Pickled Carrots. Photo by Leda Meredith.
Leda Meredith has kindly offered this excellent post for the readers of Israeli Kitchen. It’s about food preservation without fancy equipment – just in time for late summer’s abundance of fresh produce. For those who would love to keep those ripe, colorful seasonal treats for later in the year, this is a wonderful introduction and worth keeping.
Visit Leda’s Urban Homestead to find out much, much more on eating locally, sustainable living, gardening for food and foraging wild edibiles in city settings. And Leda’s charming, informative memoir with recipes is a treasure for any library.
Hi, do you know where to get these jars in Israel? does it pay to shlep from the US?
Hi, Ita,
It really doesn’t pay to shlep glass from the US. I’ve bought similar jars in the houseware stores around the shuk – any permanent shuk.
Great ! Saves me some weight for when I go.. although I might buy a few jars there to start me off ..
What an interesting posting! I just got myself a food dehydrator (I live in Tel Aviv,so sun drying is not an option,due to the humidity) and I am discovering so many uses for it.
Where did you get one? How much did it cost?
I got mine from http://www.ezidri.co.il. I saw them on a exhibition, and got the machine a bit cheaper.They have a few models,the classic Ezidri,which costs about 1000 NIS and the Snackmaker, which is 1200 NIS.
Thanks.. The site looks like it has a bunch of good stuff!
That was an amazing post.
So what foods do we avoid so as not to get botulism?
I use brown grocery bags, printed side down, in my oven to dry herbs and apple slices.
The paper bag lets the air circulate better than a cookie sheet.
Hi, C-M! Thanks for the good suggestion!
Nice post.
It is good you treat vegies in vinegar before oil preservation.
Botulism only grows in the abscence of air, so oil preservation can be very dangerous unless the food being preserved is acid (ie. dried tomatoes). There have been several cases of botulism caused by garlic in oil.
In case anyone wants to know, the key factors for botulism are oxygen (which it doesn’t like), and acid (which it doesn’t like).
[...] Israeli Kitchen, another source for tasty recipes, has a wonderful guest post by Leda Meredith on Low-Tech Food Preservation. [...]