I can’t remember if we’ve talked about “portioning” or not this season. Perhaps we’ve mentioned it in passing, but it deserves its own post. Portioning your preservations is very valuable to practice as it helps optimize the use of your garden and eliminate food waste!
When we’re preserving, especially with blanch and freeze techniques, we’re often aiming for specific amounts in each bag. Now, this might strict or loose measurements, which are definitely up for your own interpretation. A portion for a family of six is obviously very different from a family of two.
The concept of a portion might be “roughly a meal or serving.” But, it can also be an exact cup, half cup or some other more precise measurement. We often find it helpful to tune our individual preservation portions around amounts we’d typically use in a given recipe or meal.
For example, with our celery preservation, we’re measuring out one cup amounts. We place these into (cheaper) sandwich bags, then encase all of these bags into a freezer grade bag. This not only saves you a bit of money on ancillary preservation gear, but we generally find that most recipes call for a cup of celery. (Or could use that amount, anyway!)
Then, there’s certainly some things where a “grab bag” is more appropriate. For example, with our frozen peppers, we might need a lot or a little depending on what we’re making and how spicy we want it. In this case, it makes sense to stuff our bags full so we can just grab it, throw in what we need and put things back in the freezer.
The point is, we’ve found it valuable to put some thought into the portioning related to our preservation. We tune things to our specific needs, aiming to create as little waste as possible. This concept has a direct impact on the efficiency and utilization of your entire garden. It’s the very last step in a line of steps that contribute to how much your garden will produce for you.
Plus, when you have “ideal” amounts, it makes it easier to use those preservations. If we can just grab something, dump the entire thing into our pot or pan and we’re done? That’s easy and will encourage us to use our preservations more. It’s important not to underestimate how much you future laziness or “I don’t feel like it” can discourage the use of your preservations!
Anyway, we’ve found this surprisingly helpful to practice and that it pays lots of dividends down the road. As we’ve discussed previously, it’s really important to keep those preservations easy to use!
