A Guide to Preserving Your Fruit and Vegetable Harvest

It's not just that I grow everything under the sun; I am also a prolific preserver, canner, and fermenter. I take summer harvesting seriously and consider it a real failing to have to buy produce at a grocery store between summer and February. Yet, I am always looking for ways to make that process easier. I have tried it all, from freeze-drying to dehydrating to water preservation, and while I believe in preserving food, you also have to eventually eat it, so preserving the taste is at least as important. While there are all kinds of ways you can preserve your summer vegetables, here's my recommended ways to do so-and why.

Stop freezing tomatoes, and do this instead

Yes, peeling tomatoes is a grind-but freezing your tomatoes to avoid peeling them is a bad idea. The whole point of preserving your tomatoes is to ensure you have delicious, homegrown tomatoes to work with come winter, and freezing them ends up changing the texture in an unpleasant way. Even worse, it changes the taste, making it mealy and lacking in sweetness. Even when I'm chucking tomatoes into soups, stews, or sauce, I worked hard to grow those tomatoes and want them to be as flavorful as possible. There are ways to more easily preserve tomatoes and skip the painful peeling process, and I have two of them.

First, don't peel them at all: Slice them in half, put them in a large stockpot and crush enough of them with your hands to cover all of the tomatoes in tomato juice. Allow the tomatoes to simmer for four to five hours. Let it cool, then pass the mixture through a food mill. A food mill will take fifteen minutes per forty pounds of tomatoes, and you end up with gorgeous passata, which can be canned. Passata is a traditional Italian pureed, strained tomato sauce, but has no other ingredients. You can use it in almost every way you would peeled, whole tomatoes. A second method is to halve the tomatoes and lay them cut side down on a cookie sheet and roast them until a black spot appears in the middle of each tomato skin. Remove the sheet and immediately pluck the skins off with a pair of tongs. Then you can continue canning them as peeled tomatoes.

If you're going to freeze tomatoes (which again, I don't recommend), cook the tomatoes first instead of freezing whole, raw tomatoes. Cooking the tomatoes preserves the flavor, color, texture, and vitamins in the vegetables, as well as removing almost all bacteria. Make sauce or paste, and then pack it into freezer bags or vacuum-sealed bags, and remove as much air as possible from the bags.

Frozen peppers can be fantastic

I always plant too many peppers, and they don't can well unless you pickle them, but that means you have limited applications for cooking. Last year, I discovered they freeze beautifully and defrost well-if you roast them first. I found this was most easily accomplished on a grill. Get your grill to a high temperature, and once it's hot, lay all the peppers in one layer on the grill. Depending on the size of the pepper, they will take between 5-15 minutes to char on one side. Turn all the peppers over and allow them to char on the second side. Turn the grill off, remove the peppers, and place them in a paper grocery bag, folding the top over. Let the peppers sit for twenty minutes to steam in the bag. Now lay the bag down on the table, and use your hands to agitate the bag against the peppers. This will peel the loose pepper skins away. At this point, you can easily pluck the stems off the pepper, taking most of the seeds with it, and toss them.

Now, lay all your peppers in a single layer on a cookie sheet lined with some parchment paper and par-freeze them for thirty minutes. This will freeze them just enough that they won't stick together in a big block in a bag. Place them in a freezer bag. It's best to use a vacuum sealer for this, because in a freezer, air is the enemy. If you don't have a vacuum sealer, try to get out as much air as you possibly can. I keep these in the front of my freezer, on the door, so they're easy to grab while I'm cooking.

The best ways to preserve berries

The most obvious way to preserve fruit is to make jam from it; if you eat a lot of jam, this is a perfect solution. You can go overboard and make too much jam, though. After you've made as much as you'll eat over the next two years, you should freeze the rest of your fruit in whole pieces. The key here is to par-freeze it so you don't end up with a big block of fruit you can't separate. Place your clean strawberries, pitted cherries, blackberries, and the like on a cookie sheet with a sheet of parchment on it. Freeze the berries for an hour, then put them into resealable bags. Reusable vacuum bags are a great solution to suck the air back out each time you take some out.

A winter full of fried eggplant

Eggplant is a tough one because simply cooking it doesn't save it from becoming mush in the freezer. The solution is going one step further-breading it seems to insulate the eggplant and make it usable: Cut it into rounds, salt and drain it, then use an egg wash, flour, and breadcrumbs and fry it, then drain the fried rounds on a paper towel. Once cool, take the fried rounds and freeze them. I place them between sheets of parchment paper, which makes it easy to pull out what I need from the freezer during the winter since they won't stick together. These rounds can be used in dishes like lasagna and eggplant parmesan.

Can pumpkin, don't freeze it

You can freeze raw pumpkin, but it loses its texture and some of the sweetness. You're probably going to use it in a pie anyway, so this might not bother you, but it did bother me. If you're going to freeze it, roast it first, by splitting your pumpkin in half or quarters, removing the seeds, placing the pieces on a baking sheet cut side up, and baking at 350F until you can insert a knife easily into the flesh (40-60 minutes). At that point, you can scoop the flesh away from the peel, place the pumpkin in a freezer bag (or a vacuum sealed bag, if you have it), with absolutely no air around it. A better solution, though, is canning it.

Canning pumpkin has to be done a very specific way to be considered safe by the USDA: You can't can the mash-only raw, cubed pumpkin. You need to use a pressure canner, too-you can't use an open kettle method. But since you're just canning the pumpkin in water, it won't change the taste of the pumpkin like freezing will, and since you only use pumpkin once or twice a year, I believe it's better for it to sit on a shelf out of the way than take up precious freezer space.

How to preserve peas

With peas, there are only two ways to go: dehydrated or frozen. Plenty of people can peas, and in my opinion, they taste no better than store bought, which is to say, not great. Dehydrated peas can be dusted with salt or wasabi powder and turned into snacks, and dehydrators aren't expensive anymore. If you're going to freeze peas, the key is to blanche them. Raw vegetables lose flavor, color, and texture quickly in the freezer, and blanching only takes a few minutes. Get a rolling boil going, drop your clean peas in for thirty seconds (no longer), then plunge them into an ice bath to stop the cooking. Pack them into freezer bags-if you can vacuum-seal them, even better.

How to preserve herbs

If you're looking to preserve herbs, I advise skipping the dehydrator. Hanging them to dry isn't a better solution, as they tend to attract dust and even mold if the air in the room isn't dry enough. A better solution is to microwave herbs between two pieces of paper towel in ten-second bursts-you'll find they dry, but they retain most of their color. Once they're fully dry, pack them into vacuum-sealed bags and store them out of the sunlight. An alternative solution for herbs like garlic, turmeric, ginger, galanga, and horseradish is to dice them and freeze them with water into tiny ice cubes. I like to use silicone ice cube trays, and pack them as full as possible with the finely chopped herbs, using a spoon or spatula. Fill with water to cover the herbs. Toss those cubes into a bag, and keep the bag near the front of the freezer so you can easily grab them. You'll find yourself using garlic and ginger more often if you don't have to peel and chop it-and in the case of horseradish, this type of preservation is the only one that will keep your root spicy (and only for a few months, such is horseradish).