Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation

I'm so glad that this book exists! All the simple and proven methods of food preservation that any of us can use and all without a freezer or complicated sterilization processes. What a joy to read about simple and natural methods that not only preserve fruits and vegetables, but that make them taste better and in many cases make them positively gourmet! Every person should grab a copy of this book whether they grow their own vegetables or not. Imagine being able to purchase fruit in season at reasonable prices, and then take some of it and preserve it for the dark days of winter when it would be prohibitively expensive. Our forefathers (and those great foremothers that did the preserving and came up with the 'recipes')knew to preserve not only the bounty of the summer and fall harvest, but to preserve the nutrition that is stored in the produce. Vinegar, oil, salt, alcohol, sugar, drying methods too simple to name were all developed so that they (and we!) can eat food fit for the Gods all winter until the spring harvests. Each one of us can make a simple salt and water brine and preserve green beans. Each one of us can string a multitude of fruits and vegetables on strings and dry them for later rehydration in stews, soups, cobblers and pies. What a book! What simple and flavorful methods! I'm so glad that this collection from the 'Gardeners and Farmers of Terre Vivante' was compiled so that all of us can benefit not only from their expertise, but from the nutrition and flavor that we can capture and hold over from harvest to harvest. Get this book. Bronze it and pass it on to your children, friends and family. Everyone should know how to preserve food...whether they have bought it or grown it. Invaluable! TEN stars!

I write and teach self-reliant, sustainable living. I've preserved my garden produce for decades. Since I discovered this book 5 yrs ago, it has consistently been in my Top Ten books you should have. This book teaches how to preserve almost every food you can grow without canning or freezing. For years my favorite go-to book on food preservation has been Stocking Up: The Third Edition of America's Classic Preserving Guide But this book goes into topics not covered in most food-preservation books. The key to good self-reliance and sustainability is to have a wide range of options, in case one crop fails or another overwhelms your freezer or pantry capacity. This book gives you that variety and weaves it into a complete, sustainable Whole. The chapters on Root Cellaring and Drying are not as detailed as some might like, but there are dozens of books on those topics and anyone that has gardened or homesteaded for any time is very familiar with these techniques. Where the book really shines is in the chapters on the lesser-known (and ages old) techniques of brining, lacto-fermentation and preserving in solutions such as oil, vinegar and alcohol. I attended a class on brining and lacto-fermentation where we were given taste samples of the brined and fermented food. The taste, color and texture are stunning! After tasting brined green beans--bright, crisp and still tasting garden fresh after 4 years in a jar--I could never go back to colorless, tasteless, soggy home-canned green beans. Family and friends go nuts over my sauerkraut and mixed vegetables brined one jar at a time. (It was this class that led me to this book.) I love that I can use non-canning jars with this process. This saves me on my food budget, keeps more out of the landfill and I don't have to worry about getting valuable jars back when I give the food away. One reviewer worried about the lack of food safety in these methods. No need to worry. These are ages-old techniques, used for centuries before home canning was ever thought of. They do not create the anaerobic environment that botulism thrives in. If one uses good-sense--wash your hands and clean all work surfaces and start with clean, sterilized equipment and jars--these methods are every bit as safe as any other food preservation. This is one of very few books that get my complete, unreserved endorsement. Trust me, you WANT this in your home library. [...]

