How to be a human squirrel

Pickling and preserving is a great way to extend the shelf life of seasonal produce, says John Wright, who shares some of his top tips and ideas

- John Wright

I HAVE been squirrelling away food for winter for 40 years—I like the reassurance of a full larder, not buying so much stuff out of season and, perhaps most of all, the preserving process itself. There are many ways of storing food: drying, salting, smoking, bottling, pickling, fermenting, and pastes, plus the clamping of root vegetables, and ‘forcing’ the roots of biennials for fresh winter leaves.

Bottling and drying are my favourite methods, with several days in the year taken up by a flurry of messy activity. Bottling only works with fruits, as the high temperature needed for vegetables is unobtainable in the kitchen without serious kit in the form of a ‘canner’ (a species of pressure cooker). Still, bottled fruit and fruit juices are superb—and don’t forget that tomatoes are fruit. Berries can be bottled whole, but larger fruits, such as pears, need to be prepared and softened with light cooking to allow them to fit snugly into your jars. The fruit is bottled in a sugar syrup, the strength depending on how sweet the fruit is—anything from 10% for very sweet fruit to 40% for something sour. The more adventurous can add flavourings, such as cinnamon (itself an excellent preservative) into the mix.