Our YEARS worth of FOOD! | Root Cellar Tour (full & complete!) | Food Storage

[Music] hey guys shay elliott from the blog the elliott homestead and due to popular demand i have to take you guys through my root cellar we have been working so hard in the gardens and on the farm to fill our root cellar with all of this food for seasonal eating going into winter and this is kind of the time of year where we get to celebrate all of that work because you see things start to pile up in the larder and i know this might not be exciting for everybody but if you're growing some of your food i'm sure this is really exciting for you we get lots of specific questions about what we grow and how we store it and what we stock up on so i'm going to try to do my best in this video to walk you through our root cellar show you what we keep down here and how we store it and hopefully that'll help you as you begin storing food yourself for eating in winter so this big rack we keep for our extra food storage and no i don't make everything from scratch which is why a lot of this stuff is here i store up on bulk items from azer things like dried beans and some dried fruits that we don't grow here ourselves like you have some extra garlic up here some rice steel cut oats and that kind of a thing i also keep jovial boxed pasta on hand for days that i don't want to be bothered to make pasta so that's kind of my top shelf there some of those dried goods we get asked about pests a lot and yes we do battle pests so one of the reasons i keep them up on the top shelf is to keep mice away you'll notice that these are all smaller bags but if i'm buying like 25 or 50 pound bag of something i put it in ziploc bags and either store it in the freezer or store it in the cold room because the little what do they call the little weevils you know those kinds of things those will get into them so these are all freshly sealed bags once they're open they'll be stored in the cold room this next shelf down here is kind of our tea and condiment shelf we also have some homemade vinegars going here so you can see we have a plum vinegar an apple vinegar and then there's a pear vinegar behind it and if you've never made homemade vinegar before you really should give it a try because all you need to do is fill a glass jar with some kind of fruit and it could just be the cores and peelings of whatever fruit you want to make top it off with water add a couple of tablespoons of a live vinegar bragg's is a really popular one that you can get at the grocery store that's live and then add in a little bit of sugar or honey and that's it then you just have to let let it sit for about six weeks and at the end you'll have vinegar and you can see mine are covered with just kind of this cheesecloth material and the fruit flies really like it but so long as they can't get inside it won't bother it at all homemade teas is another thing that we stock up on throughout the spring and summer so i keep this little section here for tea this is some of our homegrown honey from our bees and then this is just that gorgeous tea that we actually made together on a youtube video a couple of months ago so this has chamomile and mint and rose petals and bee balm and raspberry leaves and i know i'm forgetting other stuff but this is a great tea to have on hand for winter next to the tea section we have our flavored salts which is also something that we made together on a youtube video i'll be sure to tag it below in the notes this is just a reminder that i have them here and that i should cook with them so i've got a tarragon salt a green garlic salt and some of that really yummy tuscan herb salt that we made below that is just a hodgepodge of baking things different spices and extra baking powders and mulling spices and dried seaweed extra peanut butter because i love peanut butter some really fancy natural sucker natural suckers that we got accidentally in our asser order last month and just a few baking supplies like that if we go down a little further apparently i was having a rough time the last time i did my as the order because i stocked up on all kinds of crackers and cookies from jovial which is fine these are great to have on hand for school days when we can't really stop to make something from scratch and then of course just extra olive oils extra vinegars ketchup that kind of stuff and then the bottom shelf is just for my ready-made jovial beans that i keep on hand because i love them and i don't always want to soak my beans [Music] next to the shelf is something i'm really excited to show you because i've been giving this effort for about four years and i think this is the first time i have something to show for it so let's check out my cheesecake all right this is a little wine fridge that we got a couple of years ago and this is where i keep my cheese now i made myself a promise with cheese making this year and that's that i wasn't gonna get crazy i wasn't gonna try anything super fancy and i wasn't gonna try anything that couldn't be waxed we live in a really hard environment for cheeses because it's so dry here so we're constantly having to add humidity and there are definitely ways that you can do that with a homemade cheese cave but until my kids are grown and i can give it the attention it deserves i just simply waste my time making the cheeses and then not tending to them like i need to not giving them the attention that they deserve so all the cheese i put up this year are waxed for that reason you'll also notice that i made fairly big blocks of cheese and that's to help them keep some of their moisture because the smaller the cheese the faster it'll lose moisture so when you make them a little bit bigger they have a greater chance of turning out so these are just different pepper jack this is a pepper jack that we'll be ready to eat in just a couple of months time again with the ziploc i keep the cheeses in here so that it helps the cheese to retain as much moisture as possible i leave them open so there's enough ventilation that nothing gets moldy or gooey and every week i just have to come down here and flip the cheeses over most of them we won't be able to eat until december or january which is hard to wait but also think about how good that's going to taste and this is preserved from late spring early