Not as comprehensive as expected. Still a good one to have, but the listing currently doesn't mention that the book is made up of donated recipes from random people. None of the methods described were tested by the author. It's a collection of folk methods, literally, but none were double-checked or tested by the author, or by any other authority. As a result, some of the methods, (or recipes, as the "methods" are printed out in a style like reading a recipe) look reliable and useful. Others, I looked at with skepticism. There was a range of kind-of-sketchy-not-so-great, to oh-hey,-seems-pretty-legit, throughout. Nowhere are there any warnings about botulism or other food poisoning types, how or why it can happen, how to check for it, the conditions it thrives in. Especially for oil-preserving recipes, those things should always be noted. This should always exist in ANY food preservation book where food poisoning can pose a threat to life should things go wrong in its preservation. "Mostly it's obvious when food has spoiled" is absolutely not good enough and that's what you get for safety advice in this book. If you know food "un-safety" danger signs from elsewhere, cool. If not, don't make this your sole source of food preservation information. The book has no methods for preservation of meats. It has one method for salting anchovies and for flat fish. That was simple, which was good. The recipes didn't include what the interim or the end product should look like, smell like, texture, or troubleshooting, and mentioned only that once salted, the salted fish should be cooked like any fresh fish should, which, ehh... hmm. My experience with salt-preserved fish usually = the fish becomes very salty... with changes to texture, and usually it's good to soak some salt out, from before using it. The other method was for drying fish on a very tall pole so that flies couldn't fly high enough to reach it, but extra details there would have been welcomed. How long does it take? What conditions should it be, weather-wise? Do you leave them out when it's raining, or hot out, or during any season? For that matter, how high can flies fly, anyway? This book does not contain information on preserving through jerky, old fashioned potted meat, biltong, cooked pork preserved in a barrel under a layer of lard. Nowhere in this book is anything- meat or otherwise- preserved with smoke. Some of the recipes are for foods that are not applicable to my region (USA) or/and that are not commercially available. The preservation recipes for foods I haven't heard of don't actually describe what kind of vegetable they are. Most of the recipes assume a knowledge base that in some cases, like those, is unrealistic to expect. I'm more educated than many in a wide variety of foods spanning many cultures, so that was kind of weird to experience. What the book does offer is recipes for making dried fruit and dried vegetables using solar dehydration or electric dehydration or drying by tying up with string. It offers a few recipes for chutneys- basically jam without added sugar. It offers a big chunk of lacto-fermentation recipes. It offers recipes that use oil poured on top of fresh produce and recipes with vinegar as the preserving factor. It offers salt or sugar-using recipes for preserving. (Which sometimes use canning jars.) It offers a rendered lard recipe and a rendered butter (ghee) recipe. It offers salt brine preserving (vegetables) recipes. It offers a cottage cheese preserving recipe but calls for unsalted cottage cheese, which isn't commercially available. This isn't a comprehensive review of the entire contents of this book. It's things I would have preferred to know prior to purchasing detailing better what's covered in this book, somewhat lacking in the product details. It doesn't offer any Indian style (oil) pickle recipes. It doesn't ofer any grain preservation recipes. It doesn't mention things like drying pasta. It doesn't teach you how to make miso or soy sauce. It doesn't tell you how to make cheese or butter. You don't get any ways to preserve eggs. There is brief mention in different recipes of using sawdust, newspaper, sand, or straw to extend the freshness life of produce. There's a few types of root vegetable caching shown which include black and white illustrations, which is neat. (FYI- not mentioned in this book- If you own land to dig a cache for vegetable storage in/on, in USA the national call-before-you-dig hotline is 811. Don't want to dig up a utility on accident!) Also FYI- having myself tried to preserve apples using newspaper in the past, let me tell you that it makes your apples rot twice as fast and makes them taste like gross old newspaper ink. Big yuck. Skip that method/recipe from this book. Backing up a minute, the sawdust mentioned in one place points out that most sawdust you get today is (indirectly intentionally) loaded with poisons like creosote or chemicals, so you would want sawdust from un-treated wood, not treated wood, in any food storage context. I thought that was an excellent detail to include (and it would have elevated the book if that level of guidance and knowledge had extended throughout the entire book. There is just one nut mentioned- chestnut- for which there are 2 recipes suggested for extending their edible lifespan for up to several months. No recipes for preserving seeds that I noticed, either. Another reviewer mentioned that there is no other book that covers these topics in print, and that influenced me to purchase it. I'm not totally sure I agree though, now that I have it, to look through. This book at times reminded me of Susan Gregerson's "Food Storage: Preserving Everything, Every Way!" (except she and her co-author tested most or all of the recipes/methods listed in her books, and those books were more comprehensive overall than this book.) It also had the "country wisdom" appeal of Sue's preservation books and blog. (Though, I had a complaint about Sue's book too- it didn't include the dry canning of meat method I always referred to from her blog, which was why I wanted to buy it, to have it.) I have also seen many specialized books on most of the topics covered in this book ( "Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning) - that are far more comprehensive and better researched. Ethnic cookbooks from Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Greek, etc. with methods of preserving- pickles, vegetables, legumes, sea vegetables, dairy, lacto-fermentation, smoking, salting, jerking, curing, fish and meats, and eggs, not to mention condiments. This book has a little of some of that, main focus on some veggies and some fruit, in one volume, together. In that way it is comprehensive. It doesn't specifically only tell about using one single specific method in preservation. This book has plenty to offer in the category of "folk preserving-type" recipes of some foods, but take it with a grain of salt (or a drop of oil.) It's not an ultimate bible for all non-canning, non-freezing food storage. It has uses and some neat parts and a beautiful cover, but has room for improvement. If you have never heard of any other way to put foods by than to can them or freeze them, you can take the overall ways brought up in this book and do a web search for more targeted info for what you specifically want to preserve in that method- for instance, "Lacto-fermenting cabbage to make sauerkraut recipes" or "raspberry fruit leather" or "how to preserve vegetables in the ground." In some ways it's like this book scanned 3 months of a user forum on food preservation, lifted a bunch of comments that contained certain specific preservation type keywords, organized them roughly by overall topic, weeded out some of the incomplete results, then hit the print button, bypassing its final contents ever going to a test kitchen. Or a food safety inspector. So some of the "recipes" are great, others I'm staring at thinking, "didn't I read in other cookbooks that doing this = probable botulism? I mean, that's moisture underneath oil in an oxygen-deprived environment there, isn't it? And it doesn't say how long it can be kept there like that. Should I be looking this back up??" So... Grain of salt, double checking on internet anything that raises my eyebrows. Parts of the book great, other parts of the book "hmm." If I knew what this book actually was before buying it, I'd rate it 4 stars for the countryside wisdom, and I'd expect to use my better judgement on any recipes that don't quite sound right to me. Hopefully this review helps out anyone else staring at their screen trying to divine whether this book is one up your alley.

