the glass jars that we no longer use to can the foods, with a lid. SAVING SPACE--Dried foods take up a lot less space than frozen or canned foods. We did a comparison one year with 20 lbs. of tomatoes. When we canned them we were able to get them into 10 quart sealers. We took another 20 lbs of tomatoes and cut them into slices on a slicer, and placed them on the drying trays. Next morning we were able to get the same 20 lbs. of dried tomatoes into 3 qt. sealers. I like to make pizza sauce with my dried tomatoes so I decided to powder the tomatoes in our Bosch blender (about 5 min.) by putting the dried tomatoes in the blender and turning it on high. We now got the 20 lbs. of powdered, dried tomatoes in 1 qt. sealer. Every tablespoon of tomato powder is approximately 1 tomato. To use it I just add warm water to a few Tbsp. of the tomato powder in my blender, let it sit a few minutes to reconstitute, and turn it on for a few seconds. SAVING ENERGY--Dehydrating foods requires warm moving air to pass across the foods. All the dehydrators we sell are really efficient in the way they work by re-circulating the warm air, so it costs pennies to run them. (Approx. 5 cents @hr.). Most foods are dried in 8 to 10 hours so you have used very little energy to presseve the food. Since you require no special container to store the foods we can use recycle containers like ice cream buckets or plastic food containers or even just glass jars with lids. You are not paying to run a freezer all the time, nor the cost of purchasing special jars nor the energy required to keep things boiling for long periods of time as you would for canning. TASTES BETTER--Last but not least, when you go to use the foods in cooking or just eating it, as is, like in the case of dried fruits, it tastes a lot better than its canned or frozen counterpart. When foods are dried the flavours and sugars are concentrated, thus giving peaches a more peachy taste and bananas a more banana taste. Speaking of bananas, drying them is the only way to presserve the integrity of the fruit so it can be still eaten raw when dried. Check out our tips for drying foods here We will talk about how to dry the foods in our next post.. |
