The 11 Most Common Preservation Methods and Techniques

so I have a confession I'm kind of obsessed with food preservation it is one of my biggest joys in life I think I like it more than actually cooking to be honest and it's the reason why I've brought you so many different food preservation videos over the years but as a pro home cook I am always trying to challenge myself and push it to the next level so what I did was I asked the internet every single way you can preserve food at home and it turns out well there's a lot of them damn so in today's video I'm going to be demoing every single preservation technique and to make things a little spicier all the food I use has to come from my garden all right so up first we have pickling which is one of my favorite preservation techniques because it's really simple to do and all you're really doing is creating an environment that has a low PH by using say vinegar or Citrus something very acidic and this acidic solution is going to ward off all of that bad bacteria or mold that would Decay your food quicker and the demo for this one is a no-brainer because I have some red onions growing in the garden I've never grown these before they're looking pretty nice they're about a month away from actually harvesting and storing long term but they balled up pretty nicely and you can Harvest them in the spring in this form and they are delicious so I'm going to harvest a few of these and I'm just going to clean them up a bit I'll actually reserve the green tops for another preservation technique coming up later and I'll get these cleaned and ready to go for pickling and then I'll just slice them right in half cut off the stem and the root side and then I'm just going to slice them nice and thin pull to pull to get the best texture of your pickled red onion then I'll add them to a clean mason jar just really packing them in and my favorite trick is to add the vinegar right to the jar I'm just using some plain organic white vinegar and I'll add it about halfway up the jar and then I'll fill the rest of the jar with water so you've got a 50 50 water to a vinegar solution I'll dump that solution right back into the saucepan taking out all of the guesswork on how much pickling liquid you actually need and to flavor things up a bit I'm going to add a few garlic cloves I've got a little spice mix of some whole spices here and then about two tablespoons of sugar and two tablespoons of salt and I'll bring that to a boil just so those flavors marinate together and I'll pour that pickling solution over the red onions and once that's cool I'll pop the lid on and throw it in the fridge overnight and this is what we have from just one night of marination you can see it gets that nice red tint from the red onion and pickling in this form of just adding an acidic so solution is not a long long term preservation this needs to be stored in the refrigerator and it will last a few weeks which gives you plenty of time to consume these like you know these will be gone in a few days let's give it a taste my first Red Onion pickles from the garden hmm oh my God the freshness on those wow get a lot of that black pepper that I added really nice just additional aromatic flavor those are unbelievable you can't go wrong with pickled red onions in your fridge so up next we have dry and drying is a simple concept because life needs water to survive and when we suck out the water from our food none of those microbes those living organisms can survive and take over your food and destroy it so we dehydrate stuff to preserve it long term and that's what I'm gonna do and of course I could dehydrate anything from my garden but I am picking two things for this demo I have a few big patches of garlic I want a little insane with the garlic planting this year and on the hard neck varieties around this time of year you get this thing called a garlic scape that grows out of the top which is basically just a long flower that emerges from the stem which are absolutely packed with garlic flavor I'll usually stir fry these or turn them into a pesto but I wanted to dry try them out to see what happens so for the processing I chopped off that top flower bit because it's a little dried up and brown I washed the garlic Scapes and got them on my dehydrator rack and like I mentioned before I am not wasting the tops of those onions so I'm just going to toss that on the tray as well and I'll use that to make some onion powder and I just pop these into the dehydrator at 125 degrees Fahrenheit for about 24 hours and then once all of that water is completely removed I'm gonna throw everything together in the blender at first I was going to separate these but why not just have a garlic onion blend as a powder sounds delicious and I'll just process that up until it becomes a fine powder up next we have salting which of course is an ancient preservation technique of just adding salt to our food which one will draw out that excess moisture to dehydrate our food but also salt is going to be just a natural protectant from all the