Re: Storing fruit and vegetables with minimal cost
- From: brian mitchell <brainmill@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2008 02:57:03 +0100
Zhang DaWei <feiwu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We grow vegetables out of enjoyment, but also significantly because we
need to reduce our outgoings. Given the recent rise in food prices and
the rising cost of electricty and gas, I'm interested in whether any
other readers of this newsgroup make use of low-cost solutions to
storing and keeping fruit and vegetables, or whether the freezer tends
to get used for most of the produce.
I have been looking into this for the reasons you cite.
If people are trying to store fruit and vegetables with minimal cost,
what methods have they used which seem to be the most successful at
reducing spoilage and minimising ongoing energy costs?
Drying is a possibility you might look into. Many fruit can be dried and
possibly some vegetables. Tomatoes, for instance, might dry and be
reconstituted for use in pasta sauces. Onions can be dried, although
they seem to do OK just hung in strings. Leeks could probably be dried,
and of course there's peas and beans. Herbs are always dried and the
same principle might be applied to other leaves, such as cabbage and
general greens. Reconstituted dried foods are usually only used in
cooked meals although dried fruit can be eaten as is, or in muesli(sp?).
Drying takes the least energy of all, often room temperature is enough.
Things which oxidise quickly, such as apples, need to be dried more
rapidly but it's still a low heat used. You can buy dehydrators or you
could utilise an existing source of heat. For example, you could erect a
drying cabinet over/around a radiator and still get room heating as
well.
This year, we are trying to make more use of clamps (might be good,
but uses up space which we might use...
Root vegetables can be stored in bins in some dampened medium such as
sand or a sand-earth mix, a variant on the clamp. Plastic storage
containers are cheap and stack easily and can be put in a shed or
garage. They need to be drilled to allow air in or things rot. Wooden
bins might be better but would probably have to be made.
. . . for, eg, winter radishes) and we
are making more use of bottling (which requires energy at the
beginning, which we hope is less than the overall cost of running a
freezer, though we may well be deluded about that.)...
Difficult to call that one. Bottling is quicker and uses less energy
with a pressure canner, which could also be a pressure cooker if you use
small enough jars. One thing I've found with initial bottling
experiments is that it takes up more room than a freezer. Using readily
available food jars, you only get about two servings per jar, so you
have to store a lot of jars. The bigger, proper jars are quite an
expensive initial outlay.
. . . We don't have cool
dry spaces in which we could store stuff and which would take up room,
either, though we may well go for that option at some point, just as
we are using up space with clamps. Any other ideas?
If you like the overall taste, pickling is always an option. I don't
know much about it, as I dislike pickles, but I think it requires less
energy than bottling.
You don't have an attic/roof space you could utilise for storage? Or any
outside area where you could put something like a small metal (lockable)
coal bunker?
.
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