The Farm Girl’s Guide to Preserving the Harvest: How to Can, Freeze, Dehydrate, and Ferment Your Garden’s Goodness

265 Pages·2019·9.42 MB·English

by  Ann Accetta-Scott

The Farm Girl’s Guide to
Preserving
the Harvest
Also from Lyons Press:
Welcome to the Farm
Family Table
Seasons at the Farm
The Backyard Gardener
Backyard Treehouses
The Homesteader’s Herbal Companion
Living with Chickens
Living with Goats
Living with Sheep
Living with Pigs
The Farm Girl’s Guide to
Preserving
the
Harvest
HOW TO CAN, FREEZE, DEHYDRATE, AND FERMENT
YOUR GARDEN’S GOODNESS
Ann Accetta-S cott
FOREWORD BY JOEL SALATiN
Guilford, Connecticut
˜ iii
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200
Lanham, MD 20706
www .rowman .com
Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK
Copyright © 2019 by Ann Accetta- Scott
All photography by Ann Accetta- Scott except as follows: Shailendra Bhat: pages 6, 15, 17,
21, 26, 31, 148, 232; Chris J. Dalziel: pages 18, 83; Amy Fewell: pages 10, 42, 53, 92, 112,
205; Janet Garman: pages 30, 49, 72, 90; Cheryl Aker Hubbard: page 117; Connie Meyer:
pages 166, 167; Teri Page: pages 150, 208; Peggy Thomas: pages 208, 209; Quinn Veon:
pages 158, 164
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written
permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Accetta-Scott, Ann, author.
Title: The farm girl’s guide to preserving the harvest : how to can, freeze,
dehydrate, and ferment your garden’s goodness / Ann Accetta-Scott ;
foreword by Joel Salatin.
Description: Guilford, Connecticut : Lyons Press, [2019] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018053933 (print) | LCCN 2019000642 (ebook) | ISBN
9781493036653 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493036646 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Canning and preserving.
Classification: LCC TX601 (ebook) | LCC TX601 .A33 2019 (print) | DDC
641.4/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053933
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Mate-
rials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Foreword by Joel Salatin vii
introduction 1
One WHERE TO START? 7
Two LET’S TALK WATER CANNING 43
Three LET’S TAKE THE PRESSURE OFF PRESSURE CANNING 79
Four DEHYDRATING EVERYTHING GOOD 111
Five THE ART OF CURING AND SMOKING MEAT AND FISH 149
Six THE BASICS OF FERMENTATION 171
Seven ROOT CELLAR AND COLD STORAGE 207
Eight FREEZING AND FREEZE- DRYING 217
Afterword 233
Acknowledgments 235
Resources 237
index 241
vi The Farm Girl's Guide to PRESERVING THE HARVEST
Foreword
hen I tell people that Teresa, my bride of 38 years, cans 600 to 800 quarts of food a
W
year, most gasp. Rare is the person who thinks that’s normal or doable. And yet for
us, this is such a natural normal routine that it flows from our lives nearly effortlessly.
It’s just what we do because it’s what we’ve always done. Kind of like brushing your teeth.
By effortlessly I don’t mean without work. Effort speaks to our investment, to what we
value in life. The cheater puts effort into circumventing ethics. The soccer mom puts effort
into bundling the kids into the car, fighting traffic, filling the gas tank, dealing with emotional
highs and lows that naturally flow from wins and losses in highly competitive environments,
washing the athletic uniforms, sitting in the take- out line because no time exists for making
supper. To me, that’s real work.
I’d much rather turn the food mill to squeeze applesauce or press homemade butter
into a mold. When I see the frenetic effort put into modern society’s celebrity- based and
non- home- centric lifestyle, I feel sorry for all these folks who have not enjoyed the deli-
cious pleasure of homemade summer sausage or barbecue sauce. Many folks call our family
members workaholics. I call those folks frenetic unsatisfieds.
I don’t feel like our family puts any more effort into gardening, butchering, and preserv-
ing than anyone else puts into whatever their lifestyle demands. The question is what are we
getting for our effort? Most of us aren’t lazy; we’re busy. But where does our busyness land
us? Is it worth the effort?
In case you’ve been away and missed it, a self- reliance tsunami is springing up in the
hearts and minds of sophisticated Americans, both urban and rural. Everywhere people
seek life anchors, roots, and connections to an ecological umbilical cord. Burgeoning
mistrust toward corporate and industrial food systems, toward compromised regulatory
agencies, and toward conventional farming drives more people every day into this integrity-
living movement.
The hippie back- to- the- land movement of the 1970s, the birthing and breast- feeding
revolution of the 1980s, the interest in organics in the 1990s, mad cow disease and geneti-
cally modified organisms in the 2000s, and tainted food imports have all provided impetus
for renewed do- it- yourselfism. Personal autonomy screams for atomization in an increas-
ingly networked, bar- coded, and invasive global technocracy.

