Preserving Food from the Garden | Canning & Fermenting

do so uh [Applause] today is forecasted to be a cold rainy day eric started a little fire for us to get the house warm figured it'd be a great time to do some canning so we're going to get started on that we first are going to do relish and we're gonna be using cucumbers and zucchini for that recipe and then later if we get to it we're gonna try to get to some cauliflower and fennel soup so i'm gonna get our cucumbers harvested um [Applause] um [Applause] [Applause] we've got cube of yellow summer squash in there and i have another variety too i don't know exactly what kind it is it's a lot bigger than this but it's like a striped zucchini very excited about that one all right we got our fennel we're gonna head inside and get started i've had my second cup of coffee for the day it is 4 p.m and we're just starting on this i've got to get everything chopped up first and then once we finish our relish we'll see if we can move on to our second recipe so i'm just gonna be cubing everything pretty small i'm gonna start with the zucchini and the summer squash i'm also going to do onion that way and the fennel and the cucumber once that's all chopped up we're going to set that aside with some cold water and some salt to kind of suck out the moisture of the vegetables and then we'll get started on the brine why are you crying ariel you're an inside all right on to the easy stuff onion's real fun in fact i think actually i did a shallot in there as well just for some extra flavor well i did not realize how many cucumbers we actually picked we've got a bunch here to chop up we may even save some of them for pickles i know when you think of canning pickles is like your number one thing you probably think of at least it's something i think of and in fact it's something that eric and i started with many many years ago when we started canning that was one of the things we really did and we did it full throttle we made so many that we have been burned out on pickles for some time we have however made relish before with cucumbers and we absolutely loved it and we found that we ate it a lot toppings is big for us in the winter because we don't i guess just certain things that we omit have emitted from our diet the toppings are like the flavor they're the extra thing we get to have we don't really have a lot of herbs or much fresh food at all at that time of the year we're super thrilled to be making the relish we did not do very well on our cucumber harvest last year and this year has been you know more than making up for that so pretty excited for this we've done zucchini relish before we shredded it last year and i think we really liked it but we didn't really like the shredded consistency so that's why we're doing a chopped one we've got all the vegetables chopped and split into two different bowls so we can put salt and the cold water on them i'm thinking it's about eight quarts of volume of vegetables and again it's the squash the summer squash fennel onions and the cucumber and i'm just gonna put maybe one to two tablespoons on each bowl and kind of mix it up we're going to soak these for about half an hour and then drain them so i don't think you can add too much salt but i'm not going to add that much this is straight out they smell like that smells like divine like doesn't smell almost flowery it's almost delish that's really ice cold thank you oh that smells so good it smells fresh while these are sitting we're going to start on the brine for it so we have already gotten prepared for this canning escapade we have today i have our pints or half pints i have half pines heating up in the back here and we're going to do what's called hot pack so the relish is going to be hot the jars are going to be hot and then we're going to be water bathing the relish for 10 minutes the brine is very simple we're going for about a one to one ratio of vinegar to water but we are going to be putting a little bit more vinegar a lot of the recipes lean heavier on the vinegar side and that is because it is a relish so i'm going to add two cups of water to our pot and then we're doing a cup and a half of apple cider vinegar and a cup and a half of white distilled vinegar we're not adding salt since we already added it to the vegetables that are soaking and we're going to be putting about a teaspoon of mustard seed in i have brown mustard seed some whole peppercorns and some celery seed and then eric also chopped us up some fresh gel and parsley for this and as far as sugar we're gonna be adding two cups to this recipe you can do more if you want it sweeter or you can do less we're definitely going a little bit on the heavier side we want our relish to be sweet and then i'm gonna let this come to a little bit of a simmer we're going to let it go for maybe 10-15 minutes once the vegetables soak we're going to add those to a pot and add our brine okay our relish is ready and we're going to be adding it to our hot jars all right we ended up with about 16 half pints and i'm going to leave about a quarter inch headspace i'm just adding a little bit of brine to top these off they don't need much and then we're going to wipe them with vinegar and get them into our water bathroom with some already hot water going since these are very hot and then we're going to process them for 10 minutes first round of relish is done and we're gonna get the second batch in there and we're gonna head outside to grab our ingredients for our soup oh gosh that's beautiful there we go all right came back with the big pruners got a lot of cauliflower heads to harvest and a lot of them have started to kind of spread out or get older so they're mature they'll be perfect for this soup and the greens are going to go to the chickens it's a lot of chicken food all right so i think two or three days ago sadly we had to dispatch one of our hens um sadly for the hen but it's good for us because we're making soup and chicken broth is gonna make that soup tastes a lot better so we're out here feed the chickens and i'm gonna check for eggs and i'm gonna head over