Tag: food preserving

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Fine Fermenting

By Rebecca Johnson

I started drinking kombucha a few years ago. Maybe you’ve seen it in your nearest health food store. It’s a beverage fermented from black tea, sugar and a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY). I like the tart flavor and refreshing fizziness. The probiotics and nutrients are great, too. But the $4 a bottle price tag makes me cringe. A friend gave me a starter SCOBY (it looked like a flat mushroom cap) to brew my own, but I was too nervous. I’d heard rumors of people dying from bad homebrews.

That’s why I was excited to find Cultures for Health, a website headquartered in Sioux Falls with an abundance of fermentation information and products. Founder Julie Feickert became interested in healthy living after her first child was born.”I took a class on living sustainably and learned about eating a whole foods diet and the amazing number of fermented foods you could make at home,” Feickert says. She purged her cupboards of processed foods and started making her own yogurt, kombucha, kefir and sauerkraut. And the more she made, the more she realized the need for a website with quality instructions, recipes and starter cultures.

“Meanwhile, I was facing a decision to go back to work teaching at night,” Feickert says.”My son was still quite young, and I really didn’t want to leave him, so I was looking for a way to work from home.” In 2009 she built a simple website and stocked a few products.”It took off beyond anything I had ever imagined.”

Cultures for Health now offers over 350 products for at-home fermentation and has a staff of 20. Feickert moved her business headquarters and her family from Portland, Oregon, to Sioux Falls in 2012.”We needed to be more centrally located to better control the quality of shipping perishable products and keep shipping costs and transit times as low as possible for our customers,” Feickert says.”Sioux Falls had a great mix of excellent shipping conditions, affordable living and a safe place to raise our young children.”

I haven’t made my own kombucha yet, but I feel more confident to try. Feickert’s website has a wealth of “how-to” videos and articles and sells pH indicator strips for the squeamish to test when the beverage is ready. And besides kombucha, they have products for yogurt, kefir, sourdough, buttermilk, cheese and more to help people ferment confidently.

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Need for Green

By Fran Hill

It is April, and I am experiencing winter fatigue. The weather forecast is littered with snowflakes and temperatures that still require winter coats, hats, gloves and a survival kit in my car if I dare attempt a road trip. It is cold. It is gray. It is dreary. And I am over it.

Usually I am a lover of all seasons. I rush into the first snowfall to make snow angels. My pups and I crunch through fallen leaves in the autumn. I revere the first buds on trees and watching the lawn and gardens awaken. I even worship the sun’s rays on the hottest days of summer. But I have had enough of the snow, enough of the dull and dead brown, enough of the ice, enough wind, enough brutal cold — enough of this never ending winter.

I want green. Fresh. Vibrant. Green.

There are a few blades of grass greening in my backyard, but Mother Nature threatens to dump more snow in the next few days. For now, I think I’m stuck with the green of my home-canned salsa verde.

Last summer’s garden was prolific with tomatillos. Much sauce and salsa was made, consumed, and immensely enjoyed, and my pantry shelves still boast a few prized jars of this green treasure. We use it as a base for the sauce to slowly braise a pork stew, dunk our tortilla chips and quesadillas in it and spoon it over our favorite enchiladas. It is fresh, vibrant and green — just what I am craving during these last days of an ugly long winter.

Fran Hill has been blogging about food at On My Plate since October of 2006. She, her husband and their two dogs ranch near Colome.

Salsa Verde for Home-Canning

**If you are unsure of the canning process, there are many informative sites online. I am not a canning authority.**

6 cups tomatillos, chopped

3 cups onions, chopped

3 jalapeno peppers, chopped

6 garlic cloves, chopped

1/2 cup roasted green chiles, chopped

1/2 cup cilantro, chopped (divided)

1/2 cup lemon juice

3 teaspoons cumin

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

Combine the tomatillos, onions, jalapenos, garlic, green chiles, HALF of the cilantro, lemon juice, cumin, salt and pepper in a large, heavy stock pot. Stir frequently until mixture begins to boil. Reduce heat and allow to simmer 20 minutes.

Using an immersion blender, puree the sauce until smooth. (Alternatively, working in batches, carefully blend in a conventional blender to desired texture and return to the stock pot). Add remaining chopped cilantro and stir to combine and simmer briefly. (The cilantro could all be included prior to simmering and blending, but saving some back ensures some”pretty” deeper green flecks in the salsa.)

Ladle into sterilized jars with 1/2-inch head space and seal. Process in a hot water bath for 20 minutes. (Yield: 6 pints)

Note: Additional jalapenos can make a spicier sauce. More cumin will enhance the smokiness. Roasting the tomatillos prior to simmering offers a slightly richer and sweeter flavor. Adding roasted poblano peppers (peeled, seede, and chopped) is a deeper sauce. We had A LOT of tomatillos, and I made many variations of this recipe. This is only a basic idea and can be adjusted to your own tastes.