bad stuff as well and as far as this demo goes you know I could salt some veggies but that's kind of boring and I'm not raising any animals for meat at this point but the one animal I am raising my chickens well we can actually salt the eggs specifically the egg yolks to preserve them so I'm going to take a clean food container I'm going to cover the bottom with some kosher salt and I'll make a few divots in the salt with the actual egg and I'll crack the eggs to retrieve just the egg yolks and I'll pop them right in the divots so they have a nice little secure snuggly home and then I'll cover those egg yolks with salt and I'll pop them in the fridge for around three to four days until that salt draws out that moisture and really firms them up and you can see a few days later they firmed up but they still have a little bit of give here so I'm gonna wash off all that excess salt and then I'll throw them in the dehydrator for just a few more hours and the goal isn't to totally dehydrate these a hundred percent because then they'd be too hard and they wouldn't really be usable we just want to dry out that surface texture and get them to the perfect consistency where we could take a grater and just use these like a nice hard parmesan cheese so if you're familiar with Pro home Cooks you know we have made it to definitely my all-time most used preservation technique which is fermentation and there's three different main types of fermentation you've got lacto fermentation acidic fermentation and alcoholic fermentation now if I had a bunch of fruit ripe like the grapes growing in the garden right now we could focus maybe on these but we're going to throw these to the side for now and focus on lacto fermentation which is one of the best ways to preserve vegetables and I am so excited for these cabbages to bulk up a little bit so I can make some lacto-fermented sauerkraut but they're not ready so I am moving on to that garlic patch and I've never actually fermented garlic on its own so I'm gonna pick a few of these I'm gonna clean them up get them processed and we'll get them fermented [Music] so I've got my clean bulbs of garlic right here and I'm going to add them to a clean jar and I'll cover that with fresh water now I'll dump out that water and I'll figure out the total weight of that water and then I'll multiply that by three percent or point zero three which gets me the amount of salt I need to add which in this case is 15 grams so I'll add those 15 grams of salt to the water and I'll just stir that up until everything is dissolved and I'll pour that back over the garlic The crucial step is making sure everything is submerged under that top water line and I'll just Place those in a cool dark area to ferment for at least a week and actually I have a sample of these that I made around three weeks ago check out this lacto fermentation so I should be able to eat green tops as well because they were tender at the time that I picked the chop off a piece yeah they're super blender let's see what these taste like okay not super garlicky great pickled flavor that texture is not as satisfying as like a crunchy fermented pickle but you could certainly chop that up throw it in a dip throw it in a salad I'll keep you updated on how I use it but I really want to try one of these fermented bulbs I'll just rip that out our skin off wow pickled garlic cloves here we go pop it in oh wow that is unique let me try another one of those so fresh and not too intense at all which is crazy yeah super mild it kind of tastes like a crunchy fermented pickle damn those are great and what's awesome about lacto fermentation is now that these are fermented you can keep them at room temperature and like keep fermenting them and it's just going to get more intense and more sour but what I'll do is I'll toss them in the fridge which will slow down the fermentation by so much and they can sit in there for like a year or two years potentially and they'll slowly get a little bit more sour but they'll still be preserved which is one of the reasons why I love lacto fermentation all right so next up we have canning which is why this machine is running right now it's an electric canner and it's currently canning veggies and canning is when you put food in a can or jar you boil or steam it at a very high temperature to basically kill off everything and preserve the food for a very long time now there's two main types of canning which is important enough if you're canning something with a higher acidity level like tomato sauce you can actually just boil the jars to preserve them because it already has a little more protection from the acid in this case I have some radish growing in the garden which is not very acidic at all so we need to pressure can it so I'm going to clean up that radish heal it off and remove any blemishes on the radish and then I'm going to slice it up into pieces and I'll sanitize my jars and cover them with boiling water and a pressure canner actually uses steam to get to really high temperatures around 240 degrees Fahrenheit