the freezer we're gonna grab that chicken because it's frozen now and grab a couple herbs and we're heading inside 13 eggs today not a bad day what do you think do that you want more we can add more water to the soup okay yeah sure i'd do a little more because we're gonna add a lot more water we're starting with our chicken broth for this soup and we've got one whole chicken to add so i'm gonna get this one in there and this is a nice this is an older hen so she had fat on her and i mean i'm sad very sad that she passed away but on the bright hand this is going to make the soup so much better we're going to be straining this broth before i add it to our actual soup that we're canning but i'm going to add a whole onion in there just sliced in half and then we've got a bunch of herbs that eric picked we've got sage we grew some white sage this year it is really strong stuff and tarragon thyme parsley and some rosemary so that will add some nice flavor and then we're going to be adding some dried summer savory as well i'm just going to plop the herbs in this muslin cloth in there and then we're going to add a hefty dose of salt and pepper for this and we're gonna get it cooking probably gonna let this go for two hours or so just when i feel like it's done that's when we'll turn it off okay i almost forgot i want to add some celery leaves to this too and some coriander we've already got some of our veggies chopped but there is plenty more to cut up we're going to be using onions shallots in this recipe the fennel and the cauliflower i picked some extra broccoli we had and i thought it would be a good idea to add some of the immature celery that we had i thought that would add a nice flavor this recipe is just something i kind of looked up online and i'm doing a mishmash of some of the things i found one thing that's neat though about this soup is you roast the ingredients before so we're actually going to be cutting everything up roasting it with olive oil garlic in the oven and then we're going to be making our soup with our broth and immersion blending it before we can it and the cauliflower i'm just cutting up just chunks of it i don't think it really matters at this point since it's going to be roasted and then cooked this is actually a really great use for this cauliflower because our cauliflower did not turn out that beautiful this year i don't really know what happened there maybe it was heat maybe it was just a timing thing but it's still gonna be awesome for this recipe soups are awesome for eric and i in the winter not only because it's a winter alaskan it's cold but because they're kind of like a pre-made canned food and anything in our realm that's pre-made and ready to go is awesome if you made it yourself so like of course canned soups but canned meats or just canned meals we find those super convenient on days where maybe we're busy but we want to eat some of our own food i've got a lot to chop and we are going to start our oven at about 400 degrees because it's going to take a little while to roast all this gotta do it in small batches so okay we finished up roasting all of our vegetables last night they turned out awesome they are just lightly soft and they're still going to cook quite a bit in the soup and i pulled our broth off we let that go for about two and a half hours last night and maybe 20 minutes this morning just to reheat it and we're going to strain it now and get it ready for the soup and take the herbs out first and i'm also going to take out the entire chicken now this chicken is definitely not going to go to waste but we're not using it in this recipe we're going to be saving that and using just the broth for the soup i have the same muslin cloth that i used earlier for the herbs i just cleaned it and we're going to strain it through that and another little strainer so i don't know if you could see that but there's already a lot of flavor in there with the oil and the fat from the chicken and olive oil that we roasted the vegetables in but i'm probably gonna even add a little bit more olive oil to this recipe i want it to be really savory okay all of our veggies are in this pot and i'm just gonna be adding quite a bit more olive oil we're gonna get them a little more toasty and heat it up and then we're gonna add the broth the vegetables are ready to add the broth and i don't think this is going to be enough liquid to cover them so i'm probably going to add water as well i'm just going to cover the vegetables with the liquid we're going to let this cook probably an hour or so or until the vegetables are soft and soft enough to actually immersion blend and get them all blended up well we let our soup go for about two hours and i think it's all finally soft enough i even took some of it out and pre blended it to see if it would work and it did work very well so i'm just gonna let this cool a tad bit and then i'm going to use our immersion blender and immersion blend the entire thing until it's a nice consistency at this point the soup is really flavorful it's emitting all sorts of awesome scents if you're walking up to the house i added more salt and pepper we added a few more seasonings so just kind of season it to your preference i would say [Music] all right it is time to get these in jars it's all blended it tastes fabulous and i've got to get my pressure canner on the stove so the soup that we're jarring is very hot i'm going to heat the pressure canner water up just a tad bit the jars i already cleaned them with soapy hot water but i did not heat them up so i have to account for the fact that they're just a little bit cooler and i am heating up our lids because i feel like they just get a better seal that way so i just heat them up a tad and in these are gonna go we have seven of them for each pressure canner and i think that's about exactly how much soup we have about 14 quarts and i left about an inch head space on these and we're going to process them for 75 minutes because they're a soup that we created that we're canning they look really good they look just like i imagine cream of celery or something would