In Episode 224 of Mother Earth News and Friends, Bevin Cohen of Small House Farm joins us to discuss his new book, The Heritage Pantry, and all the ways you can preserve your harvest, including best vegetables for canning, how to can fruits and vegetables, canning equipment, and more.
Scroll down for our episode transcript, and scroll to the bottom for our show-note resources!
Best Vegetables for Canning, Dehydrating, and More Transcript
Jessica Anderson: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. At Mother Earth News for 50 years and counting, we’ve been dedicated to conserving the planet’s natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources. In this podcast, we host conversations with experts in the fields of sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you are in a way that values both people and our Mother Earth.
Kenny Coogan: Good day, everyone. I’m Kenny Coogan, and joining me is Bevin Cohen. Bevin is an award winning author, owner of Small House Farm, and host of the popular Seeds and Weeds podcast. Bevin offers workshops and lectures across the country on the benefits of living closer to the land through seeds, herbs, and locally grown food.
He is the author of The Heritage Pantry: Modern Methods of Preserving Food the Old Fashioned Way. Today, we’re going to be talking about the best vegetables for canning, dehydrating, and [00:01:00] more preservation methods. Welcome to the podcast, Bevin.
Bevin Cohen: Hey, Kenny, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Kenny Coogan: I’m excited to have you because we all love food and we all love preserving the harvest.
Bevin Cohen: That’s right.
[00:01:13] What are Some Benefits of Canning?
Kenny Coogan: Growing food on the homestead is great, but oftentimes they will come into ripeness at the same time. It’s also hard to beat produce summer prices at local farmers markets, so listeners might feel compelled to buy in bulk. Just this week, I was able to buy clamshells of blackberries for 99 cents. Which is $4 cheaper than normal, so I stocked my freezer. So to achieve sustainability, we need to learn how to preserve the harvest. What are some benefits of canning? We’ll talk about canning first, and then we can talk about freezing.
Bevin Cohen: I think you really hit the nail on the head there, Kenny, because one of the greatest benefits of canning or any form of food preservation, it gives us that ability to capture the harvest when it’s at its peak, you know, when everything’s really coming in [00:02:00] mid summer, late summer, the harvest is a bountiful, and we really want to be able to have that so we can enjoy it throughout the year.
One of the things that I love about canning my own tomatoes is the diversity that allows me to have. Let’s think about going to the grocery store and buying cans of tomatoes. You’re going to have, oh, maybe two different varieties of tomato available to you, right? There’s the San Marzano, which is a nice one. And then there’s pretty much the generic tomato or whatever it is that’s in all the cans. And that’s perfectly fine. That serves its purpose.
But when we grow and preserve our own, or even buy it from a local farmers market and preserve it, we have just such an array of different varieties that we could choose from: all of these different flavors, all of these different colors. In a way we can kind of capture the essence of not only the season, but our location as well, the place that we’re in, the flavors of our garden. And we can have all these different things. I love to make tomato sauces out of different varieties of tomatoes, each sauce being its own flavor profile. And that’s something that we can only do when we preserve our own food from our [00:03:00] communities or from our gardens through canning or whatever method it might be.
[00:03:03] What are the Best Vegetables for Canning?
Kenny Coogan: What are some of the best vegetables for canning other than the famous tomato?
Bevin Cohen: We could consider pickles. We could talk about green beans. I think the best vegetables or fruits for canning are going to be the ones that come in all at one time. That large abundance, the ones that don’t necessarily store very well on their own.
I know folks that like to can carrots, and you certainly could, but carrots store pretty well on their own. Some people want to can potatoes. You certainly could, again, but potatoes store pretty well on their own. I think canning is ideal for fruits and vegetables that come in in a large quantity, all at one time that aren’t necessarily shelf stable for a long term.
So like we mentioned, tomatoes and cucumbers, green beans, a lot of our delicate berries, things like blueberries, the blackberries that you just bought, raspberries, that sort of thing. They’re not going to sit around for too long. So we got to get them while we can, when they’re coming in in abundance, preserve them, enjoy them all year.
[00:03:58] What Equipment Do You Need When Learning How to Can Fruits and Vegetables?
Kenny Coogan: When I moved to my [00:04:00] Florida homestead 15 years ago, on a social media marketplace, somebody in the neighborhood was giving away all this canning equipment, and learning how to can fruits and vegetables is simple once you have the right equipment. So can you guess and tell the listeners all of the devices and freebies I got from my neighbor?
So what’s the best equipment for canning, or what’s needed for canning?
Bevin Cohen: In the book, we have plenty of lists of all the equipment that you’re going to need for each of the preservation techniques. But for canning, first, we have to decide what kind of canning that we’re going to want to do, whether it’s water bath canning or pressure canning.
For water bath canning, you can simply use a stock pot like you might already have in the kitchen already. Whereas with pressure canning, you’re going to need a pressure canner. There’s a certain piece of equipment for that. And some of them use a weight. Some of them have a dial, a gauge on them so you can regulate the pressure, and both of those are going to work just fine, you know, depending on what’s available to you and what fits your budget.
