Yeah, yeah. We know what we said about “fast” food preservation yesterday. But, there are certain foods that we find are best left to the more intensive preservation techniques like canning. As we’ve increased our growing capacity and experience, we’ve learned to heavily rely on “value” (to us) as a means of determining how much effort we should place into preservation.
Tomatoes are one such crop where the value of canning them goes through the roof. Whether it’s diced, quartered, or halved tomatoes, these are all items we would absolutely buy regularly from the grocer if we weren’t able to make them ourselves. Even tomato based value-add products like marinara, salsas or soups even make that list for us. It’s worth both the time and effort for us to preserve them in a long lasting way like canning.
Sure, we “could” just freeze our tomatoes. But, the canned form often allows us to easily and with little effort follow any given recipe out there, just with our own home grown equivalent. We don’t have to measure, guess or estimate amounts in frozen form. A pint is a pint, a quart is a quart of these products and pretty much every recipe out there will call for these ingredients in these quantities. Our canned versions are often better and more tasty than those you get at the store. Plus, the time we spend on the front end preserving them is made up on the back end when using them.
Sure, we sometimes will can “one off” things like pickles, fruits, pie filling or some random thing that really suits our fancy. But, our “general focus” and priority with more intensive preservation techniques is to hit those staples that we’d 100% have to buy if we didn’t make them. The rest? It’s subject to “easier” preservation techniques like blanch and freeze. Or maybe “best effort” canning, but it has to compete with those staples for our time.
We hope that talking about how we leverage different preservation techniques helps you think about and frame how you might want to approach preservation. How you can “break the mold” of being one of those “old school” preservationists that just cans everything and start to approach food preservation in a more modern and efficient way!
Because let’s face it. A lot of canned food kind of sucks to eat. And we have better tools and methods than our grandparents did!