summer milk which is when the grass is greenest the cow has just calved and so her milk is just flowing like crazy and it's the perfect time for us to be making cheese because there is a lot of milk now you can make you can make cheeses with winter milks but i mean winter milk it's just not the same as spring and summer milk and so this is the time of year to really stock up the cheesecake and then spend the winter just enjoying it and using your milk for other stuff all right let's talk about the shelving behind me for a few minutes so on this shelf is just where we keep all of our supplies when you're cooking a lot of food from scratch and when you're eating seasonally you're going to use a lot of supplies especially if you're putting up food from your farm so canning supplies cheese making supplies butchering supplies got a little coffee section here extra baking supplies napkins tupperware juicers all that kind of stuff it all needs a home don't want it to live in my kitchen i try to keep my kitchen really paired down to what i use every single day so that's where all of this stuff lives i try to keep it organized in these big plastic tubs that we use a lot when we butcher because that way they get stored and it helps to organize stuff this cabinet is a little bit more exciting okay besides the stockpots and stuff i know that that's not exciting but this is where we have stored all of our dried fruit now i know this doesn't look like very much but if you've ever dried fruit you know how much effort goes into every single one of these jars so this year we did dried apricots dried cherries dried pears dried blueberries and dried apples are still on the list but we haven't done those quite yet we also have our little home apothecary area down here so this is um that outlander herbal salve i didn't show you guys this i'll leave a link down below to the post on my blog but this is made with fresh herbs and flowers from the garden and it's kind of a medicinal salve that you can use on rashes or bug bites that kind of stuff below that is some echinacea tincture the 2020 vintage the 2019 or 18 vintage is behind it so this one won't be ready for about six months but that's just echinacea flour covered in vodka and allowed to steep down here for about six months and then of course a nice spicy jar of fire cider that won't be ready for another couple months as well if you've never made fire cider it's a really easy recipe to add to your repertoire and a really nice kind of backup to have in your home apothecary for when you need to kick a sickness really quickly that one's going to be a spicy one because we grew a lot of jalapenos this year so that's kind of an exciting show for me and then below that we have this year's shallot harvest and the remnants of last year's shallot harvest that we didn't use but instead of wasting them we'll just add them by the handful into our broths and stalks all winter long and that way they still get used and we can use the really fresh shallots for putting on salads that kind of thing all right next room so this is the second little room in our root cellar and this is where i keep my jams and jellies you'll notice that i don't actually put up that much canned food mostly because it's a ton of work and i like to ferment things and keep them in the cold room instead but there are a few things that i will make an exception for and what i like about having everything out like this is i don't have to make everything every single year so i made a ton of pepper jelly a couple of years ago and we're still eating on it so there was no need to make that this year a few canned peaches at my kids request but most of this is just jams and jellies i'll make sure to link that below because we did make a honey sweet and jam recipe together a couple of months ago here on the channel and i gotta i gotta work and talk at the same time because this is some really fabulous pear butter that we made a couple of days ago that i've been meaning to bring down here really this room just holds these jams and jellies other than the grow rack that's behind me so this is where i keep my seedlings in the spring and so this won't see much action for a few more months but it's here waiting at the ready when we need it this is a great place for me to have them because i can really keep a close eye on them because i'm down here so many times a day okay now i'm going to show you probably the most exciting part for me as the farmer because i'm going to show you our cold room this is the fullest that it will ever be throughout the year almost every single crop has come in from the fields other than our potato harvest so this is really its peak moment [Music] probably looks a little different than the last time you saw it when we were just putting these shelves in but here she is in all her glory let's just start left to right and cruise through this thing because i don't want to miss any of this goodness that we're going to show you shall we start with the flavored gins this was a project i was really excited about this year i had no recipe for it everything i saw online just used a ton of sugar so i kind of just made it up and went for it but gin is my drink of choice and we had all this gorgeous fruit and i thought what would happen if we just filled the jars full of fruit topped them off with gin added a little honey and then let it ferment for about a month and that's exactly what we did so my pear gin as you can see is still fermenting the rest of the gins have already been strained from the fruit and then bottled with these little grommet bottles that i just love with a little label because of course i'll forget and i am saving these for winter especially for christmas like that's when we'll break them out we've got a blackberry gin a raspberry gin a pear gin and a blackberry raspberry chin sounds like i didn't have enough fruit so these are happily storing away there this was another really exciting one that we made this year and this is a current cordial so our current bush is finally big enough to give us a big crop of beautiful red berries and so we simply mashed up the fruit with a bunch of honey and some spices and some water and here it is so that one will be good again not not quite timing another big one we stocked up on this year was