But in addition to the actual canner itself, of course, you’re going [00:05:00] to need jars. You’re going to need lids. You’re going to need the screw tops. You might need some funnels. You might need the magnet for picking up the lid. There’s a number of different little bits and bobs that you’re going to want to accumulate as you begin your canning journey.
But what’s cool about it, Kenny, is that aside from the resealable lids themselves, everything else is a one-time purchase. Once you have the jars and you’ve got the funnels and that sort of thing, you can use those same funnels for years and years. I used to can tomatoes with my grandma when I was a little boy. She used that same canner her entire life. And it’s the same canner that I could still use today. Once you have a nice piece of equipment, you’ll have it for as long as you want to have it, they become heirlooms in a way for themselves.
Kenny Coogan: I should have mentioned that the stuff that I got for free was a water bath canner. And it also came with tongs to pick up the jars. And she also gave us small mouth and large mouth jars, and then also the corresponding bands, and probably some lids. And now that I feel like I’m an expert, I don’t even bother [00:06:00] with the small mouth.
Bevin Cohen: I rarely use the small mouth jars myself. Kenny. You’re absolutely right. The wide mouth jars. They’re just a lot easier to work with. And if that’s what you got, totally, use what you have available to you. But if you have the ability to, say, upgrade to those wide mouth jars, that’s what you’re going to want for sure.
[00:06:14] Precautions When Canning
Kenny Coogan: Are there some precautions people should keep in mind when canning?
Bevin Cohen: Well, sure, we want to make sure that we’re processing and preserving our food safely. Right? And so that’s going to come back to this water bath canning versus pressure canning.
Water bath canning works really well when we’re working with fruits and vegetables that are more acidic. Right? So the, the, acidity of the fruit, tomatoes is one of them, berries is another. The acidity of the fruit helps to deter the growth of bacteria, right? So we can utilize this water bath canning method. But when we’re working with other foods that aren’t as acidic, we need to utilize pressure canning. The pressure canner brings the food up to a much higher temperature, and that’s going to help kill that bacteria to make sure that food is safe for us to can. So that’s very, very important.
It’s also [00:07:00] important, I think, just to consider basic cleanliness. And that’s something for any food preservation technique. We want to make sure all of our equipment, our countertops, our surfaces, everything’s nice and clean while we’re working. Keeping everything clean is going to cut down on that bacteria, and inevitably that’s going to make sure our food is safer for us.
[00:07:16] Advantages of Canning
Kenny Coogan: What makes canning worth it? Do you need to just be buying food in bulk, or is it all because you’re getting better flavor, more freshness? Or like, what’s like, the main purpose, or like for you individually, what’s like the main drive of like, because it’s a lot of, it’s not a lot of work, but it takes a lot of time.
Bevin Cohen: Well, it does take a lot of time and it can be quite a bit of work. And I find that I do a lot of my canning, which can be a very, very hot job with all of that boiling,, in the summertime when it’s already quite hot. So it’s a fun experience, but it’s definitely challenging, you know? So what is, what makes it worth it?
So there’s a few different things here. I mean, we could think about the economics of it. Like I would prefer to be [00:08:00] canning and preserving the food I’ve already put all the time into growing, as opposed to going and buying it. I can support my local farmers. If I want to go and buy produce in bulk from them to bring it home and can, that way I’m keeping my money in my local economy. I think that that’s very important. We talked about the diversity that’s available to us when we can our own foods. You know, if you go to the store, again at the grocery store, you have very limited selection of the different foods that you can eat. But when you’re purchasing from your farmers market or growing in your gardens, the sky’s the limit. You can have all sorts of different stuff. So that’s important.
But also I think the convenience is something to think about. Now, it may seem like a bunch of work here at the season when we’re canning, but the convenience at the end, when we’re enjoying the product, you know, so when are you going to do the work? You’re going to do it now, or are you going to do it later. And I find that getting it all done now, maybe that’s the best way to do it.
In the book, one of the recipes that we have in there is for a ratatouille, which is one of our favorite dishes. And it incorporates eggplants and it’s got zucchinis and tomatoes and that sort of thing. And by preparing it and canning it in advance, [00:09:00] then later in the year, when I’m very busy, when the kids are in school and we’re running around all crazy all the time, I can pop open that can and enjoy some delicious homegrown food. And that’s pretty cool because I know how it’s being grown. I know how the plants are being cared for. And those aren’t things that you can say if you’re buying stuff at the grocery store.
[00:09:16] Other Ways of Preserving Garden Vegetables
Kenny Coogan: So we want to inspire our listeners to preserve their own food. Other than canning, which I think is maybe popular or mainstream because people are familiar with jams and jarring and pickles, what are some other ways of preserving garden vegetables? And what are the benefits of these methods?
Bevin Cohen: Well, you know, there’s a lot of different benefits and a lot of different techniques. In the book, we cover up to, I think, 10 different techniques. So we’re talking canning and, and, and jellies, of course, and dehydration and using smoke and salt and fat and sugar, different ways to preserve these foods.
