Progress in Preservation

My biggest goal in beginning this journey into (aspects of) self-sufficiency has been to learn pickling and preserving. It's one thing to pick some tomatoes from the garden and make yourself a salad but entirely another to process the things you've grown and then put them aside for another day. It still seems to odd to me that I can just make something like jam or chutney or sauce - could I be any more a product of my modern upbringing?! - but the idea of actually doing that remains incredibly exciting. And now that I've tried my hand at a few of these I'm ready to show some of it off.

Could I have staged this shot better so there wasn't laundry and cold medicine in it? Yes, I really could have!

In a fit of productivity that took ten hours over two days, I made my first batches of tomato sauce, hot sauce, semi-dried tomatoes and green tomato pickles. I also managed to bake some muffins and brownies in between all of that, but those are much less exciting. The recipes are all from some semi-discerning google searching and pretending I can judge the quality from simply looking at the page: hmm, yes, that looks like it would taste good probably?

Luckily for me things went pretty well!

The tomato sauce is a recipe from chef Matt Preston, of Masterchef fame, followed from my good old standby taste.com.au. It's fairly straightforward - cook some tomatoes with herbs and spices (the cloves especially made this smell amazing), then add a ton of sugar and vinegar and cook a little longer - and felt more like a waiting game than anything else. This was good news! It left me free to worry about my jar sterilisation and all the horror stories of how miniscule an amount of botulism is takes to kill someone. I went with the wash-boil-bake method as I didn't trust our dishwasher to be thorough enough for something so important.

The sauce smelled amazing throughout the entire process and the end result is tangy and delicious and, frankly, so much better than what you get in the store. We have since made excuses to eat sauce-friendly foods just to have an excuse to taste it some more. The one thing I would take away from the experience is to make use of those muslin cloth bags you sometimes hear about - though the whole thing gets puréed at the end I would hate anybody to chomp down on a piece of clove that I missed when I was painstakingly digging out all the loose bits of herb and spice at the end (I didn't like the watery sauce I got from the proscribed method of forcing the sauce through a strainer and instead opted to purée the whole lot together for a thicker texture).

Matt Preston's Tomato Sauce: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Simple process and excellent taste make this recipe a no-brainer.

The rainbow chilli bush that I planted on a whim ended up producing so many of these pretty little things that I knew I'd have to make a particular effort to use them. I cook with chillis occasionally - there's a chorizo and ricotta pasta I can't get enough of, for example - but not in these quantities, and I wasn't sure I had a good place to dry them for later use. But since I was making sauce it seemed like hot sauce would be a fun idea. In hindsight I use hot sauce as rarely as I use chillis themselves, but at least it has made a great gift for my spice-inclined friends and family.

After supplementing my chillis with a bag of jalapeños I followed the allrecipes.com recipe for Jalapeño Hot Sauce and the process was relatively painless. I heartily recommend, however, that you wear gloves when handling those chillis. It didn't occur to me at the time and despite washing my hands, thoroughly, a number of times afterwards I still ended up with tears streaming down my face after rubbing my eyes later that night.

Jalapeño Hot Sauce: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Hot without being unbearable and relatively simple to make, the sauce is lacking in much flavour other than its heat. 

When I saw the sheer number of tomatoes on my vines I knew I would be using at least some of those before they were ripe. My brother has always been a huge fan of green tomato pickles and, rather than be bombarded with more ripe tomatoes than I could handle, I figured I'd do this one for him. The salted mix of tomatoes and onion sits in the fridge overnight (and loses an impressive amount of water in the process, mine came to almost a litre!) so you will need to have enough room for that and a container large enough to hold them.

Cutting up more than three kilograms of tomatoes takes a long time and the tart juice will find any cuts and scrapes on your hands in the process, but otherwise it wasn't too painful. At my brother's request I added in a couple hundred grams of sultanas but the rest of the recipe is from a fellow Aussie blogger - Lynda at Living in the Land of Oz - and her copy of Well Preserved by the Country Women's Association of Victoria. It's also my first real preserve and my first time "putting up" something I've made, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it it when it comes out of the cupboard.

CWA's Green Tomato Chutney: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Simple, tasty and a great way to use those tomatoes you might not otherwise have a need for, this chutney is a great choice. 

Now that I have started, well, I suspect that I'm going to have trouble stopping. The excitement and satisfaction of making the sorts of things I've always taken for granted as supermarket staples - not to mention that I'm growing the ingredients myself! - is pretty heady. I'm not sure how much money is saved in the long run, especially when accounting for the time it takes, but I'm not too worried about that. The costs are overall pretty low, still, and the taste of home-made products is always going to be so much better than anything I can just go out and buy.

Hopefully my pickles aren't far behind, now, because they're what I've really been looking forward to!