Chapter Five

Revolutionary Home Economics

Revolutionary Home Economics

The callings and disciplines I have spoken of as the domestic arts are as instructive and as pleasing as the so-called fine arts. To learn them, to practice them, to honor and reward them is, I believe, our profoundest calling. Our reward is that they will enrich our lives and make us glad.

— Wendell Berry, In Distrust of Movements

 

 

We’ve lost our knowledge of farming and animal husbandry, and more recently, we’ve lost most of our practical knowledge regarding housekeeping. Housekeeping is no longer considered an art. If we have the money, we outsource it. We earn money so we can buy prepared food and pay someone else to clean our home. The home is little more than crash a pad where we watch TV and a storage unit where we keep the things we buy when we are not working.

The home used to be a place where we made things. We made the things we used, and the things we ate, and we made them with pride. With generations of experience guiding their hands, homesteaders transformed the harvest into usable goods. They could make almost everything they needed. There is power in that, power that we’ve exchanged for convenience.

This exchange is often celebrated as a liberation from drudgery, but art is never drudgery, even if it is hard work. The practice of art is profoundly satisfying, precisely because it is challenging, and when it comes off well, you know you’ve created something of real value. Drudgery is not about hard work, rather, it is a condition of skilless work. One of the big lies of the last century was that the home arts were drudgery that needed to be abandoned in favor of commerce. We gave them up, just as we ceded farming to factories.

Now the tide is turning. Just as there is growing interest in growing food and raising livestock among people who were not raised up with these skills, there is also a resurgence of interest in the indoor arts. If we take the kitchen back from the microwave, we discover a whole new world of flavor, a world of living, healthy, nutritionally complex foods. The kitchen becomes an arena where you, the domestic artist, learn to harness the forces of life. It is time to resurrect the lost domestic arts before they are lost for good.

Preserving The Harvest

Whether your harvest comes from a dumpster dive, your neighbor’s apple tree, or your own garden, you will often find yourself suddenly in possession of more food than you know what to do with. This is the nature of harvest. Sooner or later, you will find yourself uttering the age-old question of any farmer or forager: how do I keep all this stuff from going bad?

You can freeze some of your haul, but more than likely you don’t have enough room in your freezer for all of it. Our ancestors came up with all sorts of ways of preserving food without the help of electricity. Some methods, such as lacto-fermentation, were once universal and are now nearly forgotten. Others, like drying, are still familiar. All of them are well worth learning to do yourself.

Nature Gives In Cycles, It’s Your Job To Adapt Accordingly.

We’re accustomed to eating whatever we want whenever we want. This is amazing evidence of how far we have evolved as a species. Yet some of that accessibility comes at a price. When we eat fresh fruits and vegetables that are out of season, the odds are we are eating food which has been shipped to us from across the globe, necessitating a enormous expenditure of fossil fuels for an act as simple, as primal, as eating. But even if we had all the fuel in the world to spare for shipping grapes from Chile to Minnesota, there is still a cost in terms of the nutrients lost in the long wait between harvest and the table, and the loss of flavor that is also part and parcel with foods that are shipped long distance. These foods are bred to be travel-tough and to look good when they reach their destination, not to taste good. We think taste and nutrition should be our first priorities when it comes to choosing what we eat. Life is too short to eat crap.

So we enjoy food as it comes out of our garden, or as it comes into the local farmers’ markets. In doing so, we’ve learned to associate food with seasons. Nature gives in waves, and we’ve learned to surf these waves. Trees fill with apples and apricots, vines go heavy with cucumbers and grapes, tomatoes start coming in faster than you can eat them. Rather than waste this food, we’ve figured out how to preserve it so we can enjoy these flavors throughout the year.

Growing up, most of the food we ate came out of a package, a can or the freezer. How the food got into the package, can or freezer tray was one of those things we didn’t think about much, but we came to accept the idea that food storage could be dangerous if not left in the hands of professionals. Neither of us had a grandma who canned, or an uncle who made beer, or a cousin who made sauerkraut, so when we started figuring how to pickle, brew, ferment, can and otherwise preserve, we were scared to death we’d die of botulism. That said, but with a few simple precautions, anyone can preserve food.

Not All Bacteria Are Bad; In Fact, Some Are Delicious

Microorganisms surround us and inhabit us. We eat them, drink them, sleep with them. Friendly bacteria form complex ecologies in our gut, help us digest food and train us to fight disease. Our modern world has become so sterile that we are actually missing out on some of the benefits these little beasties bring us. Something called the hygiene hypothesis has been gaining support in the scientific community for a few years now. This hypothesis states that lack of exposure to bacteria, particularly early in life when our immune systems are developing, results in off-kilter, overreactive immune systems. It may just be that our overly clean environments are actually the cause of the increasing incidence of all sorts of conditions with immune responses at their core, conditions like allergies and asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease.