But if we think about all, all these different techniques are very similar in their own ways, because what we’re doing here is if we’re using salt or [00:10:00] sugar or whatever it might be, it’s to extract the moisture from the plant. When we’re dehydrating our food, we’re extracting the moisture from the plant. And the moisture, the water, in the plant is what harbors a lot of that bacteria, right? So we’re getting the water out of there. We’re protecting the plants, the food, from air. And sometimes we’re utilizing heat to kill bacteria, but there’s a lot of overlap in all of the different techniques. So I wanted to explore that in the book, because I thought it was really important that we realize that the similarities from one technique to the next, the science is, is the same for each one of them, right? What we’re trying to accomplish here. They’ve all got, you know, different benefits, different times and places.
So let’s use an example of zucchini. Boy, man, when it’s zucchini time, we’re bringing in a lot of fruits, right? Zucchinis on zucchinis. People are hiding them on their neighbors’ porches, all sorts of things. We’ve got more zucchini than we know what to do with. But Mature zucchini, a nice big zucchini, isn’t really something that I’m going to want to can, right? You can most certainly. And it depends on what your final plan for the fruit is, but a zucchini is something that’s very [00:11:00] high water content. It’s going to get kind of soft. It’s going to get kind of mushy in the canner by itself. It’s also not even necessarily something that I would want to freeze because of that water content, right? It kind of just becomes a big, big lump of frozen mass. And we don’t necessarily want to do that.
But dehydration for zucchini? Absolutely fantastic. We could take the zucchini, slice it up, put it through our food dehydrator, removing that water content from the fruit, that’s going to preserve it. And then when we’re ready to use it, we can even rehydrate it. It won’t be exactly the same as a fresh zucchini, but it’ll certainly be delicious.
Now, another example for that would be like eggplant. Eggplant is another soft, spongy, high moisture fruit that’s not necessarily going to be perfect for putting through the freezer unless let’s say, what are you going to make with it? If you’re making baba ganoush, well, then it doesn’t much matter, right? But for other applications, maybe we don’t want such a soft and mushy eggplant. So we’re going to want to utilize other techniques, even though it’s the same science, right, protecting it from air, protecting it from light, removing the moisture, the different techniques [00:12:00] allow us to make a slightly different product, which is going to be able to be fine tuned, tweaked, depending on the food that we want to make at the end.
Kenny Coogan: Do you ever think about if people should buy additional freezers? Or should they just use what they have? Because I’m sure there’s a cost analysis that they should consider if you’re freezing everything in the summer, you’re eventually going to run out of space.
Bevin Cohen: Well, that’s one of the tricks with the freezer too, you know, is that it, you have limited freezer space and you’re relying on electricity to keep it going. And that can pose certain challenges. Now, here at Small House, we do have multiple freezers. We’ve gotten a larger freezer. One of them is mostly filled with meat. You know, most people that have a lot of freezer space, that’s what they’re going to use it for. Whether they’re purchasing from a farmer, growing their own meat, if they’re hunters, whatever it might be.
So you do have limited freezer space, which I think is what’s really cool about all of these other techniques. It allows us to not only choose a technique that fits the final product that we want, but also fits the space and equipment that we have [00:13:00] available to us, right? If you have the ability to get more freezer space, oh, absolutely. You’re going to want to do that. But along with that, it’s going to come the reliance on electricity.
I’ll tell you a quick side story. A number of years ago, we had, we were raising pigs here at Small House, and we just taken the pigs to the butcher, and we loaded up the meat in the freezer and everything, everything we thought was so wonderful out in the pole barn. But we had a circuit blew. It was, we blew a circuit and I did not know that, but off that same circuit, we had a disco ball running out in the pole barn. And one day I was out there and I realized that disco ball wasn’t turning. And I thought, oh, that can’t be good. Well, it had been a while apparently, and we lost a lot of that meat, you know? So there’s, if we’re going to work with the freezer or rely on electricity, we want to take those precautions to make sure that we’re keeping a really good eye on those things. So we don’t lose that food.
We’re putting a lot of hard work into preserving the harvest and we don’t want to lose it simply because the power went out. So that’s why I think that people do like canning so much, you know, we could preserve a lot of food. It still takes up a lot of [00:14:00] space, but it’s a different space, right? And it’s not relying on any outside inputs like that. And I think that’s important for folks to consider.
Kenny Coogan: When you were talking about zucchini, dehydrating zucchini, I thought about the first time I grew striped kusha squash. And apparently there is a rogue vine that I wasn’t paying attention to, and it produced a 15 pound squash and a 3 pound squash, all by itself. No watering, no fertilizing. And I didn’t know what to do, so I just made loaves and loaves of zucchini bread. And then everyone in the neighborhood got bread. Which I might have froze, but it would probably have been better if I would have dehydrated it and tried to kept some for myself.
[00:14:41] A History of Food Preservation
Bevin Cohen: Well, I tell you, Kenny, so I love zucchini bread, and that’s something we do a lot with our zucchini here, you know, because it’s not something if you just shred up your zucchini and try to freeze it, it never works out well for me. I don’t like the final texture of that product there, but we make some zucchini bread. My wife makes some killer zucchini bread and we love, we’ll make it up and we’ll wrap that in foil and put it in the [00:15:00] freezer. And then we’ve got it, you know, to enjoy all winter long. And I think that’s a really nice way to preserve the harvest.
