How to Pick the Best Preserving Methods

How to pick the best preserving methods for you summer harvest for a year's worth of food, or if not a year's worth of food, how to preserve it to keep it from going bad before you and your family can eat it.

I invited back Carolyn Thomas of HomesteadingFamily.com to discuss how we go about choosing which method is best for which crops, why we choose one method over another, and our favorite recipes for each of the main home food preservation methods, including recipes!

I have readers and listeners of the show email me or leave a comment and say, “I really need some inspiration on ways to prepare all of this wonderful food that we've preserved, but how do I go about really turning that into meals and making sure we're using that food to feed our families?” The answers below!

Listen below to, How to the Best Preserving Methods for a Year's Worth of Food #149 of the Pioneering Today Podcast, where we teach families how to grow, preserve and cook their own food using old-fashioned skill sets and wisdom to create a natural self-sufficient home, with, or without, the homestead.

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Pros of Canning

You know we do, we love canning in our house. We do a lot of it, and some of the things that we really like about it, is that for one, it usually turns out a familiar product. It's what we're used to using. We have this cultural familiarity with our canned food, which makes it a lot easier for people to consume. You don't need to develop new tastes in order to enjoy your canned food. So, I really like that.

And another thing that I really see as a huge benefit for canned food is that, you can make meals that are just ready to eat. You heat them and you go. And that is really amazingly simple when you need some convenience food on hand, to have those just sitting on the shelf and ready to go.

Melissa: I think canning is really the ultimate batching when it comes to doing meal prep, because and the same thing and then when we're really busy out, or in the middle of winter of course those foods aren't available from my garden or locally, but I can go and pull out two or three jars, sometimes four depending on what it is I'm making, and all I have to do is pop it open, mix it together, and heat. And you know, supper can be on the table in 10 or 15 minutes. So that is definitely a pro.

With the other forms, especially when it comes to dehydration, you need extra liquid. With canning I don't have to worry about having extra liquid to make anything, because I'm not having to rehydrate it or really add, and usually, especially if it's soups or stews or something I'll always have canned up bone broth, so I can add that if I do need extra liquid.

I prefer to pressure can. I think pressure canning is faster, and maybe because the majority of the canning that I'm doing in the summertime with fresh produce, like green beans. I do the raw pack method, so I just pick the beans, rinse them, string them, snap them, throw them in the jars. Put my boiling water on top, and put them in the pressure canner.

I feel like it's a lot faster than waiting for that full water bath.

Cons of Canning

Carolyn: Time investment upfront-Well I think that for canning, one of the biggest one that hits me is the time it takes up front. Especially if you're doing pressure canning, by the time you get something into the jars, and then get that pressure canner up to pressure, can it for the full amount of time and then let it cool back down, you really have quite a bit of time investment that happens right up front. And that's one of the big drawbacks.

Heating up the kitchen, but there's ways to work around that. I can outside, almost year around, to try to keep the heat out of the kitchen space. But it definitely, if you don't have a spot to can outside, it adds a lot of heat to the house if you have big batches to do.

Equipment investment. The canner, the pressure canner, and then all the jars and the lids. You really have to use those standardized pieces of equipment there, and for some people, that's really prohibitive, that initial investment in getting set up to can. So those are kind of the big cons for me on the canning side.

Favorite Home Canned Foods

Carolyn: When we can peaches in the water bath canner, everybody just loves those. And I think, who doesn't love peaches any time of the year, but then in the middle of winter, when you can open a canned peach and it just smells like summer, oh that is such a wonderful thing. And then you can make up quick cobblers, you can do so many great things, or just eat it plain, so we really like that one.

And I think for me, one of the things that I like the most pressure canned is meat of any sort. And again, that's just because you're doing all of your work up front. It's like, in the summertime, in the fall, when you're doing all that pressure canning, you're actually just preparing your meals. You're just doing it in one big batch all ahead of time.

When you can open up a jar of meat that you have pressure canned and be ready to dump that and make a stew or a sandwich filling, or anything like that, I love that. I think to me that's really adding to the convenience of my life, as well as having all those great stored foods. When you have meat on the shelf, you really feel like you're prepared for anything. You know, anything can happen and I'm good to go.

Melissa: When it comes to the fruit, I have to say one of our favorites is strawberry jam, for sandwiches or having it on biscuits, and then I even like to take jam, I'll do it with fruit butter, kind of any the fruit preserves and use it as a filling between cakes. Especially chocolate, because strawberry and chocolate, cherry and chocolate, raspberry and chocolate, they just go so good together, and then it's a really quick one.

And for me, I think with pressure canning, I do definitely love to have meat, but I also, probably home canned tomato sauce. Just because it's so versatile, so I'll can up the tomato sauce and then turn that into pizza sauce, pasta sauce, add it to chili, or soup, or stew, for an extra flavor or thickening. I pressure can my tomato sauce, it's just so fast, and like I said, I can put way more in my pressure canner and I just kind of prefer to use that one than a big boiling pot of water. So, I'm gonna go with tomato sauce on that one.

