I’ve just been reading a very interesting article on the Oil Drum local, introducing ideas of how to store home grown foodstuffs without boiling or other heating methods.
I’d been meaning to write an article about the joys of the humble pumpkin, simply because they are so fantastic for keeping. Hard skin heirloom varieties keep in a cool room for several months, without any kind of processing.
This article by Jason Bradford summarises several methods of how to store foods without boiling. As well as growing pumpkins and other crops that keep, we also grow parnips and other root crops that will stay in the ground until we want to eat them, and perform most of the ideas that Jason documents.
Okay, back to the subject of preservation. My favorite is drying. Not everything does well with drying, but some of the most abundant fruits and vegetables, such as apples and tomatoes, perform well. This year my farm devoted a lot of effort towards drying and the associated equipment. In California I can take advantage of low summer humidity. Many foods can simply be placed on screened trays outside (see top image). Towards the end of the summer and early fall as the day length shortens and relative humidity increases, drying may require more concentrated heat. A couple friends of the farm build specialized food drying cabinets with a heat collection chamber, and these did a fantastic job.
This is what one of the driers looks like. The black box at the top holds the screened trays of produce. The slanted front piece is a heat collector. Here is a good web source for descriptions and plans of solar cookers, dryers, root cellars and stills.
This solar food dryer looks amazing, and we do plan to build something similar in 2009, to enable us to dry foods for preservation without any heat-source other than the sun.
In the affluent west we have been stupidly complacent regarding cheap abundant energy. This should never have happened, energy is valuable and should always have been treated as such. Solar cooking and drying is possible in most parts of the world, at least some of the time. In many places it is almost always feasible, particularly in hotter southern areas, that never had the luxury of energy wastage. I would like to see this kind of appropriate technology taken up all over – it just makes sense.