Sometimes we don’t have to preserve the fruits and vegetables in the exact state that they come out of the garden. We can turn them into something wonderful and then find a way to preserve that as well. You know, speaking of dehydration, dehydrating squash is a great way to go. You know, Indigenous populations for millennia and still to this day dehydrate squash to store it throughout the winter, and it makes it, you know, when you get that water content out of the food and you could concentrate those flavors, it is so delicious, you know, and then you can make it into soups. You can do all sorts of wonderful things with it. It’s, it’s a fantastic way to preserve the harvest.
And working on this book, writing The Heritage Pantry, one of the things that I wanted to do was to go back and look at the history of all these different food preservation techniques. How have we been preserving our food?
I mean, since the dawn of agriculture, right? 10, 000 years, even longer if you think about as a hunter and gatherer society, we had to find ways to preserve the food when it was available to us. So let’s find the [00:16:00] history of these preservation techniques and then follow them through to modern times and see how we’re using them today.
And in many cases, those techniques haven’t even changed that much. We’re doing a lot of the same things that we would have done back then. We might have a more modern equipment. We’ve got electricity, we can run food dehydrators, et cetera. But for the most part, it’s the same as we’ve been doing it since the beginning.
And I think there’s, there’s something cool about that to know that we’re kind of following in the steps of the gardeners and growers and food preservationists that have come before us.
[00:16:29] Ways to Dehydrate Food
Kenny Coogan: What device do you use for dehydrating? Because of course we have the modern day multi tiered 15 layer dehydrators. But I’m positive there’s different ways to dehydrate food.
Bevin Cohen: Oh, sure. And there’s a lot of different ways that we could dehydrate food. You’re absolutely right. And it is a technique that we could go back thousands of years with. Most certainly I know pork didn’t arrive until North America until, you know, just a few hundred years ago, but still, Indigenous folks would have been dehydrating meat for a very long time and still [00:17:00] do.
Now we got those multi stack tier type dehydrators here and I use a number of those. I really like them. I’ve got a few that have an adjustable dial so you can set the temperature on them, and they’ve got a fan which kind of gets that airflow, which is very, very important to make sure you can dehydrate these foods very quickly. Because if you think about when you’re dehydrating foods, especially, let’s say something like meat, you know what I mean? You don’t want to just sitting out at room temperature for long extended periods of time. You want to get it dried down as quickly as possible. So having some fans on there is really nice.
We’ve used our oven to dehydrate food most certainly. We’ve worked with a smoker. We have a whole chapter in the book talking about smoking our meat as a method of preservation, which, there’s some science there, but a lot of it is really just getting the water out of the food, is what’s going to help preserve it. Cutting down on that ability for bacteria to grow.
There are some very fancy dehydrators on the market for all sorts of budgets, most certainly, and they’re all wonderful pieces of equipment, but we could even harken back to sun dried [00:18:00] tomatoes on the rooftops in Italy. You know what I mean? Just utilizing the sun and a little bit of wind to get those tomatoes dry, concentrating those flavors and making the most delicious sun dried tomatoes. Absolutely. Which is not a technique that I can do here because it is far too humid where I’m at during tomato season. So I can’t pull that off because that humidity, again, that’s your enemy because we’re trying to get the moisture out of the food and that moist environment, the food keeps soaking it up. So that’s why the fans are so important.
We use those multi stack plastic trays. I’ve got a few of them, and we run them over here in the corner basically all summer long. Non stop, it seems like. But the newer models, they’re, they’re pretty cost effective. They don’t burn as much electricity as the older ones do. So it’s worth investing in buying a new one if you can. But if not, use what you’ve got and make the most of it. And, you know, the flavor of that homegrown home preserve food is so delicious. Sometimes I don’t even mind if it costs me a little bit more.
[00:18:53] Comparing Dehydration Methods
Kenny Coogan: If you’re dehydrating a tomato in an oven compared to the multi tiered, modern day [00:19:00] device, is one faster than the other?
Bevin Cohen: Well, so if you use an oven, like a convection oven, with, that’s got airflow in it, you can do it pretty much just as quickly as a dehydrator could. But the dehydrator with that fan is really going to speed things up a little bit.
Another thing that I would recommend: you can do it in the dehydrator, but particularly in the oven is using some parchment paper underneath, because otherwise as the tomatoes as they dry down, they’ll kind of stick to the pan a little bit and they can a little bit difficult to work with. And that parchment paper works so nice. You can just pull it right off and it’s clean, quick, and easy. And yeah, that seems to be the easiest way to do it if you got the parchment paper, of course. If not, don’t worry about it. You know, do it, do what you can with what you got. That’s the big lesson here.
[00:19:41] Best Preservation Methods for Different Kinds of Vegetables
Kenny Coogan: Do some vegetables work better preserved through one method than another?