How to pick which foods to dehydrate

Do you have some kinds of pros and cons when you're choosing this method for preserving the food?

Carolyn: I definitely do, because there are very specific foods that we tend to dehydrate. And so a lot of times when I'm trying to decide, what I'm gonna do with each bit of produce that's coming in, I want to think ahead to what I want to use it for. And to make sure I have all of my uses covered, so I don't find myself running to the grocery store because I didn't think of something that I wanted to use tomatoes for, or fruit for, or something like that.

Pros of dehydrating food

We find is if you take something that is so filled with moisture that it's heavy and it's bulky, and you dehydrate out a majority of that moisture to leave it very light and very small. Which means packable in my family.

If you want trail food, you want travel snacks, you want anything that's light and easy to keep with you, and that really becomes where dehydrating shines in our family. They become shelf stable so they're easy to keep a little snack in your purse, in your diaper bag, on the go, they're really easy to grab and go.

Storage-But it also is really easy to store because of that. So when you have your pantry shelf, and I know a lot of us don't have huge pantries, or huge root cellars, or different places to store large amounts of food, but we still want a good amount of food storage, and that's another place that dehydrating really shines. You can get a lot of dehydrated food into a very small space, that rehydrates up pretty bulky.

Melissa: Fast prep work. I feel like the prep work up front to get food into the dehydrator is a really fast compared to the prep that goes in towards canning.

Cons of Dehydrating

You are limited to the size of the trays that you have for your dehydrator. And there's many options where you can buy extra trays or get a larger dehydrator.

Time factor on the back end. The actual processing time for dehydrating is longer than the canning time. Cherries are probably one of the ones that take the longest to dehydrate, so that can be a con if you've got 30 pounds of cherries, you're not going to be able to dehydrate all of them, because you're gonna have to be letting that first round go, and then bring in the rest.

Knowing what items do best with dehydrating (or other preserving methods)

Greens aren't really something that you're going to be able to preserve via canning. I mean spinach, and kale, and lettuce, and all of those items, those are not canning or fermenting candidates.

I can take some of those foods that I don't really have another way of preserving them, and then I'm able to preserve them to use them throughout the year. I think that's probably my biggest pro when it comes to dehydrating.

Powdered forms for extra storage and intensified flavor

Carolyn: We make green powder, our own super green powder out of them, and it takes these bulky, big, giant, big, bulky greens that would just take baskets and baskets in the kitchen, and it shrinks them down to almost nothing once you get them powdered. It just makes storage so much easier.

Melissa: I love to dehydrate my herbs, because I use herbs in cooking, I use herbs sometimes medicinally, depending on whether ... and it really does give you that storage capability. When it's in that powdered form, depending on what the herb is, you get that intensified flavor, so think about garlic powder and onion powder, you can take just a small amount, and it brings so much flavor to a dish.

Favorite foods to dehydrate

Melissa: And one of our favorite things to dehydrate is my kids love kale chips. And I really like kale chips, and it's a great snack food, and a lot of times I'll do them in the oven but right now it's really hot out, and so I can do so much more bulk. I can dehydrate out the whole bunch, and then just have that snack food available for them, too. When you kind of said that prior, snacking and portability wise, it's so great with your dehydrating.

Carolyn: When I asked my kids this morning what their favorite dehydrator stuff was, they had a whole list of them one of them is this great little snack we make where we just slice up bananas, and we dip them in slightly melted peanut butter, and then roll them in coconut powder, and then dehydrate those. You can get rid of the candy store. The kids don't even miss it, when you do something like that. It is so healthy and it is so delicious, and just makes this nice chewy, salty, sweet snack.

That was right up there on their top but the fruit roll-ups were too. We love those. Any extra fruit, any fruit that's just barely past prime, that we don't wanna can or do anything else with, we just blend those right up and turn those into the fruit leathers. Those make for a great snack anytime.

I think for me the sun dried tomatoes, and of course, they're not really sun dried because I do them in the dehydrator and not in the sun, but I like to season them with just a little bit of salt and Italian seasoning before I dehydrate them. I have found that when I'm making pizzas in the winter, a little bit of olive oil brushed on and just a layer of those spread out, and we don't even miss the pizza sauce. So I can do away completely with the canned pizza sauce if I just have a really good supply of these dehydrated tomatoes on hand.

So sometimes it's useful to kind of think outside of the box, and say, "Now what can I use this for?" But then you have those guys on hand for pastas, for anything else that you wanna throw some dehydrated tomato slices into. It's really good, it's really handy to have.

How to determine which route of preserving to use

Carolyn: the number one thing is how much time do you have right then. Because like we were saying, a lot of times, canning something you put a lot of work up front. And sometimes you have that time up front, that you say, "Hey, I can take a day and can this."

But other times you say, "I just, I don't have that time. I need to spend a few minutes now, get it into a dehydrator, and be able to leave it alone all day." And so, like you were saying with the time, that's where that dehydration can be really useful. So, I'll look at that, and say, "Do I have an overabundance, can I get that into the dehydrator?"
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