Preserving food

Making a glut last, without making anyone ill.

• FP0 Water bath or pressure: choosing correctlyThe single most dangerous decision in home preserving. One number decides it, pH 4.6, and getting it wrong is how botulism happens. Read this before any other page in this domain.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FP1 Water bath canning, jar to sealThe safe method for acid foods, and the backbone of the British preserving tradition. Jar preparation, headspace, processing and the seal check that decides whether it goes in the cupboard or the fridge.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FP2 Pressure canning, operationallyThe only method that makes low-acid food shelf stable. It is temperature that does the work, not pressure, and that distinction explains the ten-minute venting step almost everyone skips.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FP3 Recognising canning failureHow to judge a suspect jar without tasting it, and the honest limit of what looking and smelling can tell you. Botulinum toxin is odourless and tasteless, so your senses are not the test.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FP4 Jam, jelly and preserving with sugarSugar preserves by tying up the water so nothing can grow in it, and that only works at a high enough concentration. Setting needs pectin, acid and sugar together, and a jam that will not set is nearly always short of one of the three.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FP5 Dry food, and make jerky safelyDrying fruit and vegetables is forgiving. Drying meat is not, and the reason is counterintuitive: drying makes bacteria harder to kill, not easier, so meat must be heated before it goes in.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FP6 Ferment vegetablesSalt, vegetables, water and time. No fuel, no jars to process, no equipment. Two numbers matter: 2 to 3% salt by weight, and everything stays under the brine.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FP7 Yoghurt and soft cheeseTurning milk that will not keep into food that will, with two temperatures: scald at 82 to 85°C, then hold at 43°C. Both are the whole technique.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FP8 Cure meat and fishSalt, and for anything smoked or long-kept, a measured quantity of curing salt. This is the one page in the app where a 0.1 g kitchen scale is a safety instrument rather than a convenience.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FP9 Hot and cold smokingHot smoking cooks and is forgiving. Cold smoking does not cook, spends its entire duration inside the danger zone, and is only safe on meat that was properly cured first. Know which one you are doing.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FP10 Render tallow and lardTurning raw fat into a shelf-stable cooking fat, a candle material and a soap ingredient. Wet rendering with salt gives a cleaner, longer-keeping result, and the difference is worth the extra hour.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FP11 Root cellaringStoring a harvest with no fuel, no jars and no processing at all. Two things decide whether it works: matching each crop to the right temperature and humidity, and keeping the ethylene producers well away from everything else.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FP12 Make pemmicanEqual weights of bone-dry powdered meat and pure rendered fat. Keeps for years at room temperature with no processing, no jars and no power, because there is no water in it for anything to grow in.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FP13 Water-glass eggsFresh unwashed eggs kept a year or more in a lime solution, no refrigeration and no fuel. It only works on eggs that still have their bloom, which rules out every egg in a supermarket.Quick actions, 9 steps
• FP14 Make vinegar from a motherFree vinegar from windfalls, scraps and leftover wine, indefinitely. With one hard limitation that cuts against the whole self-sufficiency instinct: you must not use it for pickling or canning.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FP15 Pickling in vinegarAcidity is the preservative, so the vinegar must be at least 5% acetic acid and it must not be diluted below what a tested recipe specifies. Low-acid vegetables in weak vinegar are the one way this method becomes genuinely dangerous.Quick actions, 8 steps
• FP16 Sprouting seeds, and its real riskFresh green food in three days, in a jar, in winter, with no soil or light. It is also a genuinely high-risk food, home growing does not make it safer, and the honest recommendation is to cook them.Quick actions, 9 steps