Bevin Cohen: If we think about, you know, those softer, more moist fruits, like zucchini and eggplant, I don’t think that they’re going to go through the freezer quite as well. I don’t necessarily know if I’m going to want to can them individually. So there are definitely [00:20:00] differences from here to there.
I’m going to come back to the freezer. So, when we talk about, say, a blueberries. We just started picking blueberries out in the woods here. That’s happening right now. So I guess that’s top of mind for me. We got a recipe in the book, this wonderful blueberry jam that you can make. And I like blueberry jam, but I don’t like so much blueberry jam, you know. And I’m going to have a lot of blueberries coming in and I know that I can make a nice jam with them, but do I really want gallons of jam? It’s not really practical for me, right?
So I find that it is a lot easier to run my blueberries through the freezer. And the trick when you’re working with the freezer is if you can get a tray of some sort, and again, the parchment paper works nice here, get a tray and you can lay these fruits out in an individual layers when you put them into the freezer. And that way they can start to freeze individually. So that way, when you then you bag them up, you put them in freezer bags later, they’re all individual fruits. So it’s really easy to pour them out and use them. You can portion out the amount that you need. Whereas if you just throw all your fresh berries into a freezer bag and toss it in the freezer, you’re going to get a big lump of berries. And when it comes time to use them, that’s, you know, it’s going to be a challenge, [00:21:00] let’s say. So that works really well.
Sometimes in the freezer, I also like to blanch my vegetables, things like that. A quick blanching process slows down the oxidation. So you keep that nice, vibrant color and that, that crisp texture and that sort of thing, which is important to do when you’re working with the freezer, because it can break down the plant material a little bit more and which is going to affect the overall quality. So putting those couple of extra steps in, I think that’s important, just to make sure that that final product is as enjoyable as possible when we come time to eat it.
Kenny Coogan: So we’re in the middle of summer right now, and we’re talking about food preservation. But you’re mentioning preserving the greens. And definitely in the winter, I’m blanching my greens and putting them in the freezer.
Bevin Cohen: Oh, yeah. And that’s a cool thing about the food preservation from our own gardens is that it’s something that, I mean, it happens all year long. We’re bringing in different stuff in the spring, all the way through the winter, new fruits and vegetables, and we can preserve them and enjoy them. And if you live in a place with the farmers market, you have that same opportunity to do that, even if you can’t grow your own.
There’s a few markets near me that [00:22:00] are year long. You know, and the pickings are a little more slim in the winter, of course, just because it’s winter in Michigan, but there’s still some fine produce that you can get your hands on there. And you can preserve it if you’d like, but let’s think about some of those winter vegetables, root crops, and that sort of thing. They don’t necessarily need a lot of processing to store. So we actually wrap up the book with a chapter about the root cellar and all of the different fruits and vegetables that we can actually store just by understanding how the, the, the process of storage works, right? And, and keeping them cool and keeping them dark. We can keep a lot of our produce fresh and delicious well into the winter months, just utilizing what we consider, you know, Indigenous technology.
[00:22:39] Customizing Your Preserved Foods
Kenny Coogan: One thing that I’ve made a few falls in a row is kimchi because the onions, the carrots, the cabbage, maybe some hot peppers. They’re all good, you know, at the end of the summer, beginning of the fall.
Bevin Cohen: Yeah, I love kimchi, and I love to make it, and we always try to experiment with using, you know, different types of cabbages or different [00:23:00] greens or different peppers. When you learn the traditional techniques of making these foods, then you, once you understand how to do it well, you can really branch out and experiment and really do these different flavors. And that’s another cool thing about preserving your own food, Kenny, is you can make things at home that you’d never be able to find anywhere else. Very specific to whatever’s coming in to your garden, you know? And I think that’s part of the fun of it. It’s delicious and it’s fun.
Kenny Coogan: I am a vegetarian and I love spicy food, and kimchi has fish in it. So I make very spicy kimchi that’s vegetarian.
Bevin Cohen: Absolutely. See, that’s cool. You can customize it. You know, we do a lot of that sort of thing. We make a lot of hot sauces here. That’s something that we enjoy doing, sometimes fermented, some otherwise, maybe not all the time. Although I do love a nice fermented hot sauce. But we can make something here that’s custom to our own flavor, and we know the flavors that we enjoy. And that’s, that’s really cool because I mean, there’s a lot of varieties of hot sauces out there, but nothing like the stuff that we can make from our own [00:24:00] gardens, you know.
[00:24:00] Midroll Ad: Pantry from the Garden Course
Alyssa Warner: Stock your pantry with fresh foods grown in your home and community. We’re taking notes from Bevin Cohen’s book, The Heritage Pantry, and trying out our favorite recipes and techniques with locally grown produce. We are canning, salting, brining, and pickling our way to better and healthier foods that meet the needs and tastes of our families. Learn how you can use this resource in your kitchen with our “Pantry From the Garden” course, releasing September 13th and featuring recipes and guidance from Bevin Cohen’s The Heritage Pantry. Go to www.motherearthnews.com/courses/pantry-from-the-garden on September 13th for more information.
