Preserving Your Vegetable Harvest

I decided that it was important to tell you what you can do with your harvest after talking to people who had gardened and stopped because they didn’t like being stuck with things they got bored with and couldn’t give away fast enough before it got spoiled.

It kind of surprised me. I never thought of a bumper crop of anything being a problem. I guess it's the Italian in me. We almost just naturally know what to do with food. 

If we are not making pesto with excess basil, we are making Giardiniera or Muffoletto (garden vegetables and olives chopped up like a tapenade and fermented) with a variety of vegetables.

I should mention, in case you look it up, that Muffoletto led to the New Orleans sandwich, Muffaletta. It is one of its ingredients and muffaletta has completely overshadowed muffoletto. So rarely will you find the original meaning. It is now relegated to olive salad for muffaletta, if it is mentioned at all.

Oddly enough, it is Italian Americans that are not from New Orleans but that come from the old country that keep the old definition alive at all, since the American invention is exported to Italy through the inventor's family and gains popularity then in Italy. That may be where the Italian definition of muffaletta that is a kind of big sesame bun came from.

Italian American inventions with their huge popularity can just overwhelm the original Italian name. It’s like pizza. In Italy, before the Italian American creation of Pizza with sauce and cheese, pizza was a round flattish loaf of bread and sometimes it had vegetables cooked right into the dough. That definition of pizza is all but lost too.

Giardiniera and hotter variations are popular in Chicago, but the same name was maintained. I looked up the derivation of giardiniera and it comes from “garden” and a suffix “eria” which refers to a contained area of a thing or activity, or a container. I just thought of giardiniera as a nice convenient condiment or antipasta of fermented garden vegetables. But it directly translates to “a container of the garden”. I guess that’s just what they did in Italy to preserve the harvest. It’s like a garden storage container.

You mostly see chunks of carrots, cauliflower, garlic cloves or slices, cipollina (little/pearl onions) celery and peppers in giardiniera, but really you can add anything from the garden. I especially like okra and eggplant. You can also dice up onions to put in it. Or you can ferment each vegetable separately.

We Italians look forward to and actually try to create excess so we can make these things.

Brining, Fermenting, Pickling and Dehydrating are easy methods you can use to make tasty treats that also prolong the life of the food using naturally occurring microorganisms or low heat methods. Historically these were skills passed down the generations. Without these skills there wouldn’t be all that delicious food all year and the harvest would have gone to waste because fresh vegetables don’t last long at all.

And then don’t forget things like scarpaccia which uses large amounts of vegetables like zucchini, but also any other vegetable to make a kind of tart that won’t last long enough to store because it is addicting and there never seems to be enough. It’s kind of like pizza, 

In fact, it can be very like pizza with a variety of vegetable flavors but no cheese. but if you like you could add cheese. But then I guess that would turn it into Pizza. No pizza has toppings, scarpaccia has baked in the dough veggies and uses more veggies than pizza.

Scarpaccia comes from scarpa-shoe and accio-resembling or related to. The tort is a delicious combination of leathery and crunchy at the same time and it is often oval, resembling the sole of a shoe.

Some say accio means bad like in tempaccio, which means bad weather, but it also could be something like Tempest (bad storm) and Accio (of or like), combining to be "bad weather", (like a bad storm). I think that makes more sense. Or it could just be one is Latin, of or like, and the other is Greek with a different meaning. Otherwise that would mean the derivation of scarpaccio would mean bad shoe and that doesn’t fit.

But anyway since, of or like, just fits perfectly as a description of this dish I am going with the Latin. You can get a plethora of recipes for this dish online. It’s fun, you can be very creative with it, it uses lots of vegetables and it is delicious!! And if you give that to a neighbor rather than just raw zucchini they will never want you to stop gardening!

Oh and let's not forget tomato sauce. Every Italian family has their own recipe for that. You can’t make too much of that. Neighbors don’t refuse that either!