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Lazy Preserving: Oven Dried Tomatoes

By Laura Johnson

It looks like the last couple of cold nights put an end to the South Dakota Magazine garden plot activity for 2011. If you recently harvested the last tomatoes of the season from your garden, consider saving them for enjoyment this winter by drying them in the oven. It’s my favorite kind of preserving, requiring very little effort or attention. Just bake for a few hours and then throw in the freezer for long-term storage. The results are magical — sweet, chewy and intense tomato discs ideal for throwing in improvised pasta mixtures or on pizza, or merely grabbed by the handful and consumed while still frozen. Dried and frozen cherry tomatoes are my favorite — they’re like icy tomato candies.

Wash and de-stem a pile of tomatoes. If using cherry, grape or pear tomatoes, slice in half. If using large tomatoes, cut in Ω inch slices. Place tomatoes on a cookie sheet lined with tin foil. You may drizzle olive oil, garlic and herbs over the top if you like. Bake at low heat (225 degrees or less), checking occasionally, until tomatoes reach the degree of dryness you desire. The drying time will vary depending on the size of your tomatoes — it could take anywhere between two to eight hours. Remove from oven and let cool. Place pan, uncovered, in freezer. Once frozen, the tomatoes can be moved to a plastic bag or sealable container for longer storage.

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Meet Our New Staffer

Today’s an exciting day at the office. We began the day with some wheat bread and homemade raspberry jam, brought by our newest staffer, Laura Johnson. Laura is our assistant marketing director. She will be working with Heidi Marsh to be sure fresh, entertaining material is always available to you on our website.

Gardening and cooking are some of Laura’s favorite hobbies, so she might start contributing some recipes and food articles. Laura wrote a couple of paragraphs to introduce herself to our web readers. We asked her to share the raspberry jam recipe with you, too.

Our new staffer, Laura Johnson.

By Laura Johnson

I started out life on a farm north of Mission Hill. I can remember hot summer days spent out in the bean field spraying weeds with my dad and brothers. Every now and then, Dad would suggest we quit early for the day and head over to Ponds of Fun to relax. By Ponds of Fun, he meant the scummy, snapping turtle-infested pond in Mission Hill. It had its hazards, but the water was cool and it beat working.

After 13 years spent in exile in Minnesota, I moved back to South Dakota in 2006. One of the things that brought me back home was the desire to spend time with aging grandparents, but another draw was the ability to see the sky again. When you grow up loving farmland and prairie, being hemmed in on all sides by trees and buildings can be rather oppressive.

Last year, I was allowed access to a friend’s abandoned raspberry patch. I wasn’t even sure I liked raspberries, but was lured in by the idea of free food and the ability to indulge in my passion for pulling weeds. Once I had experienced the thrill of seeking out the little red berries while fighting off insects, thorny raspberry canes, and giant weeds, I was hooked. Once my friends and family tried the homemade raspberry jam that resulted from my labor, they were hooked too. Be careful who you choose to give a jar to – they will pester you for more.

Raspberry jam glows atop a slice of peanut butter toast.

Red Raspberry Preserves

4 cups raspberries
3 cups sugar
1/4 cup lemon juice

Makes about 3 cups.

Sort fresh raspberries, discarding any that are soft, moldy, or otherwise dubious looking. Rinse and drain them well.

Stir the raspberries, sugar, and the lemon juice together in a bowl, using a rubber spatula. Let the mixture stand, stirring gently once or twice, until the sugar has dissolved, about 2 hours.

Scrape the mixture into a stainless steel or other nonreactive large skillet or sautÈ pan. Bring it to a boil, stirring constantly with a straight-ended wooden or nylon spatula, and boil it rapidly, stirring often, until it passes the jelly test; this will take from 3 to 5 minutes, depending on the juiciness of the berries. Remove from the heat.

Skim off any foam and ladle the hot preserves into hot, clean half-pint canning jars, leaving º inch of headspace. Seal the jars with new two-piece canning lids according to manufacturer’s directions and process for 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath. Cool, label and store the jars. The preserves will keep for at least a year in a cool cupboard.

If the jelling doesn’t work out, do not fret. Even if it does slide off your toast, the cooked berry-sugar mixture will still make a fine sauce for ice cream, waffles, or anything else that would benefit from a sweet, fruity topping.

From”The Good Stuff Cookbook” by Helen Witty

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Pickle Party

A tasty family recipe inspired Terry and Sam Grosz of Delmont to organize a pickle party and invite their entire community.

By Ruth Steil

Pickle packing is more fun with the help of friends and neighbors. At least Sam and Terry Grosz thought so when they began the annual gathering in 1994.

