Collection: Food Preservation & Storage

Food Preservation Equipment, From a Three-Day Pickle to a Shelf of Jars

The tomatoes came in all at once, there are cucumbers in the sink, and a carton of raspberries has two days left in it. Which food preservation equipment you reach for depends on which of those is the loudest problem: a jar of pickles is three days and one kit away, a shelf of canned green beans a bigger project and a different tool.

Fermenting: three days, one jar, no heat

Lacto-fermentation asks less of a kitchen than canning does: no processing times, no boiling water bath, and most nutrients survive intact, with gut-friendly bacteria added along the way. The three FarmSteady kits share one core, a half-gallon glass fermenting jar, a glass fermentation weight, a lid with airlock, kosher salt, and instructions, and differ in the recipe each is built around.

The Fermented Pickle Kit adds a black tea bag, whose tannins keep the pickles crisp; full-sours, half-sours, and dills are ready in about three days, when the brine turns from clear to cloudy. The Fermented Vegetable Kit handles kimchi, sauerkraut, and whatever the garden overproduced, in as little as five to seven days at room temperature. The Fermented Hot Sauce Making Kit runs longest: two to three weeks for the chiles, then blend with a cup of the fermentation liquid and white vinegar to taste. Chlorinated tap water can inhibit fermentation, so use filtered.

Two kits go past preserving into making. The Hard Apple Cider Making Tool Kit pairs a 1-gallon glass fermentation jug with dry cider yeast for three batches, racking cane tubing, clamp, screw-cap stopper, and airlock cleanser: two weeks fermenting, two weeks bottled. You bring the fresh cider, a funnel, and ten non-twist-off bottles. The Sourdough Bread Making Tool Kit is the bakery-equipment half of a loaf: natural-fiber banneton and cover, a stainless-steel bread lame with four spare blades, a bench scraper, and a flexible dough scraper.

Pressure canning, and the low-acid rule

Meat, fish, poultry, and vegetables are a different category. The USDA recommends pressure canning as the only safe way to can them; a water bath never gets hot enough. The All-American Pressure Canner/Cooker has been hand-cast from aluminum in the USA since 1930, and its seal is why people keep them for decades: a precision-machined metal-to-metal joint pulled tight by positive-action clamping locks, no rubber gasket to crack, burn, replace, or clean, and automatic venting under unusual pressure. Eartheasy founder Greg Seaman has canned on a Model 921 for more than thirty years and says it is still as good as new.

Model 910, 10.5 quarts: the smallest of the six sizes, four quart jars or seven pint jars per load, 11.5 pounds, shipped with a canning rack, instructions, and a recipe book. Larger models run to 41.5 quarts, and what grows is load and weight, not hardware, since the seal and the overpressure release are on every size. Check the stove before sizing up: models 910, 915, 921, and 925 suit newer glass and flat-top ranges, the heavier 930 and 941 do not.

FreshPaper, for the fruit that will not wait

Back to that carton of raspberries. FreshPaper is a single sheet infused with organic spices including fenugreek, naturally antibacterial and anti-fungal. Drop one wherever the food already sits and it stays fresh two to four times longer. The faint maple scent means the sheet is still working; it lasts a month once opened, two years unopened in the pack. Two versions split the kitchen: the Produce Saver for the fruit bowl, berry carton, and crisper drawer, the Bread Saver for loaves, bagels, and muffins, in or out of the fridge with no wrapping. Both come eight sheets to a pack, roughly two months of use, made in the USA, recyclable and compostable, and won the INDEX: Design to Improve Life Award in 2013.