elderberry syrup we just made this a couple of weeks ago again honey elderberries water i put on guard essential oil in mine and there it is ready for the taking you'll probably notice all the bins around me and i can't even tell you exactly what's in every single one i know we have four lugs of beets which i think are over here we've got six lugs of carrots which are over here somewhere and if you've missed our video on how we store those through the winter i'll tag that below as well you can see they're actually buried in dirt this beet was harvested in june and look it it's still solid as a rock it's perfect they just have to stay nice and buried in that dirt this was also the year of the pair for us because we were able to get an entire bin of bartlett pears from a local farm and so what we haven't turned into pear sauce or pear butter or dried pears or pear gin or pear wine has been just stored in here so pears are picked unripe from the tree and they'll stay that way until you sort of expose them to the right environment so as long as these stay in here they're going to ripen really slowly and we should be able to eat on them well into late autumn this bottom shelf here is where i keep all of my flowers so remember i was telling you if i buy something big and in bulk i put it in zip locks and store it in the cold room well that's what this flower is so i've got my regular flower my iron corn flour and so my baking supplies kind of live here on this bottom shelf right above that is my beautiful cabbage from this year's harvest and these heads just like this just cut off and stuck in the cold room will last all the way through next cabbage harvest they'll start to look a little worse for the wear but as long as you just take the outside leaves off the inside will be totally fine this is a great way to have fresh veg all winter long and this is a copenhagen market cabbage which is bread for storage so make sure you get a storage cabbage if you want to do this in yours i know it sounds like i'm making a lot of boozy drinks but they're all just consolidated here in the cold room this is an elder flower cordial that we made in the spring so before the elderberries are formed you have these gorgeous little white flower clusters that you can take mixed with lemon and honey and water and alcohol if you choose to and make this yummy cordial it tastes super light it tastes like spring i mean plus the alcohol preserves it so you know it may it all makes sense moving to this side of the cold room this is where we keep all of our ferments and vegetables which you can see here so this is my fermented salsa again this will keep all year long though it never does because we'll eat it here are those gorgeous pack oil tomatoes that we made together a couple of weeks ago that's all that there these ones are just some sun-dried ones so before i packed them in oil i dehydrated them a little bit that's all salsa all salsa there's some lard a couple different types of roasted tomatoes then we get down into pickled territory which is good territory so here are those barrel pickles that again we made together we've made a lot together this year haven't we so some of them i keep in glass jars i also have three or four or five crocks full of pickles kind of surrounding the floor of the cold room so they're around here's a roasted tomatillo salsa also fermented and then some green beans actually those are yellow green beans that are preserved in vinegar and i just love the sharpness of the vinegar so those ones aren't fermented more tomatoes back there and of course sauerkraut the king of preserving vegetables so this we decided to do all of our purple cabbage this year as sauerkraut and make it extra spicy just for fun so there's some chilies and all of them but this and it just looks pretty it looks so pretty so when you come down in winter and it's white and it's gray and horrible and soggy outside and you see a bright purple spicy cabbage you just want to eat it all the way to my left is those bins of carrots and beets and pears that i talked about but there is one other exciting thing that i want to show you a lot of you joined me on my instagram stories a couple of weeks ago and i was showing you butchering our ducks and how we kind of follow through the culinary process of that throughout the day well here is the final result of our duck home fee so we ended up with five containers and each of them has how many like sets i think like a leg and thigh does that sound about right so you can see they're completely submerged in the fat here you can kind of see sections of them there although i just tore some of it off when i opened it but what you can do is just take this out bring it to room temperature scoop out your already cooked leg and thigh and just enjoy it whenever you want some delicious meat if i had to choose a very favorite meat in the entire world it would probably be duck coffee especially homemade so this is a fun one this is like the gold of our refrigerator this is this is what everybody wants i know this can be a little overwhelming or a little exciting depending on where you're at but let me simplify it for you with one question what do you want to eat if you don't want to eat duck comfy it would make no sense for you to put some up in your cold room so think about that and explore it and have fun with it because after all this is your food storage this is my food storage and it should be reflective of the cook and of the people that are going to eat of it so now is the time to completely celebrate that so break out your raspberry gin slice open your cheese and enjoy it because all that hard work is finally going to pay off

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Keywords: homestead pantry, food storage, cold room, food preservation methods, long term food storage, seasonal eating, root cellar tour, root cellar, food storage pantry, food preservation canning, food storage for beginners, storing food, long term food storage ideas, pantry tour, shaye elliott, the elliott homestead, food preservation techniques, years worth of food, homesteading, homesteader, farming, farmer, organic, grow your own, seasonal ingredients, home cook, homecook

Id: BhoWhNMpXW0

Length: 20min 6sec (1206 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020