and by maintaining those temperatures for an extended period of time you kill off the risk of botulism and anything else growing in which is only possible with a pressure canner you can't use a pressure cooker to properly can and then once it comes out and cools that is shelf stable for a very long time and one day I hope to have many shells filled with canned fresh produce from the garden not just this one Char next up on this preservation list is smoking which is an excellent way to preserve your food because it also imparts a ton of delicious flavor but there's two forms of smoking food that you should be aware of you have a hot smoking of your food for instance these ribs I cooked up this week on my smoker I set the smoker for 225 degrees Fahrenheit which is a low temperature but it's still going to actually cook the meat and start breaking down the meat so it's nice and tender this is for short-term delicious consumption and then you have cold smoking or smoking at a very low temperature which you see all the time on like Wilderness Survival show and they build a very small fire just to keep things at a low temperature and that Smoke's actually going to dehydrate your food just like the dehydration technique but it will also impart a lot of flavor so great you know in the wilderness preservation technique and I've never actually done this preservation technique so I thought it'd be fun to just go into the garden pick a few veggies throw them on the smoker and see what happens now I will say my smoker only gets down to 160 degrees Fahrenheit which is still a little bit too hot for like a true cold smoke but hey we'll see what happens I'm going to throw this on for 24 hours and we'll see what's on the other side so this is what we have some shriveled up veggies and an egg that who knows what's going on in there now I can feel there's still some moisture in there so they definitely needed to go a little bit longer for long-term preservation oh wow that just erupted with Smoky Aromas because this garlic in half yeah see still a good bit of moisture you can see it in there radish now these will still preserve for a little longer because some of the moisture is dried out but not long term oh smoked onion ah so bad on its own it's terrible I mean maybe good in like a salsa radish actually that's super moist try these garlic cloves that's not bad Garlic's all right egg whoa whoa oh my God so that is crazy whoa whoa look at that yo I'm so interested if the smoke flavor actually penetrated I'm not getting any smoke flavor but that yolk is an incredible texture I'm eating that whole thing right now so outside of taking say a jalapeno and making dried Chipotles that's a good use of smoking vegetables but I would say the better use of smoking preservation is going to come when you're using fish or meat so up next we have sugar preservation and sugar actually works in a very similar fashion to Salt by pulling moisture out of food and if we've learned one thing today it's less moisture equals less spoilage and this is why things like jams and jellies which have a very high sugar content can easily preserve for a long time so to demo this the only fruit that was really ripening in my garden at this time were strawberries and this is my first year of this little strawberry patch that I made so it's a little bit weak sauce at the very moment but what I've been doing for the last week is just going out there collecting strawberries every day freezing them which is another preservation technique just to make sure they wouldn't spoil until I had enough to fill up a food container and hopefully one jar of jam so I added the frozen strawberries to a saucepan I added just a few tablespoons of sugar and fruit has natural pectin in it which is going to gelatinize and create a jelly but I'm gonna add just a little more additional pectin and I squeezed in some lemon juice in a container which will also add acidity to lower that pH and help with the preservation took about a teaspoon of the pectin and I cooked everything together on a low heat for about 10 minutes until it started to Bubble Up I took a 12 ounce mason jar I threw that in some boiling water to sanitize it fill it up the jar with the jam just getting about one jar not even one jar actually kind of pathetic and then I screwed on my clean lid nice and tight and to actually preserve this long term you have to cook the jars in boiling water for at least 10 minutes which is going to kill off any of those unwanted microbes so it's shelf stable for the long term now here's my one jar of jam strawberry jam and of course you know I didn't need to make this shelf stable because I'm going to eat it probably in the next week but I just wanted to give the proper example if you're making a bunch oh yeah wow would you look at that right there strawberry jam fresh from the garden I mean wow that instantaneously cancels out a smoked onion flavor in your mouth I can tell you that much I mean I could finish this one jar right now just straight to the face but I won't I'll hold off