Q&A with T&J

Fascinating info I wanted to share with you

A friend, MK, asked a question of T in my previous post: What got them started in doing all of this? What was their motivation and how did they learn to make mead, raise bees (I’m assuming) and so on?

T: Home-preserved food is like home-cooked food - it's just better, tastes better, and there's no junk in it. Working in the kitchen has always been a spiritual practice - walking Zen - so it's not really work. Plus, it's fun.

A local collection of producers formed a collective here called REKO - it's like a farmers’ market but we order and pay online ahead of time, and one evening a week there's a line of vendors who have everything packaged for pickup - it's a drive-through. Raw honey comes from a local beekeeper and his price is outstanding. The produce, lamb, beef, eggs, and other food is the highest quality. Lots of field tomatoes right about now make for many pints of canned tomatoes. Fruits like peaches, bing cherries, apples, and pears I make "spirited" according to trusted recipes from Ball (makers of the canning jars): each pint gets a couple tablespoons of amaretto disaronno, grand marnier, port, or brandy, and the flavor is exquisite, the syrup is ultra-light (unlike the sickly-sweet canned fruits found in a supermarket).

I learned to make mead from an online recipe with encouragement from my daughter who brews fabulous ales - and I've gone from the basic recipe to a few of my own that I like best: Bing cherry mead, black plum mead, and a spiced mead that is made with cinnamon, cardamom, coriander, cloves, orange peel, and lemon peel. I brew one-gallon batches. Each gallon uses 4 pounds of raw honey, goes through a primary and secondary fermentation, and finishes at about 21 or 22% ABV. There are no additives, no sulfites, no preservatives, just filtered water, raw honey, a chopped orange, a chopped lemon, cherries or plums, a handful of golden raisins, and Cotes des Blanc wine yeast. The wee yeasties do all the work of turning all the glucose into alcohol and carbon dioxide (my meads are fermented dry).

With all this stuff, sanitation is critically important, and processing times in canning cannot be messed with. Some foods are fine in a boiling waterbath, other non-acid foods require a pressure canner. Tomatoes get 1/4 teaspoon of citric acid to bring the acidity up to safe levels for waterbath canning. The resources from Ball and organizations like National Center for Food Safety (Georgia University) tell you what you can be flexible with and what cannot be changed without compromising food safety.

Motivations (other than it's better)? It's fun, it's actually pretty easy, and the sense of satisfaction that comes with eating food I have preserved is huge. Our commercial food supply is increasingly concentrated in factory farms and a handful of major multinational corporations - we've become lazy and dependent. And even more than was true in the early 1970s, the "edible food-like substances" (Michael Pollon) that come from these corporations is full of stuff that is anything but good (preservatives, sulfites, plastic can linings, artificial colors). I will do everything I can do to NOT support that system. We will do everything we can to support our local producers who care about what they are doing, who are organic (even if they haven't jumped through the hoops to get the official seal), and for whom the work is a calling. And most importantly, together we are a community. We know each other, and we help each other out. This is the future.