I found this book very interesting. It is a collection of recipes for preserving food from times past as well as more current methods. A wide variety of methods such as in the ground, root cellars, drying, fermentation, salting, etc. I'm looking forward to trying the green bean preservation methods. While this is not an in depth or scientific discussion of any preservation method, I enjoyed reading it.

Loaded with great info!

How to preserve food without destroying nutrients - how to keep food for a relatively long time - avoid waste - Amazing recipes! French Gourmet...

This book has great practical advice and I will absolutely use its suggestions. However, it does take some time and prep to use these methods. Planning and forethought are a must. I don't actually mind this fact, and think the balanced view they give on fermentation is great. It is not preachy, fearmongering, or overly-crunchy about it. Just straightforward. But if you are looking for an instruction book to just run out to the store, buy a few canning jars and get going, then you'll be frustrated. Be prepared to study the methods, make a list, and go through some trial and error sessions before you get your routine down pat. I have yet to have success with the sugar-free jam methods though.

I love this book and rate it 5 stars. I have purchased several copies of this book to give as gifts. This book is great because the instructions are clear and easy to follow. The results are fantastic. My problem with my last order was with AMAZON. The book-a gift-arrived with torn bar code stickers all over the front of the book! I patiently removed the stickers but the front of the book was sticky. I did a packaging review but I believe that AMAZON does not read them. I have received poorly packed items many times before and did packaging reviews and nothing has come of these reviews. Love this book-question AMAZON packaging

Bel libro, con una impaginazione retrò. Le ricette sono semplici anche se, a volte, alcuni ingredienti sono di uso non comune in Italia. Sarebbe interessante un'edizione in italiano con l'adattamento degli ingredienti e delle misure imperiali a quelle metriche.

Amazing purchase, love this book! Helps me understand the basics of preserving! Not only does it have recipes but also has an amazing index to look back at!

I think that many people looking to buy a book like this will be aware that our planet is changing. From peak oil to climate change ~ and everything inbetween ~ some of us are thinking that life is likely to be very different at some point in the future, and best we prepare for how to adjust now! This book will not disappoint such folk as it contains a host of energy efficient (indeed, many require NO energy!) concepts & recipes, and it is all soooo simple to follow. Ingredients are, for the most, readily available in your average pantry/local store and even measurements are not that necessary for many of the ideas. I also love the way that the contributors personalities shine through each recipe, and the little snippets of history that can be gleaned from them. All told, this is a wonderful, useful book which I've already given away to friends living off-grid in Eastern Europe to help them store this years crops (they loved it, so I couldn't leave them without it!), so I'm off to purchase another !

.it arrived on time and in good condition. its a great idea and a great product. good quality and value for money.and I recommend this product.

I'll need to give context here before starting this review. I bought this book with other books of the same kind, one about cold storage, another about preserving seeds. I read them all during spring and summer, thinking about now, in autumn and ready for the harvest and what to do with the produce coming out of my garden. This book is the one I ended up using most because, unlike cold storage (which was also an excellent book I'm sure to use eventually), it is not time consuming to set up. It also always surprised me with gems of recipes to do with produces I didn't plan on preserving for the winter (nasturtium capers, rosehips in all forms, wines of all kinds...). The little piece of story at the beginning of the chapters are inspiring and well written. The recipes come from around the world, it is not just the experience of the writer. This book is a gold mine for someone who has too much of a produce and no cold storage in place and it's easy and fast to use ; pop the book at the end in the index and check what you can do with your surplus of peppers!