Food Preservation Methods

There are so many ways food can be preserved, but we take a lot of them for granted in the modern day because of how used to convenience we are.

If major food preservation infrastructure is ever lost, it’s important to know how to preserve food for yourself and your community!

Modern Methods:

Canning:

Best For: Preserving seasonal harvests for long term storage, meat, vegetables, broths, fruit, sauces, and pickles.

There are few methods that come to mind as readily as canning. Canning was invented in the early 1800s by a man called Nicholas Appert. He observed that food kept in airtight containers didn’t spoil unless the seal was broken so he developed a method of cooking food in sealed glass jars to protect against microbial growth.

If you want to get into canning, there are tons of resources online, but I recommend talking to an old lady in your community as they are almost always more than glad to teach you something they grew up doing! (This is also a great way to get live feedback and learn in a hands-on way rather than copying a video.)

Freezing/Refrigerating

Best For: Short-term, or medium length storage for fruits, vegetables, meats, breads, pre-made meals

*Requires a lot of electricity

Freezing and refrigerating both have a very long and interesting history involving ice boxes and transporting blocks of ice on ships. We won’t dive into that all here, but if you’re interested the ladies at Gastropod did a fantastic podcast episode all about the history!

It’s hard to imagine living without a fridge or freezer, but they both have a place. This is perhaps one of the most well-known methods of food preservation for short-term and works decently well at what it’s designed for.

These methods can work for most foods, but it is much more dependent on a power grid to run. Refrigerators and freezers both use quite a bit of electricity so if that’s in short supply for you (or if you are preparing for hard times) then it might be worth considering alternatives.

Freeze-drying

Best For: Storing food for decades and preserving flavor (almost anything can be freeze-dried)

*This method also uses massive amounts of electricity and without a power offset, might not be wise to rely on if you’re aiming for being off-grid.

Freeze-drying was developed in 1906 and requires a special machine (a freeze dryer) that both dehydrates and freezes food at the same time. The result is a light and dry food that can be powdered or added to water that will last for literal decades.

This might be one of the longest-lasting methods, but it comes at a high price. Freeze dryers for a home-scale are very expensive and might only be worth investing in if you plan to sell freeze-dried foods and offset the power usage.

Traditional Methods

Drying (Dehydrating)

Best For: Fruits, vegetables, herbs, mushrooms, grains, and meats that need compact storage and will be consumed within a year.

For the purposes of this article, I will be using the terms “dehydrating” and “drying” interchangeably. The results are the same, but the method of removing moisture technically varies a little bit (dehydrating uses a constant low heat from a stove or dehydrator to dry the food while traditional drying uses just the air, sun, or wind to dry things out naturally).

The benefits of drying are that even though it doesn’t have as long of a shelf-life as other methods, it can be done with almost no equipment at all, and no electricity if you so choose!

Some people elect to build a solar dehydrator that captures heat from the sun via the greenhouse-effect and uses it to dry food which I hear good success stories from! If that’s too much or you’re lazy about it like I am, then simply take the food you’re drying, lay it on a tray or screen or whatever, then place a clear storage container over it all for a similar effect.

We’ve had pretty good success with that low-tech method this year!

Fermenting

Best For: Dairy, grains, fruit, vegetables, and sauces, and beverages, especially to add live biotics to your gut.

Fermenting is another method that has been around since ancient times. The method involves encouraging beneficial bacteria cultures to grow in order to preserve your food and add some probiotics (sometimes to break down hard to digest compounds).

Despite how it sounds, fermentation is actually much easier and safer than you’d expect! I highly recommend the book Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. He is an expert at breaking down the science of fermentation into an easy low-tech method that anyone can do in their own kitchen!

This has a wide range of applications too from sourdough to kimchi, to kombucha, kefir, water kefir, cheese cultures, and lacto-fermentation.

There are also a lot of sources of wild yeasts to explore and work with including fruits, vegetables, juniper berries, or cultures borrowed from friends!

You might just find it so fun that it inspires you to experiment with bacteria!

Pickling

Best For: Eggs, meats, vegetables, and fruits that you want to add a tangy flavor to, or that you want to add more salt and vinegar into your diet with.

Pickling is not the same thing as fermentation. Pickling is great for shorter term storage on its own, or longer-term storage when paired with canning.

Essentially this method is done by adding your food to a brine that contains an acid (such as vinegar) and often a salt. This changes the PH of the liquid to make it unfavorable for spoiling bacteria to break down your food.

There are all kinds of ways to pickle and frankly I’ve only had partial success with it myself. I know people who regularly have amazing results and end up with incredible sauerkraut, great pickles, and delicious pickled fruits.

Curing/Salting

Best For: Meats, fish, and certain vegetables for a few months of storage. Works best in cooler dry climates.

This method involves using high levels of salt to both absorb moisture and change the PH of the food to make it unsuitable for bacteria. This gives meat that delicious savory salt-flavor and can be a good way to keep meat without electricity.

The only caveat is that you need a good salt supply which may be hard in the event that there is a significant shortage. That said, this method would be fantastic for people who live near saltwater sources!

An old farmer, a hunter, or a good book on the subject can get you on the right track to doing this correctly!

Sugaring

Best For: Fruits, nuts, honey-based foods, and jams/jellies.

Similarly to curing, sugaring draws moisture out of the food cell walls which inhibits bacteria growth. The key here though is keeping the moisture content low enough that it won’t mold (I’ve had syrups and jams mold on me before!)

This can be done a few different ways depending on what you’re preserving and what your goal is. Right now, the Korean cheong is a quite popular method that involves layering fruit and sugar together in a jar at a 1-to-1 ratio and letting it sit for a few weeks. This draws out the fresh juices of the fruit and preserves its fresh flavor as opposed to a cooked down flavor which can be desirable in cooking or baking!

Other methods involve candied nuts, making jams or jellies (especially when canned) or preserving foods in honey (which is naturally high in sugar).

This can absolutely be done without electricity or any major tools, just beware that you will need a regular source of sugar otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to rely on this method in hard times.

Root Cellaring & Aging

Best For: Storing cheese, root vegetables, squash, grains, beverages, cured meats, and dried goods.

*Making a root cellar CAN be expensive, but it can also be done cheaper on a smaller scale.

Admittedly I have very little experience here, but root cellaring is very much a primitive refrigerator that doesn’t use electricity.

There are a lot of benefits to making a root cellar and aging food in it but there are a few things to know:

Firstly, airflow is essential. If you don’t have airflow, then your food will be consumed by mold. In the case of cheese, you actually want molds of certain varieties to protect the outside (known as the rind) but that is not the case for most of your food!

The other thing you want to do is keep moisture content at an absolute minimum to avoid those food spoilage bacteria from taking over.

An excellent book on the subject is Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables which I would recommend any homesteader have a copy of!

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