Of course this involves a whole range of environmental factors, including the overuse of antibiotics and anti-bacterial soaps, but it also applies to our food. Pasteurization, canning, freezing and irradiation are processes that certainly do protect us from bad bugs, but they kill all the good bugs too, bugs we need to support digestion and a healthy immune response. Probiotic adherents believe that we can increase our exposure to beneficial bacteria by changing the way we eat, by including a host of cultured and fermented foods in our regular diet, foods that used to be part of a standard human diet, but which have been replaced with dead food over the last few decades.

Preservation Is Transformation

Culturing, drying and most of all fermenting foods opens up whole worlds of flavor and texture that just do not come about any other way. Fermentation is a living, active, constantly changing process. If you leave food out, it might spoil, or it might transform into something wonderful. Our ancestors figured out how to harness this process, particularly the versatile bacteria species Lactobacillus, to make some of the most essential and elemental of human foods, like cheese, sourdough bread, pickles and of course, booze.

When you are fermenting or culturing you are not exactly preserving a food, since the word “preserve” seems to imply that the food remains unchanged. This is really only true for canning, the most modern of the preservation processes we are going to talk about. The other forms we’re going to discuss transform food into something new, something that lasts longer than its fresh counterpart, something eminently useful, beneficial and flavorful in its own way. A cucumber is one thing, full of its own flavor and benefits. A dill pickle made via fermentation with Lactobacilli is something else entirely, with a different flavor and set of benefits.

Nowadays we extend the shelf life of milk by ultra-pasteurizing it, which turns milk into tasteless lactose water that keeps for ridiculous amounts of time. Far better to keep milk around by culturing it and transforming it into yogurt, crème fraiche, or cheese. A grape is preserved by transforming it into wine, or drying it into a raisin. You can harness these powerful transformative forces in your own kitchen. You don’t even need special equipment — just lots of jars.

When you grow your own food, you never want to see any of it go to waste. If we have an overabundance, we preserve it somehow. As a result, our cupboard is never bare anymore. It is loaded with bottles and jars, each one holding a memory, how we grew the food, or found it, how we processed it, what we learned. It is an intensely personal relationship to food, which brings new meaning to sitting down to the table.

What’s more, this stock of food serves as a safety net. If for any reason we can’t go to the store, or the stores are empty, we have food on hand. That, combined with whatever is growing in the garden and the staples we keep on hand, gives us a cushion of protection from random disaster and disruption.

There are two books on the subject of food preservation that we cannot recommend enough. Both blew our minds and changed our attitude toward food permanently. The first we read was Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning, by the gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivant. This is a French book, published in English by Chelsea Green Publishing, full of all sorts of Old World methods.

What pushed us over the edge is the wonderful, radical Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz. Wild Fermentation is as much a manifesto against lifeless food as it is a cookbook. It as well as Keeping Foods Fresh make you understand that our sterile, packaged food is dead food, and will make you want to change the way you eat for good.

First Things First: When To Sterilze And When Not To

For perfect safety you will want to sterilize all jars and lids that will hold things that are not going to be canned (that is, heat processed), like jars for yogurt, or flavored vinegars, or lacto-fermented pickles.

To sterilize, either use your jars straight out of the dishwasher, or boil them for 10 minutes, covered with water, in a lidded pot. Put a rack or folded dishtowel at the bottom of the pot to protect the jars. You’ll need tongs for lifting them out. Fill your jars while still hot.

If you are planning on canning, whether or not you have to sterilize the jars depends on the size of the jars you are using. Quart-sized jars used for actual canning don’t have to be sterilized, They just need to be clean and hot when you fill them. The canning process sterilizes both the jar and the food in one go. Pint and half-pint jars have to be sterilized though, because their processing times are so short that sterilization isn’t assured.

Canning lids should not be boiled if you are going to use them for canning. Just wash them in warm soapy water and use a new one each time you can something. Don’t run canning lids through the dishwasher before you use them in canning. The sealing stuff around the rim is heat-activated and meant for one use. For this reason you should never reuse lids for canning. But do boil your lids or put them through the dishwasher if they are intended for non-canning projects.

It’s also worth knowing that you can buy handy plastic lids that fit Mason jars. They’re not for sealing the jar, but for using after you’ve opened the jar and broken the seal instead of the persnickety ring and disk lids. These can be ordered from any outfit that sells canning supplies.

 

Note on bottles and jars: You can find canning jars or “Mason” jars at restaurant supply stores, some hardware stores, the rare grocery store, and of course online. A case of 12 will cost around $12 - $15. They come in wide and narrow-mouth versions. Generally speaking, the wide-mouthed ones are more convenient. If you buy a case, they come with lids, but you can purchase extra lids separately.