[00:24:45] More on “The Heritage Pantry” and Food Preservation Recipes of Vegetables
Kenny Coogan: I’m Kenny Coogan with Mother Earth News, and we are talking to Bevin Cohen. Bevin is a food and garden contributor for Mother Earth News, and he’s the author of more than 10 books, including The Heritage Pantry. And you can learn more about [00:25:00] Bevin’s work at www.SmallHouseFarm.com.
So, Bevin, we have a couple of questions from the listeners. They want to know specific recipes. But before I ask you those a handful of things, can you give us one or two of your favorite food preservation recipes for vegetables that are in the book?
Bevin Cohen: Well, sure. I mean, picking one or two favorites is going to be a challenge, Kenny. The reason that the recipes are the ones that are in the book is because they’re all my favorites. You know, some of them are family recipes that we’ve been making for years and years, and some of them we specially developed just for the book.
I mentioned the nice blueberry jam that’s in there. That’s a good one. We’ve got a barbecue sauce that I really enjoyed. We did a preserved lemons. Preserving these lemons. And they were so delicious, the salt preserved lemons that I loved them so much that I was every excuse I could come [up with]. “Well, let’s see if these preserved lemons. We’re going to work in this recipe.” And I would dig them out and cut them up. And what I thought was really [00:26:00] fun about was that you once you preserve this lemon, once it’s properly processed, even the peel is edible, you know, so I was able to utilize the peel and eat that. That was really, really fun. I like that one.
Kenny Coogan: That recipe is very simple, correct?
Bevin Cohen: Oh, my gosh. Very simple. And that’s the thing. With a lot of this food preservation is it’s incredibly simple. You know, it’s something that every single person can do is learn how to preserve their own food. Or again, preserve the food from their farmers market, or even at their local grocery store if something’s on sale, you know, if you have access to an abundance of, of produce, you can preserve it and enjoy it. And it’s something that every single person can and should do.
[00:26:37] Preservation Recipes: Barbecue Sauce
Kenny Coogan: Can you go back to the barbecue sauce?
Bevin Cohen: Yeah, so barbecue sauce is a really fun one, you know, and I think that every time I make barbecue sauce, it’s a little bit different. And that’s kind of the fun of it. It’s a tomato base that we use to make the barbecue sauce. But from there, it really, it just goes this direction or that direction, depending on the flavor profile of what we’re trying to make that day, [00:27:00] what we have available to us while we’re cooking, you know. But essentially it’s just combining the ingredients that we have, cooking it down a little bit. Really trying to work the moisture out to get a lot of that water. You know, the tomatoes are watery and you want to get some of that tomato to thicken that sauce up so it’ll really stick to the food that you’re working with, if you’re making barbecue chicken, or even if you’re just using it as a dip or a marinade. It was very simple to do.
So we made probably, I’m going to say maybe a dozen different barbecue sauces while we were working on the book. And we picked the one, it was the one, that we ended up putting in there, because at the time I said, ” out of these 12 sauces, this is the one I could eat on every meal.” You know what I mean? It’s, it was really just fit the flavor profile of so many different dishes. So we said, “now that’s the one that’s going to go in the book.”
But what we try to encourage folks to do is once you understand the technique or the method, you gotta make it your own, right? You can follow my recipes and learn how to do it, find out how it’s made, but then, you know, feel free to customize it and really, you know, personalize it, make it your own.
You [00:28:00] got to follow your palate, right? You got to make the food that you enjoy. And that’s kind of the beauty of cooking, whether it’s for food preservation or not, is that you can make the flavors exactly what you want them to be. And that’s an enjoyable part of gardening, is getting to eat all that tasty food when you’re done.
[00:28:15] How to Make Giardiniera
Kenny Coogan: One of my favorite things to snack on is giardiniera. And how do you make and store homemade giardiniera? Especially because it is so expensive in the store and the jars are so tiny. And these are like super simple ingredients.
Bevin Cohen: They’re super simple and they’re delicious and it’s one of my favorite snacks to even as a kid, I would, I would just eat it and eat it and I mean, as a side, as a snack, with cheese and crackers, it didn’t matter. Any excuse to have a little bit of it. It’s spicy and it’s sour and it’s just so good.
So when we see it at the store, and you’re right, it’s expensive and it comes in a little jar. And that’s silly because it should be less expensive in a much bigger cars because we, you know, we want a lot of it. You’ll often see it made with, you know, it’s [00:29:00] cauliflower, there’s carrots, you know, maybe a little pearl onion or something like that in there, sometimes I’ve seen it with bell peppers. And that’s cool, but it’s not necessary. You know, giardiniera is just the Italian word for “gardener,” right? And this is a way that we can utilize whatever’s coming in, out of the garden, whether it be, you know, cauliflower and carrots, or if it’s onions or bell peppers, it, you know, it doesn’t even matter what it is. You can bring that in and you can preserve it and enjoy those flavors.
