Food Preservation Techniques: Learn How to Pickle

Image Gallery Make the riches of seasonal foods last with “Well-Preserved,” a guide to traditional food preservation techniques as well as low-tech methods, such as freezing and oil preserving. The book also includes more than 50 delicious recipes that will remind you why you put up your fare in the first place! COVER: RANDOM HOUSE

The following is an excerpt from Well-Preserved by Eugenia Bone (Random House, 2009). This hybrid cookbook/training manual will teach you techniques for putting up small batches of foods to make them last beyond their season, and show you how to savor your preserved bounty with scrumptious recipes such as Scallop and Tomatillo Ceviche, Smoked Chicken and Wild Rice Salad, Concord Grape Walnut Tart, and more. This excerpt is from Chapter 1, “All About Canning.” 

I am not an enthusiastic cucumber pickle eater. I pretty much like two kinds: bread-and-butter pickles made into a relish to eat with hamburgers and hot dogs and little sour cornichons to eat with pâté. However, there are many dishes I eat that call for vinegar, as in sausages with cauliflower, and so there was a certain logic in preparing pickled cauliflower: Having it on hand meant that instead of adding vinegar when cooking the sausages and then blanching the cauliflower and adding it as well, I could simply dump the contents of my jar over the browned sausage and be done. So, besides the pleasure of preserving a food when it is cheap and seasonal — and there is nothing more tempting than a fresh, tight, white head of cauliflower and little more disappointing than watching it brown over the course of a week in the fridge — I have the added satisfaction of knowing all I need to make dinner is to pick up a pound or two of fresh sausages and a bunch of fresh parsley to prepare a delicious (and quick) meal.

What is pickling? Pickling is the process of preserving foods in a high-acid solution, either by adding vinegar or naturally by means of fermentation. Spoilers cannot grow in a high-acid environment. This state of high acidity is achieved in two ways: by means of salt and with vinegar (though when you pickle with vinegar, you add salt as well).

Pickling With Salt

Pickling with salt falls into two categories: dry salt and brined. The dry salt method combines dry salt with vegetables in quantities above what you would add for seasoning purposes. Liquid (watery juices) is pulled from the vegetables, and this liquid combines with the salt to create a brine — a salty, watery solution. With the premade brine method, a vegetable is placed in a combination of salt and water. In both cases, the vegetables are covered in brine for a prescribed amount of time. In this submerged, airless state (below the brine line), the vegetables ferment. Fermentation is the process by which the natural bacteria in the foods convert the sugars into lactic acid. Lactic acid is a natural preservative. Depending on its strength, microorganisms will not grow in lactic acid because of its low pH (high acidity). As a result, low-acid foods such as cabbage can be canned safely in a water bath canner and stored on the shelf for up to a year after fermentation is complete. Lactic acid also supplies that yummy sour taste — hence the name sauerkraut.