Now that things are slowing down for us, we can illustrate a point that might often be overlooked during our busy season posts. During the short growing season, things are happening at a pace where we often have to heavily curate what we show you.
What we mean is that we might show you “one way” in which we’re preserving or using a given type of produce. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the “only way” we’re preserving or using that particular crop. We often illustrate the “dominant” preservation method we use, but we also usually practice other preservations as well.
Those dominant preservation methods are how you make a lot of produce disappear. That’s probably the most important skill to develop when becoming a preservationist and thus why we often focus on illustrating these methods. But, those other uses can often be a bit more crafty or creative, often providing a bit more satisfaction than a bulk produce preservation.
For example, we showed you that we use blanch and freeze for the bulk of our carrots. We also store some fresh. But, we also performed a couple of garlic focused fermentations with some beautiful purple and white carrots for a medium term preservation, as shown here. In addition, we ran some through the dehydrator to make carrot powder for smoothies and such. We also try to focus on fresh eating, while we can, as fresh food is the best!
This multi-preservation approach is something we frequently practice, but we don’t always get to show you that. Often, it’s far more pressing for us to curate a different and more timely topic than to discuss the many ways we use our produce.
We often look at these multiple preservation methods in terms of how long they’ll be good for. This helps you on the consumption side of things, since it helps facilitate your use of that produce in the short, medium and long terms. We also usually scale quantity with lesser amounts for short term preservation and larger amounts for long term.
We’ve talked about it before, but having multiple methods for utilizing lots of given produce at a time is almost a more valuable of a skillset than growing itself. But, we thought it might be good to illustrate that those produce consuming practices can be fresh dishes, but also multiple preservation methods.
These fermented carrots turned out pretty darn good, a lovely color too! We enjoy carrot ferments as they retain the crispiness of the carrot, but impart an interesting and very different flavor. We gave these a decently long ferment of a week and they definitely picked up a ton of garlic flavor and sour disposition!