How To Can

NOTE: The USDA changed their canning guidelines in 1989. For this reason, we recommend that you search for books on the subject published after that date. Generally we are all for referencing ancient housekeeping guides and collecting ’70s treasures at garage sales, but this is one case in which we can’t recommend that.

Canning is the one form of preservation that we recommend which is not transformative. It does pasteurize food, and lower nutritional values somewhat. However, it’s the best way to keep jams and the like, so is worth knowing if only for that. It might sound like a big, scary production, but it really isn’t that complex, and all it takes is some basic, inexpensive equipment. Canning high-acid foods like sugary jams, pickles and fruit is safe and simple because these things don’t harbor bacteria easily. With high-acid foods all you have to do is boil your packed canning jars for a specific period of time, the length depending on what you are canning and the size of your jars. The heat kills all bacteria, yeast and mold in the food and seals the jars, thus creating a hermetic environment that allows the food to keep for at least a year. It only goes bad if the seal is not properly made, or if the heating was insufficient. Each kind of food requires boiling for a specific length of time. Guidelines for processing times are available in all canning books and also available online.

Canning meat and low-acid fruits and vegetables is more complicated, and more dangerous if you screw up, because of the serious risk of botulism inherent in the low-acid environment. Moreover, to process low-acid food you have to use a special device called a pressure canner — hot water baths on the stovetop are just not enough.

The Water Bath Process

We’re going to give you an overview of the hot water bath canning process here so you can see that it actually is pretty straightforward, but we recommend that you don’t can on the basis of our instructions alone.

There are plenty of resources out there, including free ones. The USDA wants to protect you from botulism, so they have extensive canning guidelines on the web, and the good people at Ball, makers of canning jars, have an excellent website as well. Consult these resources first, paying close attention to the specifications for the particular food you are trying to can, before you begin.

Always follow a recipe when canning to make sure that whatever you are canning is sufficiently acidic to can without a pressure canner.

•  Proper canning jars, also called Mason jars: Ball or Kerr brands. This is no time to be recycling your old salsa jars.

•  Proper canning lids, the kind that come in two parts: a ring and a  disk. The rings are reusable, but you have to use fresh disks every time you can, because they are coated with a sealing substance that is only good for one shot.

•  A big deep pot for a water bath  —  it has to be tall enough to  submerge your jars completely with at least one inch of water covering the lids. There are special canning pots “canners” which are made to hold many jars at once and fitted with a special rack to keep the jars from touching the bottom of the pot. You can improvise a canner with a big stock pot with a folded kitchen towel in the bottom.

•  A pair of canning tongs to lift hot jars in and out of the water bath. 

•  A bendy spatula, or a chopstick, or a long slender wooden spoon.

•  And optionally, something called a canning funnel. This is a widemouthed funnel that makes filling jars a lot easier.

This kind of equipment is easier to find in some areas than others. It used to be stocked in all grocery stores, but this is no longer true. Most stores will stock the lids in the baking aisle, and sometimes the jars. Family-run hardware stores often stock canning jars, perhaps more for their use around the wood shop than for the kitchen.

When in doubt, order online. Search “canning kit.” You can get a complete canning kit, which includes a canner and rack, funnel, tongs and a set of jars and an instruction book for under 50 bucks.

Getting Your Canning Supplies Ready

Start by making sure your jars are very clean by running them through the dishwasher or by cleaning them with hot soapy water. They don’t have to be sterilized if your processing time is longer than 10 minutes — they just have to be clean and hot. Heat the jars by simmering them in your canner just below a boil (around 180°) and keep them hot until ready to use. Be sure never to out-and-out boil the disk part of your lids, or run them through the dishwasher, because that will prematurely activate the sealing substance around their edges. For that same reason you should never use the lid twice, though you can use the rings and jars over and over. Simply clean the lids with warm soapy water. Again, canning will sterilize them.

Your countertop, hands, and all of your other utensils, need to be scrupulously clean too, of course.

Preparing To Pack Your Jars

If you don’t already have a simmering bath going to heat your jars, fill your canner or stock pot with water and bring that to simmer.

The key to canning is heat. You want the jars you pack hot, and ideally you want what you’re canning to be hot too. For instance, you’d be pouring your newly made batch of jelly hot out of the pan into the hot jars. You never want to make something, put it in the fridge for a few days, then decide you’re going to can it. The hot part of this process is important, as is the fresh part.

