Preserving plant food.

[JohnL]

Hi.
Does anyone have any info on preserving wild plant food? I know you can dry hard skinned berries such as bilberrys and blackcurrant, but I dont know the best way of doing it. Assuming I dont want to use an oven, fire or sun? also drying leaves, can you dry nettles etc. & then rehydrate in soup or something later? how long will they last? And what about nuts? esp. beechmast & acorns? do you need to dry them out on a heat sourse & then they will last, put them in an airtight container? In shells or no?
I look forward to your replies,
Thanks,
John.

 

[Toddy]

Leaves dry fine, just hang in bunches or stripped off the branches and loosely bagged in paper. I dry them hanging above the kitchen radiator but tied to the washing line on an overcast but warm day works fine too. The secret to success is to pick carefully. Think tea pickers; they only gather the choice leaves.
There will inevitably be some loss of flavour/ vitamin, etc., but well dried the herbs will last at least until the next season. The rehydrate easily and add flavour, scent, minerals, etc.
Dried nettles can be used instead of salt for folks who are salt sensitive, suffering from water retention or high blood pressure.

Fruits are harder, it's why we have so many recipes for jams, jellies and syrups Fruit leathers are very good, freezing is probably the best method if you want 'fruit' out of season, but otherwise jam it or dry them quickly. Again the fruits will last until the next year, or in the case of jam.........well, we cleared my Grandmother's house when she died and there was jam there that was eight years old and it was very good indeed. I get a lot of use from my dehydrator these days

Nuts, ah well, now then, which nut is what matters.
Beechmast will disappear before you get all the shells open. We eat as we gather here. I'm told that this is why pigs were set to guzzle the mast when it fell, but that to gather and turn it into oil is also a viable way of storing something from them.

Acorns are best hulled, parched and stored air tight, unless you can keep them consistantly cold, dark and dryish. Otherwise they start to sprout.
But this is the acorns that grow around me, and they don't need to be leached of tannin.

Hopefully someone else will be along to say how to deal with the ones that do have a lot of tannin. Spamel and Xylaria both posted something about them a while back.

cheers,
Toddy

 

[JohnL]

Many thanks Toddy, that is just the sort of info I was after.

 

[xylaria]

I have found that when I processed acorn or hazelnut in last few years that they need thorough drying before storage or they go funky really quickly. This is less of a problem in dry summers. Hazelnuts can be stored in thier shell, but need to be complety dry if unshelled and roasted or they go moldy. Acorns I have found need to processed within a week of coming off the tree or the tannins leach to far into the nut to make them processable without serious effort, they also start to sprout if you turn you back on them. Acorn I leach and pulverise repeatedly, and then dry out the final flour. I don't have dehydrator, but I got new oven at christmas (gorenje) that has a 50c drying setting, that does an excellant job.

Fungi I slice, lay flat and are dried above a radiator. I don't do the ray mears thing of threading them whole on to string as it is not uncommon for the odd fungi to hatch into pile of maggots and cutting the half you spot the ropey ones. Did you know that under EU food regs dreid wild fungi can be up to 10% insect protein. Greens are dried the same way Toddys are, in bunches hanging from the kitchen ceiling. Some fruits work better as fruit leathers than others, blackberry is very good. Apples can wrapped in paper and stored in cardboard box in dark cool place, for several months, but need to be check on (one bad apple spoils a barrel)

Toddys gran must have a spot bottling techneque. After a year or two my jams start smelling like wine. I found a jar of haw sauce in back of my cupboard last year, labeled nov 2004, it had turned liquid, it didn't smell bad just looked a bit funny. I dyed a silk scarf baby pink with it rather than eat it.