look like and in fact on that note we did not add cream i was a little bit worried that it would curdle with the high processing time so we're going to add cream after the fact once they're canned and we're ready to eat them [Music] do there we go neat all right we're looking good we have both pressure canners loaded up it's been really nice having two of these bad boys one of them we've had for five years the other one's a newer addition and this is all taking place on our 20-inch stove right now we're gonna let these vent for 10 minutes and then we're going to put our weight on build our pressure to 11 pounds and let them process for 75 minutes and then we'll be done nice well these are both finished we're going to be wrapping up our canning day today and we'll be switching gears tomorrow and doing a day of fermenting and we'll catch you out in the garden like a chicken noodle soup smells good you my cabbage pretty immaculate [Applause] it's so beautiful that's a lot of cabbage a lot of cabbage i'm finding the chickpea i'm pretty sure oh it's a nice one it's like two pounds not even that's a lot for a cabbage [Music] the crazy thing is you can buy a bunch like at the grocery store for 99 cents you mean the effort that it took to grow yeah you mean like storing them from seed like transplanting these are way better tiny little hair onions yeah the flavors are different i use this for my stuff of course please my gosh we're back in the kitchen with our cleaned vegetables and we are ready to start fermenting eric and i are very familiar with fermenting in this house we do sourdough milk kefir and in the past we have done june tea which is very similar to kombucha today we're gonna be doing three classic fermented foods which is sauerkraut pickles and kimchi kimchi is gonna be a new one for us but we have made sauerkraut several times and we're first gonna get started on that i have eight cabbages behind me but i'm only going to be chopping six of them for our sauerkraut and if you've never made sauerkraut it is super simple to make very very easy it is salt and cabbage in a container that's it i'm going to be trying to slice our cabbage uber thin today i want to get it nice and thin for the sauerkraut we made a lot last year but apparently it wasn't enough because we went through it really quickly this winter so we're aiming to make more in fact this won't be enough we're gonna have to do another batch i've got two cabbages chopped up and i'm going to take this as a breaking point and add some of the salt you can see it's occupying a lot of this bucket already when it comes to sauerkraut there is a preference on how much salt you want to use generally speaking you use one tablespoon per cabbage head but that can really vary because cabbage heads very obviously the density and the size so i'm going to use probably a little bit extra for each of our cabbage heads i'm just going to sprinkle it on top and what i'm going to do is just mix it so making sure that salt gets on all the cabbage and we're going to be massaging it or working it for a really long time but right now i'm just letting it sit it's just going to start to pull some of that moisture out of the cabbage i tend to put a little bit more salt as we keep going along and i will show you in just a little how you can kind of gauge whether you think you have enough salt or not [Music] finished chopping the cabbages i put half in this pot here we're not going to leave it in this one because it is a stainless steel pot it's all going to be transferred to my five gallon bucket but i did that just in terms of working the cabbage so at this point since they've both been sitting with their salt each has a little over three tablespoons you want to make sure you mix it all in and you want to kind of like punch it or massage it and it takes i mean it takes a while um i like to use the self brine so what i mean by that is we're going to actually make the cabbage secrete its own juices and use that as the brine you can make a saltwater brine and add it to them i've just never done it that way so we're gonna keep keep mashing until we get some juices to form and it's gonna take a while we've got eric doing the other batch of sauerkraut down on the floor and one way to kind of tell i mean you can always add more salt but you cannot subtract the salt obviously so that's why i like to wait and kind of add salt as needed i will taste it often as i'm doing this and see how it tastes you want it to taste like salt water you do want it to taste fairly salty you can see it's starting to starting to secrete those juices of water i guess you see that yeah mine's gotta tell a lot so that is what we're looking for we're looking for the brine or the liquid to completely cover the cabbage and if you didn't end up with enough again it's never happened to me even with store-bought cabbage you can add a brine and you want to do about one tablespoon to three tablespoons of salt per quart of water so again it just goes a little bit off of your preference and what you are fermenting um so in this case we probably used i mean i want to say we probably use maybe one and a half tablespoons per cabbage and they were pretty big final taste test those are really good i am going to put a plate a ceramic dish on this we'll put the top back on and i will seal it or i'll lightly leave it on if you seal it you'll probably need to remember to just pop it because sometimes there are bubbles and gases that form in here that you need to release we're gonna let this sit on our back counter for at least a week and you can let sauerkraut go way longer than that you can let it go for months we don't exactly have a long-term storage for where we can put sauerkraut you need to move it to a colder room or colder setting if you're looking to prolong its life it will rapidly ferment in hot temperatures so we are actually going to be canning this we're going to water bath it at about 20 minutes in a few weeks when it's done we're moving right along to our pickles and we are not making pickled pickles we are making fermented pickles so they are true