I grew an awful lot of fennel over the winter. So much that I needed to find a use for it. I found one. Fennel sauerkraut. It may be my new favorite kraut.
Preservation Recipes
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• Recipes: Most Popular | Garden Vegetables | Wild Foods | Meats & Fish
About
Whole books and websites are dedicated to preservation recipes, so what follows is merely my collection of about three dozen recipes for pickles, ferments and salted foods.
Not all are wild, in fact many are done with vegetables from my garden. You will also see recipes for pickled and dried meats and fish, too.
Most Popular
Some of my most popular preservation recipes include those for basic country mustard, preserved hot or sweet peppers, Swedish pickled herring and Minnesota-style pickled pike.
Garden Vegetables
I have kept a garden for decades, and I preserve a lot of the harvest, so you'll see plenty of preservation recipes for "regular" garden vegetables.
Some of my favorites are pickled artichokes, brine-pickled, fermented carrots, pickled fennel and a pressure-canned, preserved garlic recipe that is a show-stopper.
Wild Foods
As a gatherer of mushrooms and wild edible plants since I was a boy, I preserve whatever I can't eat right away -- especially because, as we all know, nature waits for no one.
Some of the recipes I use every year are my Italian marinated mushrooms, pickled mustard greens -- wild or farmed greens work equally well here -- and pickled ramps, which works with any small onion, wild or grown.
Similarly, I pickle wild Sierra Nevada blueberries or huckleberries, and they're amazing, but you can do the same with supermarket blueberries.
Meats and Fish
Most of my preservation recipes for meat are in my collection of salami recipes, or jerky recipes, but you'll find some excellent recipes for fish and seafood here. Other than the herring and pike recipes above, I have a smoked, dried shrimp recipe and a classic Lowcountry pickled shrimp recipe.
The Latest
How to Preserve Peppers
This is how I preserve the season’s pepper harvest. It’s a great way to have roasted peppers at your fingertips the whole year through.
Tabasco Style Fermented Hot Sauce
A few years ago I traveled to Louisiana and learned from the McIlhenny family themselves how to make Tabasco Sauce. Now, two years later, I can finally tell you how to make it. It’s easy, but like fine wine, it takes time.
Pickled Pike
If you’re not from the Northwoods, you may have never heard of pickled pike. Well, this is to the boreal forest what ceviche is to the tropics: A great way to snack on fish with saltines…
Boquerones, Fresh Cured Anchovies
Fresh cured anchovies sounds like an oxymoron, but it isn’t. This is more like a ceviche than the red, salty anchovies you get in a can. Called boquerones in Spain and gavros in Greece, these are fantastic on crackers or by themselves.
Pickled Walnuts
Pickled walnuts? Yep, you read right. Pickled unripe, green walnuts is a British thing that originated because in parts of Britain the climate’s too harsh for walnuts to fully ripen. They take a while to make, but once you do, they are a great sweet-sour condiment to cheeses as well as cured and roasted meats.
Pickled Fiddleheads
Catching the ephemeral fiddlehead is a tricky business, and I find that pickling them is a great way of preserving this zephyr of spring. This is an old-style brine pickle, lacto-fermented with no vinegar.
Smoked, Roasted and Preserved Jalapenos
This is one of the most awesome things I’ve ever made: Jalapenos, fire-roasted, then smoked, then preserved with a little vinegar and oil. Put that on a taco and you will absolutely not be sorry!