In America, with the invention of the mason jar in 1858, canning became very popular and the government encouraged the practice. It was much more complex and sought to keep microorganisms away from the food altogether by pasteurizing the food and sterilizing the jars and making a vacuum seal. But it is warned that you really have to take a class on it if you want to do it because doing it wrong isn’t safe.

I have my doubts about that because in my culture (no pun intended) we let the naturally occurring microbes grow and they compete out the disease causing ones. But then again if there are no bacteria, good or bad, then I guess anything can take root on an empty surface and I guess that is the danger in canning something incorrectly.

Also killing all the “germs” to preserve food also kills the nutrients AND the taste, so I am not recommending this relatively recent practice of canning.

Also when you hear that something is pickled, which is the use of vinegar in the preservation process, make sure that it means pickled by fermentation and not by adding vinegar for taste and then killing everything with canning. I only recently learned that pickling had two definitions like that. And now I understand why some pickles taste so good and feel fresh and alive and some are squishy and just taste like they have been soaking in vinegar!

When pickling is done by fermentation, the lactobacteria change the sugars into lactic acid and carbon dioxide, but when the sugars get low, then the acetobacter bacteria make acetic acid which is vinegar and the natural vinegar’s acidity keeps the food from being spoiled by any other bacteria. No heating and no destruction of nutrients and a delicious complex flavor develops because the vinegar is allowed to develop over time.

The confusion of running into differences in definition is caused by the fact that there are basically 2 camps, the natural fermentation advocates that have respect for nature's biodiversity and the relatively recent camp of “The only good germ is a dead germ”. 

This kind of correlates to Natural healing vs the Modern Medical idea of germs. I hadn’t realized that this attitude of modern medicine had intruded into this ancient subject.

If you want to make sure that your brew doesn’t spoil before the vinegar is strong enough, after the lactobacteria stage dwindles down you can add vinegar of your choice and add a layer of olive oil on the surface to keep out any incoming microorganisms. In this way you can control the stability of the flavor you have developed because you keep it from any further development. And then refrigerating doubly assures it's stability.

Brining, which is using salt or a salt solution and Pickling which is using vinegar or straight fermentation are just different ways to set up the preservation process, which ultimately in the last stages depends on fermentation to a large or small degree. 

Dehydration is just removing the water from a food. Dehydration can be used alone or in combo. You can create a taste with Brining, Pickling or straight Fermentation and then dehydrate it. Rarely done on a commercial scale, but it can be very delicious. But I notice it is gaining popularity. Look at the increase in the number of meat sticks being sold in the marketplace. A lot of these are fermented and dried meat 

There are many benefits to fermenting. Besides the delicious complex flavors that develop, there are health benefits.

In fermentation:

1.  Foods are partially predigested. Dense nutrients like in beans are broken down so they are more bioavailable. Beets are another example.
2. Some foods, for example, mushrooms, can have varying levels of compounds that would be considered toxins. This is why you can't eat some mushrooms without first cooking them. Fermentation detoxifies by breaking down the toxins with the benefit of using no heat, which helps preserve the enzymes.
3. Nutrient Boosting can occur. There is the formation of B vitamins and other micronutrients from the microorganisms. For instance, one of these nutrients called natto, broken down from soybeans can clean up blood vessels clearing away blood clots.
4. And last but not least, you have the Live Cultures of the good bacteria themselves. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the very bacteria that are supposed to be thriving in our guts are also the bacteria found in abundance on our vegetables. And using microorganisms in your garden to make healthy plants will increase this benefit in eating as well.

So what do you think? If you knew you could easily make all kinds of delicious things from your harvest, wouldn’t that fuel you on to have the biggest harvest possible? I hope so. 

In the next blog I will talk about different ways to actually do this fermenting, brining, pickling and dehydrating. You can find articles about how to do it, but I will add my personal experience to it for you and maybe you can benefit from it and maybe be a little entertained as well.

Till then, Happy Gardening!

*This article is intended for informational purposes. The statements above have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.