How to Preserve Your Foraged Bounty

During the slow season, foragers prepare their kitchens and pantries to reap their tasty rewards

By Seattle Mag December 19, 2014

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This article originally appeared in the January 2015 issue of Seattle magazine.

January is the quietest month for a Northwest forager. The mushrooms and berries of fall are but a memory, and most spring greens are still months away. This is the time of year to break into the larder.

What’s that, you didn’t put up?

Putting up. Putting by. Canning. Drying. Freezing. Or otherwise preserving. This is a home-ec art form that’s come back into style for good reason. What a shame to stumble on the mother lode of porcini patches and get just a couple of meals out of it. The resourceful forager, home gardener or farmers’ market regular will pickle, freeze and dry the mushrooms for another day. Other wild foods require processing just to be edible, such as those ruby red rose hips you’ve been eyeing along Lake Union. An old-fashioned food mill is all you need to extract the juice needed to make jam, jelly or syrup and enjoy the singular flavor of Rosa throughout the year.

Where to start? A dehydrator is an easy way to start the habit of preserving foods. You can find a decent one for about $60 on Amazon.com. Plug it in and the combination of heat and fan-blown air remove spoiling moisture from your fruits, vegetables, fungi and even meat. I use mine mostly for mushrooms—morels and porcini, in particular—but it’s also handy for making jerky, fruit rollups and drying surplus garden produce.

Active foragers will want to invest in extra freezer space, too. I have a standup model in the basement that I found for $20 on Craigslist. (At 7 feet in height, the freezer was such a bear to get out of the guy’s home and into my car that he ended up giving it to me for nothing.) Right now, that freezer is filled with 100 pounds of salmon fillets, scores of razor clams, a few geoduck necks, ice cube trays of stinging nettle pesto, bags of huckleberries and all my extra mushrooms that didn’t end up in the dehydrator. Sometimes I linger in the basement just to listen to the gentle hum it emits—a sound I now associate with delicious meals to come.

Finally, if you want to get serious, canning is the way to go. This subject deserves a column of its own. Lots of folks around town teach canning classes, and there are plenty of how-to books, such as the classic Putting Food By by Ruth Hertzberg, Janet Greene and Beatrice Vaughan. Making jams, jellies, syrups, chutneys, relishes, salsas and more, is a way to enjoy the fruit of your outdoor labor year around, not to mention a great source of holiday presents. I’m still getting kudos for the recessionary Christmas gifts of thimbleberry jam I sent all my relatives back in 2008. Or maybe those are hints for refills.

 

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