vii
Coming home never looked so good. Coming home never felt so refreshing. Opting
out of industrial helter- skelter looks better by the day. The problem is that when people try
to re- establish home- centricity and autonomous living, they’re struck by the profound infor-
mation implosion of basic life skills that impoverishes our culture. How to cut up a chicken?
How to make a hamburger? How to cook a poached egg?
A mere half century ago, these were ubiquitous life skills. Recently I asked a graduate-
level class of college students if they knew what a pullet was. Nobody knew. Digging deeper,
I asked them if they knew what a heifer was. Nobody knew. Could anyone tell me what
blanching was? Nobody knew. We do a lot of farm tours for school groups here at Polyface
Farm. When a middle schooler sees a chicken lay an egg, she’s yucked out. “Oh, you mean
that’s where they come from?”
As our culture’s pendulum swings further to the Star Wars apogee of techno- nirvana
sustained by artificial everything, a yearning to return to sanity awakens in many. Not all but
many. But finding the old paths, recovering Great Grandma’s skills is intimidatingly difficult.
Find them we must, though, before we reach the tipping points of energy consumption, soil
erosion, desertification, pharmaceuticals, and health crises. Already we’re seeing, for the
first time in modern history, reduced life expectancy for children born today.
From opioids to Alzheimer’s, autism to obesity, we’re seeing health and behavioral
issues unprecedented in human history. Talk to any school teacher today, and you’ll hear
heartbreaking stories of mental, emotional, and familial dysfunction. What’s the antidote?
Many of us believe that returning to clean food, clean living, family meals, slower- paced
lives, and visceral participation in foundational life skills will yield sweet benefits.
That Ann Accetta- Scott has made the journey herself, with her beloved husband, Justin,
and kids, and found a soul- satisfying and health- nurturing destination is testament to the
wisdom of the way back. And we can all be thankful that in The Farm Girl’s Guide to Preserv-
ing the Harvest, she takes wandering, yearning, seeking pilgrims with her.
Our family is blessed to enjoy an unbroken chain of farmsteading, food preserving, and
domestic culinary arts. I grew up this way. Teresa grew up this way. We still don’t have a TV.
This growing, putting by, communal dining on scratch- fare is in our DNA. But most folks just
waking up to the validity and profound cultural impact of home- centric living don’t have that
kind of experience or that legacy. The chain broke somewhere between Enfamil, TV dinners,
and high school vending machines.
For all of you who are wandering, this book is a wonderful part of the road map back.
From canned bone broth, to drying milk, to seasonings, sauces, jerky, curing, smoking, kom-
bucha, cold storage, and even freeze- drying, Ann takes us by the hand—all of us—and with
dirt- under- the- fingernails know- how, leads us home. It’s a safe place. A warm place. A haven
in a hurried and harried world. Perhaps never before has home been this important.
I deeply appreciate that Ann doesn’t sledgehammer her lifestyle on anyone. She even
applauds and recognizes the validity and importance of convenience foods and fast foods—
made in our own kitchens and grabbed when we’re on the go. Of course, we need snacks
viii FOREWORD
and ready- to- eat foods. But they need not come from the grocery store. They can come
from our local farmers to be processed in our own kitchens to be preserved in our own
larders and then deliciously enjoyed when we’re in a hurry. I’ve often said that if our family
could grow toilet paper and facial tissues, we could almost pull the plug on groceries. You
can do that too, and it’s an incredibly awesome place to be.
Effort? Yes. We’re all putting effort into something. Goodness, in my opinion it takes a
lot of effort to read labels and try to suss out what’s edible in the grocery store. Fixing our
health when we’ve eaten junk from the industrial orthodoxy takes effort. Knowing which
drugs to use takes effort. Why not just invest effort in a good place from the start? Instead
of cheating, why don’t we just learn the material?
I guarantee that anyone taking Ann’s hand to follow her through this harvest preserva-
tion journey will agree that this effort offers the greatest return on investment. Food secu-
rity, safety, and satiation all begin with personal responsibility and kitchen accountability.
Whether you grow it or purchase it from someone who grows it, you can join this healing
team. Thank you, Ann, for guiding us home. Your readers will love where this book takes
them. Welcome home.
Joel Salatin
Polyface Farm
Editor, The Stockman Grass Farmer
FOREWORD ix