and I'll let my kids at least sample some of this on a sandwich or something like that so the next one on this list is pretty obvious we've got freezing but could you imagine how screwed we'd be in this modern world without the invention of refrigerators and freezers we would all be relying on these other preservation techniques a whole lot more but generally this is all we do for preservation and now that things are really growing well in the garden I'm freezing a lot of things but for this demo I've got this big patch of spinach right here and you can see it's like shooting up to the sky and the reason for that is because it's getting hot so it's bolting which means it's going to seed so it's all got to go so I can make room for new veggies to be planted so I chopped down this entire patch I picked off all the usable leaves using a scissor kind of makes things easy and to process the spinach I gave it two washes in just a big vat of water to clean off any debris and dirt and then I use my salad spinner to get off as much excess water as possible which will help extend that preservation even longer and now you can go right into a Ziploc bag and freeze it I'm using my vacuum sealer and I've got this Nifty little vacuum sealer from zwilling which we sell at promcooks.com and I've talked about this before but this is an absolute Game Changer you've got vacuum sealed anything on the Fly talk about preservation at its finest and I'll pop these in the freezer and as you can see I have some other things Frozen like this bacon and there's garlic here and I'll have frozen spinach for months which I can take out throw in a smoothie I can throw in a stew or soup I will have no problem whatsoever using up all of this frozen spinach all right up next we have alcohol preservation and one of my favorite ways to use this technique is by making tinctures little garden tinctures so what I'll do is I'll go around my garden see what herbs are actually growing wild that I can forage in this case I found some mint and some mug water which helps Aid in sleep and will give you some crazy ass dreams and then I planted some holy basil which is considered one of the best medicinals on the earth and I wash off any of the dirt or debris on the herbs throw them on a dehydrator rack dry out all the herbs and then I'll just smash them up throw them in a mason jar cover them with some liquor in this case some vodka because it's pretty neutral and I'll just let that sit for like three or four weeks until it really starts to infuse and Preserve in that alcohol and then I'll strain it off into little droppers and I've got myself a potent tincture up next we have oil preservation using all of these things here different types of oils to help preserve our food and to demo this I am going to be using some more garlic from the garden this video is kind of a celebration of how many different ways you can use garlic it is a miracle plant so I'll peel all the cloves of around five bulbs worth of garlic and what I'm going to do is blanch these in some boiling water for like 10 or 20 seconds which will give me a nice Baseline for some longer preservation and then I'll dump them in a clean jar cover them with olive oil and now this isn't a shelf stable preservation technique you have to keep these in the fridge but they will stay in your fridge for a really long time not to mention you get delicious garlic infused or herb infused or whatever you use infused oil and we've come to the basement for the last preservation technique which is root cellaring now this is just a room in my basement that's a little cooler than that I turned into really a preservation room built some shelves put in a carpet painted the walls and proper root Cellars are much cooler than this this is like maybe 10 degrees colder than upstairs but even that little drop in temperature is huge for things like lacto fermentation I've got all these misos fermenting here I'll be making some more beer soon and I will definitely be storing veggies like those onions and garlic when they are fully cured this is a preservation Palace down here and I hope to have the entire thing filled with food that can get me through the winter one day but I still have a long ways to go and there are a lot of other preservation techniques like freeze drying and different chemical preservations but I really think I nailed most of the big ones and it was a ton of fun and I actually learned a lot so hopefully you learned some things too click on this video for more preservation and I'll see you soon [Music]

Channel: Pro Home Cooks

Views: 319,463

Keywords: pro home cooks, mike g, mike greenfield, gardening, food preservation, salting, alcohol fermentation, oil fermentation, smoking, freezing, lacto fermentation, garlic, pickling, onions, eggs, drying, dehydrating, chat gpt, techniques, canning, sugar preservation, root cellaring, strawberries, herb tinctures, radish, vacuum sealing, ribs, holy basil, mint, mugwort, spinach, bacon

Id: Y5zLmAu8uyY

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2023