So the process, it’s pretty simple like everything else, but first we’re going to create a brine is what we’re going to do here. So we’re going to get all of our vegetables. We’re going to kind of chop them up a little bit smaller, and then we’re going to make a brine with it. And all this brine is, it’s just going to be salt and water, right? So it’s cold water and salt. We’re going to add the salt to the vegetables in a bowl, cover them with cold water so they’re nicely covered, and let it sit in the refrigerator overnight. Maybe like 12 hours or so. Really let the salt cure that food, break it down a little bit.
And then we’re going to strain out that water, rinse it off a little bit, and then we’re going to pickle it with a vinegar brine solution, right? And that’s all that it really is, is just a [00:30:00] salted brine pickle. Now, a lot of times you’ll see, if you find traditional recipes, they utilize olive oil in it. And we could really just start digging into the history of how these types of dishes travel around the world. But there’s muffaletta and they make these sandwiches down in New Orleans. And the, the condiment that they use is essentially a giardiniera with olives and such in it, but it’s heavy with oil.
So we talk about this in the book, you don’t necessarily want to can with the oil, right? It’s fats and starches and those sorts of things. You don’t want to necessarily pickle or can with those. It’s not going to preserve well, it’s not necessarily a safe thing to do. But no worries. You make it with the vinegar the way that it is. And then you can bring it out of the jar when you’re ready to eat it, chop it up, blend it with a little olive oil, spread it on sandwiches. You can put it on hot dogs or hamburgers. You can, you can eat it by the spoon. It’s so good. You know, and it’s something that’s so easy to make. There’s no reason that it should cost as much as it does, but they know we’ll pay it. They know we’ll pay, Kenny, because it’s so tasty.
[00:30:54] How to Make Spaghetti Sauce
Kenny Coogan: That’s right. So another recipe that a lot of our listeners [00:31:00] would like to know is a good spaghetti sauce recipe.
Bevin Cohen: Well, now I can’t tell you how to make a good spaghetti sauce recipe. I could tell you how to make my spaghetti sauce recipe, which I think is the best. And everybody’s got their own, you know, differences in how they like to make their spaghetti sauce. But I will tell you a couple of tips to get you going.
A lot of times when you see somebody making a spaghetti sauce, they’re going to blanch and peel the tomatoes and take the skin off of the tomato. And that’s an extra step. That can be quite a bit of work. And I remember as a kid, you cut the little X on the bottom of the tomato and you, you know, doing it with my grandma for hours on end, it seems like, and as an adult, I thought, I don’t want to do that work. I’m just going to run this stuff right through the food processor.
Kenny Coogan: I’m right there with you.
Bevin Cohen: Yeah, well, this is an important detail. A lot of people are going to water bath can their tomatoes, right? They’re going to use water bath canning because the tomato is relatively acidic and sometimes they’ll add a little bit of lemon juice to it to make sure it has a high enough acidity to be safe to water bath [00:32:00] can. And that’s fine if you’re peeling the skin off the tomatoes, right? The skin is going to harbor quite a bit of the bacteria. And if you’re leaving the skin on the tomato, it is far safer to pressure can your sauce. So that’s an important thing. You can cut that step out and not peel your tomatoes, but you’re going to want to make sure you pressure can it.
Then, I’ll take my tomatoes. I’ll run them through a food processor, turn it into basically a sauce, right? But there’s a lot of water there. So we’re going to want to cook it down. And this is, again, the beauty of processing your own food is you get to choose how much you want to cook it down. How thick do you want your sauce to be? Do you want to cook it now and cook it down until it’s a super thick sauce? Do you want to wait until later when you open the jar, when you’re ready to use it? Cause you might want to use this spaghetti sauce for a different dish, even in your chili, whatever it might be? And then you’re going to want it to be a little bit more runny.
So you get to make those choices while you’re making it. But it’s also important to remember, once you start to add more ingredients to your tomatoes, cause I want to maybe put some onions in there. I love to put basil in there. The more ingredients you add to your tomatoes that are non acidic ingredients, [00:33:00] the more important it becomes to pressure can them, right? It’s, it’s very, very important. And I like to add a lot of basil to my tomatoes. A handful of basil goes into the food processor with the tomatoes. So I definitely have to pressure can it, but at the end it’s worth it. I’ll cook it right down. Sometimes the half volume to get that water out there, I’ll really cook those tomatoes way down. So that way, when it’s time to enjoy the sauce, I can just pop that jar open, pour it in there. It’s ready to go. And we can enjoy it because I, for some reason, prefer to do the work during the harvest season. Not when I’m cooking. When I, when it’s time to make the meal, where you usually, I don’t want to, I got to cut some corners somewhere, so I like to get all the work done in advance, you know.
Kenny Coogan: And how do you store the spaghetti sauce, and what is its shelf life?
Bevin Cohen: So we’re going to can it. Like I mentioned, we’re going to use a pressure canner to can the sauce, and then we’re going to store it in the cupboard, just like you store any of your other canned foods.