pickles we are harnessing yeast and bacteria to make these bad boys and we've got some really nice shaped little cucumbers i think they'll be great for this we've actually never done this so i'm pretty excited about it and it's very simple from what i've read just gonna cut off the ends of the cucumbers and then we're gonna put them in this jar now there's no vinegar in this recipe at all it is just the salt brine water that we were talking about earlier with the sauerkraut i'm gonna add a garlic clove in and some of our dale about halfway the spices that we're gonna be using is mustard seeds i've got some coriander seeds we've got some black peppercorns and some celery seeds and all of this is pretty potent so i'm just going to add a tiny bit and at this point we're going to add our brine water we went with two tablespoons per quart of water so this is just half and i have one tablespoon in here since it is only two cups i'm just going to pour it right over that perfect amount we want to completely submerge our pickles and that's crucial when you are doing ferments you want to make sure that all of your ingredients stay below the brine that's it these are pickles they look absolutely beautiful i am going to seal it and what i'll have to do is just monitor it probably every day release the gases and i can seal it back up and i'm thinking these are going to take at least three days to start but we'll probably let them go a little bit longer to really get some of that fermented flavor we will also be keeping these in a cool indirect sunlight place of our kitchen which is behind me and then we're working right on to our kimchi that's our next thing we've gathered all our ingredients to make kimchi and this is not going to be quite traditional kimchi because we don't have the exact right ingredients i cannot grow napa cabbage but we can grow a beautiful green cabbage so that's our cabbage we're using and instead of the decon radishes we are using turnips it's a good substitute to use we're also going to be using green onions garlic ginger a few peppers hot peppers from our high tunnel and of course the korean chili pepper flakes this is a fermentation so we are also using salt i'm going to first chop up my cabbage i'm going to leave the chunks a little bit thicker i think that's a little more traditional with kimchi and i'm gonna do really thin strips of these turnips we're gonna get it in a bowl we're gonna add about two tablespoons maybe a little bit more of kosher salt blend it mash it let it secrete some juices and then we're gonna mix all of our ingredients together foreign we've got our green onions to our kimchi mixture and i'm gonna add a few peppers and eric grated about a teaspoon of ginger and four to five cloves of you know bigger hardneck garlic so quite a bit of garlic i'm gonna just put this paste in there i'm gonna mix it all up we've actually never tried kimchi but from what i've read and heard it's supposed to be a very flavorful strong spicy fermented food and we're not going to be adding fish sauce that's a common ingredient we're just adding the korean chili pepper flakes and those are supposed to add some sweetness and some spice too i'm gonna add some of these flakes in now and i'm gonna add probably two to three tablespoons they're absolutely beautiful they look like a like a flake of salt or something but red so that's adding this really nice red color and [Music] i gotta be honest i may put another tablespoon of those flakes in they just smell absolutely awesome this is ready to be put in our jar this is the size we're using i think it should all fit i just wanted to say that fermenting does not have to be tricky it is so simple if you've never done it before you know i know if you're researching it you may find that you need all this stuff but the truth of it is that you do not actually need all that we've been fermenting for a long time just using mason jars and lids you just have to keep a close eye on it when it is fermenting but having a fermentation crock or those i think they're called the air locks that can be helpful especially if you're having some trouble with your ferments not going right this stuff smells so good it smells like green onion and ginger and just fabulous we don't even know what we're going to be eating this on i haven't really quite thought about it we were looking at maybe beans with eggs something like that looks fabulous and there you have it a beautiful jar of kimchi so unfortunately this is not ready to eat yet it's going to take a few days to start its fermentation probably wait at least a week on this one i'm so thrilled for this i'm very very excited for this so same thing we're going to put it in the back on our kitchen counter like keeping it out of direct sunlight and in a you know room temperature is is ideal for them at this stage at least and once you're done fermenting it you can transfer it to your fridge if you're at the point of eating it we hope you guys enjoyed this video and maybe try a ferment or two if you have not and our kitchen is a mess we're gonna tidy up and in a few days we'll be enjoying this awesome fermented food uber thin like super tiny like really extreme being an outstanding or supreme example of a particular kind of person or thing he was an uber fan of his favorite team you can't say uber thin yeah you can you don't even show me that yeah i wouldn't show one of those stuff we'll show what it looks like like midway you can break us

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 886,898

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, off grid cabin, off grid in alaska, cabin in alaska, homestead off grid, life in alaska, garden alaska, high tunnel garden, greenhouse alaska, gardening alaska, raised rows garden, gardening cold climate, greenhouse garden, growing food, grow food for a year, homestead living, sauerkraut, making sauerkraut, making kimchi, femented pickles, home canning, chicken stock, harvest food from garden, preserve vegetables

Id: -kE2Go4dh9Q

Length: 34min 9sec (2049 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 19 2021