Terry and Sam Grosz of Delmont host an annual Pickle Packin’ Party. The gathering began several years ago when the Groszes visited family in California to attend a pickle party hosted by Terry’s cousin. They loved the pickles so much they brought the secret recipe, along with a dozen jars of pickles, back home in a suitcase.

They tried a small batch in their kitchen the following summer, staying true to the family recipe except for adding some vegetables. The next summer they invited friends to help them pack pickles under a tent. After making 100 jars in 12 hours, a Delmont tradition was born.

Eleven years ago the summer heat and flies, plus an ever-growing group, persuaded the Groszes to move the party from a tent to the Delmont Community Center. They use the rear of the building for cleaning the cucumbers and the community room in front for packing and sealing the jars.

Local Hutterite colonies supply cucumbers by the truck full.

The group has grown to about 50 picklers, and the process is considerably more streamlined since that first yard party. They are on a strict schedule, starting at 8 a.m. on a Saturday in July. Forty-five minutes are scheduled for the potluck lunch and the canning and cleaning are finished by 5:30 p.m.

The Groszes purchase the cucumbers from nearby Hutterite colonies, since they grow enough to ensure a uniform size for the pickles. Invitations are mailed a few weeks before the party. Along with the usual date and time, the clever cucumber notes include an RSVP for how many quarts each partier wants to make. The Groszes order and purchase the pickle ingredients, but everyone brings their own jars, rings and lids and a potluck dish to share at noon. At the end of the day each person pays a per-jar price, based on the cost of the supplies.”It costs roughly $2 per jar,” Terry said.”That’s rent, gas, refreshments, everything.”

The first step to making pickles is prepping the cucumbers. Hundreds of cukes are dropped in a cattle tank filled with water where the stem and remaining leaves are removed by a group of workers. In 2008 Howard Knodel, from Nome, Alaska, was on stem duty. He was visiting relatives in the area when Terry gave him a jar of pickles to sample. Impressed by the taste and crispness, he decided to join the party.”Terry told me if I was around I should come to the pickle party,” Howard said.”I’ve ordered 16 jars so I can bring them back to Alaska for my wife and boys.”

Delmont’s pickle party is a community event, but the recipe remains top secret. Pickle partiers go home with as many jars as they want – for $2 each.

After being stripped of leaves and stems, the cucumbers are run through the rinse/spin cycle of a washing machine. Three to five gallons of cukes are placed in the washer at a time. Towels are positioned around the sides of the tub to buffer the cucumbers from breaking or bruising. Mike Grosz, Terry’s son, runs the machine.”I’ve been washing cucumbers for about 10 years,” he said.”I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

The washed cucumbers are carried to the community room in tubs where an assembly line of chatting, smiling picklers stand waiting on both sides of long tables. A turkey cooker with a canner placed on top serves as the hot water bath for the jars. Peggy Grosz, Mike’s wife, pulls the jars from the hot water. Her PVC coated gloves demonstrate the potential hazard to tender skin.”I’m the hub of the wheel,” she said.”If I quit everybody has to stop.”

Each person on the line after Peggy has a designated task: packing cucumbers, dill, hot peppers, garlic or vegetables, adding alum and finally pouring in the brine and sealing the jars.

Terry won’t share the recipe for the crunchy, savory dill pickles.”When my cousin gave me the recipe years ago, he made me promise not to give it to anyone. He died a year and a half ago, but I’m still keeping my promise.”

He’ll share the pickles though, if you bring your own jars.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy, or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Almost Tomato Time

By Katie Hunhoff

I’ve never canned vegetables before but I’m determined to start this summer. My motivation is a New York Times review I recently read on the book “Tomatoland” by Barry Estabrook. I’ve always known that store-bought tomatoes aren’t as tasty as garden-grown, but I didn’t know that tomato farmers in Florida (where the majority of supermarket tomatoes are grown) are actually prohibited from growing tasty varieties because their color and shape don’t conform to what you would typically see in a store. Or that the tomatoes don’t dent or splat if they happen to roll off a speeding shipping truck onto a highway. Or that a pink color is gassed into green tomatoes to obtain the color we see in stores. Or that 100 herbicides and pesticides are used to just get them to grow out of Florida’s nutrient-deficient soil. The list goes on… many workers report being sprayed with toxic pesticides and migrant and child labor laws are broken just so we can have a red tomato in the off season.

All this information has me determined to begin canning this summer so I have some healthy tomatoes to for the winter months. I’m lucky to have some tomatoes growing in the backyard, but if you don’t, try visiting one of the farmer’s market’s around the state. Here’s a good directory. Or visit Dakota Rural Action’s online “Local Foods Co-op” page. The co-op is a way for consumers to connect with local farmers and producers so they have an opportunity to buy fresh foods.

Although “Tomatoland” doesn’t seem like a fun summer read, I’m planning on getting a copy to learn more about our tomato supply. In the meantime I hope we have a bumper backyard crop.