You know, we’ve got pretty much a whole room here at Small House where we keep all of our, all of our canned foods and our squashes and our soups and all that sort of stuff. And [00:34:00] we’ll store it there and it’ll store for a year. It technically can store more than a year. But one thing that I like to do at the end of a year is I’ll kind of go through my supplies and see, well, how much spaghetti sauce do I have left over? How much of this or that? And if I’ve got a whole bunch of it left over at the end of the year, maybe I’m doing too much work, you know, maybe I’m working too hard. So I can kind of cut back and I can use that to kind of keep myself in line with how much time do I want to spend over the hot stove in the summertime, you know, but it’ll easily keep for a year or more. Keep it cool. Keep it dark. Right? Those, those are the important things.
[00:34:33] How to Make Apple Pie Filling
Kenny Coogan: Okay. Another popular recipe people want to know is how do you make apple pie filling?
Bevin Cohen: So apple pie filling is just like how you’d make apple pie filling for your apples, right? So I like, we got a cool coring peeling machine. You kind of put the apple on there, you know, crank it and it spins around, takes the core off, takes the skin off of it. Kids love to do it. Super fun. And it gives you a nice sliced apple.
And then I will blanch it really quick just to kind of help break it down just a little bit. And then I’ll put it in a [00:35:00] water, a bowl of water with lemon juice, right? To stop it from browning while I’m getting everything else ready. And we’ll get our seasonings and our cinnamon and all that kind of stuff together.
And then we will use a product for canning that’s called “clear gel.” And a lot of times in a traditional apple pie filling, we’ll use corn starch as our thickener. And you absolutely, you know, can do that when you’re making a pie from scratch, but the corn starch isn’t necessarily, again, something that we want to can with.
So this clear gel is actually, it’s just a modified version of a corn starch, and it’s just safe for canning. So we’ll use that as our thickener. And then we’ll just cook all of our ingredients down until it’s a nice thick apple pie consistency. Into the jar it goes, pressure can it because it’s got these other ingredients in it. I’ll put it right on the shelf next to the spaghetti sauce, right in the same part of the storage facility.
[00:35:47] How to Make Corned Beef
Kenny Coogan: The last recipe we can cover is corned beef. That’s also very popular among our listeners.
Bevin Cohen: Corned beef gets its name. It cracks me up. People are like, well, there’s no corn in corned beef, but corn is just an actually an old English [00:36:00] word for grain. And in this situation, what it’s referring to is the large grains of salt that are used to make the brine and the corned beef. So again, we’re going to make a salt solution brine, mixing quite a bit of salt and water. We’re going to take our brisket. Corned beef is typically made from a brisket. The brisket’s going to go into a bucket. You’re going to make sure it’s properly submerged, completely submerged under the brine. Refrigerate it, you can let it sit in there 10 days, 12 days, up to two weeks, and that high salt content is going to inhibit the growth of bacteria and make it safe. So it’s tenderizes the meat, it adds flavor in it. I mean, 14 days, that’s a pretty long time for a piece of meat to be sitting around.
It’s also important, though, when you’re ready, you get it out, rinse off the additional salt, and it still needs to be cooked. Right? We’ll still cook it the same way that we would for any corned beef meal, making corned beef sandwiches, that sort of thing. It’s often boiled. A long, slow cooking time is very, very important to make sure you keep the meat tender. It should take you 2, 3 hours to cook a nice corned beef.
Kenny Coogan: The Heritage Pantry: Modern Methods of Preserving Food the Old Fashioned [00:37:00] Way is available now. Thank you so much, Bevin.
Bevin Cohen: Oh, thank you, Kenny. I had a great time.
[00:37:06] Podcast Credits
Jessica Anderson: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, visit www.MotherEarthNews.com/Podcast. You can also email us at Podcast@OgdenPubs.Com with any questions or suggestions. Our podcast production team includes Jessica Anderson, Kenny Coogan, and Alyssa Warner.
Music for this episode is “Hustle” by Kevin MacLeod.
The Mother Earth News and Friends podcast is a production of Ogden Publications.
Until next time, don’t forget to love your Mother.

About Bevin Cohen
Bevin Cohen is an author, herbalist, gardener, seed saver, educator, and owner of Small House Farm in Michigan. Cohen offers workshops and lectures across the country on the benefits of living closer to the land through seeds, herbs, and locally grown food, and he has published numerous works on these topics, including the bestselling Saving Our Seeds, The Artisan Herbalist, and The Complete Guide to Seed and Nut Oils. He serves on the board of the International Herb Association and the advisory council for the Community Seed Network.
Additional Resources
Check out Bevin’s new book, The Heritage Pantry, available now!
Check out our “Pantry from the Garden” video course
Check out more podcasts with Bevin:
Wild Medicinal Plants to Forage
Make Your Own Seed and Nut Oils
Our Podcast Team:
Jessica Anderson, Kenny Coogan, and Alyssa Warner
Music: “Hustle” by Kevin MacLeod
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Go to the MOTHER EARTH NEWS video page for an opportunity to see some of our podcast guests on camera.
The Mother Earth News and Friends podcasts are a production of Ogden Publications.
Ogden Publications strives to inspire “can-do communities,” which may have different locations, backgrounds, beliefs, and ideals. The viewpoints and lifestyles expressed within Ogden Publications articles are not necessarily shared by the editorial staff or policies but represent the authors’ unique experiences.