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Jelly? Jam? Which is which?
Being from the UK, I tend to call fruit preserves “jam”. Being in the US, most folks call them “jelly”. Both useages are, in fact, wrong, and here I explain why. The approximate definitions, in ascending order of fruitiness, are roughly as follows. Jelly Jelly is the thickened (with pectin), sweetened juice of fruits or…
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A word on old canning techniques
If you like hanging around old bookstores, you will almost certainly come across canning recipe and technique books from all ages. They are definitely worth looking through and buying for the recipes. Fair warning: the canning/preserving techniques in older books are very strongly not recommended. If you follow these old techniques you run a serious…
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Dehydration
Dehydration has been used as a method of food preservation since… well, nobody really knows. A long time, anyway – probably since shortly after our ancestors first discovered the big shiny yellow thing in the sky. It preserves food by removal of water – that is pretty much implied by the name – but how…
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Basic principles of preservation
I am going to assume zero previous knowledge of food preservation while writing this post. I am just a little ahead of the learning curve than someone who knows nothing about it, so I feel highly qualified to write on this basis! This post is not intended to be exhaustive or scientific – it’s to…
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Welcome to my cooking and preserving blog!
I am going to be collecting tried and tested recipes and techniques, along with relevant photos, here in one place to make it easier for me to share information with everyone. Home preserving and cooking is fun, usually cheaper, and allows you to eat a lot more healthily than you can by buying all your…