Packing It Up

Take your first jar out of the hot bath, hot oven or hot dishwasher, drain it and fill it up with whatever you are canning, leaving just a ¼” of space at the top. Tap the jar on the counter and run a bendy plastic spatula, or a chopstick, around the sides of the jar to make sure there are no air pockets in the jar. Those will make your canning go bad.

Don’t work in assembly-line fashion, however tempting that might be. You want to fill and seal each jar one at a time.

Clean off the rim of the jar with a clean cloth or paper towel. Put the lid on — not super-tight, just as tight as you make it using your fingers only. In other words, don’t use your full arm strength to crank the lids down. They need to be able to vent just the tiniest bit. Put the jar aside and fill your next one.

When all your jars are ready, use your tongs to lower them into your simmering water bath. The jars should be completely submerged. Add water from a tea kettle if you have to top it off. Put the lid on the pot and turn the heat up to bring the water to a full boil again. Set the timer when it comes to a full boil.

The amount of time you cook the jars varies by the types of food being canned, altitude and the size of the jar. Charts with times can be found easily online or in a canning manual. The typical time range is 10 to 50 minutes.

When the processing time is up, spread a dishtowel on the counter. Rescue the jars from the water bath using your tongs and line them up on the towel to cool and dry. Don’t fuss with the lids or move them around while they are cooling. The canning magic is still happening. You should hear a “ping” sound shortly after you remove the jars from the water bath as the lids click down to form a seal.

After 24 hours check to make sure the lids are a little sunken in the middle. Press the center gently. It should not pop up and down. Nor should the jar rims be wiggly. If any of this is so, the jar is not properly sealed and you need to use it right away — or replace the lid, and process it again.

Remember, most cases of botulism in the U.S. (less than 200 a year) are associated with bad home canning. If there is any doubt about something you’ve canned, just cook it before you eat it. Cooking at high heat for 10 minutes kills C. botulinum.

Keep your canned goods in the dark. They will taste best if you eat them within a year.

Pickling via Lacto-Fermentation

Back before the advent of canning, much less freezing, folks preserved their vegetable harvest via lacto-fermentation. This process, once commonplace, survives today mostly in the form of sauerkraut and kimchi. Old-fashioned dill pickles are also made this way, though you are probably more familiar with the kind made in vinegar. Lacto-fermentation uses no vinegar at all.

In lacto-fermentation salt is added to vegetables, either by covering them in salty water, or by mixing them with salt to draw out their own juices. Either way, the vegetable ends up soaking in salty liquid. Lactic microbial organisms (the same beasties that spoil milk) take hold in this environment and make it so acidic that the bacteria that causes food to spoil cannot live there. The result is a pickled food that will keep without canning or refrigeration, although canning and refrigeration do extend the shelf life.

Just about any firm, sturdy vegetable can be lacto-fermented. Radishes, cucumbers, cabbage, baby onions, green beans, carrots, garlic cloves all would work. All you have to do is pack a canning jar or crock with your veggies and cover them with a brine solution and leave it somewhere dark and cool. A recipe follows. After four to seven days, try your pickles. If you like them, start eating, or put them away to ferment a little longer. Fermenting time varies by taste, vegetable, weather and your patience level.

A Pickle’s Variable Lifespan

Lacto-fermented veggies generally last a few weeks. It depends on their storage temperature. If you transfer them to the fridge, they’ll last a long time. If they stay out on the counter, their lifespan will be much shorter, especially in the summer. Remember, lacto-fermentation is a living process that does not stop evolving unless you heat-process and can the pickles. They’ll be changing in flavor and texture as you work your way through the jar.

If you make a big crock of something, a crock too big for the fridge, it is best to keep it in the coolest room in your house, whether that be the basement, or the garage, or the mudroom. The big crocks will form scum on the surface as they sit. Just skim that off whenever you see it.

Wherever you keep them, pickles become stronger tasting over time. You’ll know that they’re starting to go south when they go soft, or when the flavor isn’t what it once was. If they go slimy, you know they’re done for. The best way to become comfortable with the process and timing is to start by making small, quart-sized batches of pickled foods and studying their ways. Make two identical jars, and keep one in the fridge and one in the cabinet and watch how they each progress.

If you want to keep your fermented foods for a long time, can them. Canned foods keep for at least a year, but the heat-processing does kill off the living, beneficial bacteria in your ferments. In addition, canning may also soften pickled foods. There is a balancing act between longevity and quality. We never can our pickles, because we eat pickles and krauts for their bacterial benefits, in the same way we eat yogurt, so killing the bacteria seems beside the point. Nonetheless, the USDA and FDA recommend that you can and heat-process all fermented and pickled foods as a matter of course to prevent botulism. Please consider yourself officially warned.

PROJECT

DAIKON RADISH PICKLES

This is the first lacto-fermented pickle we ever made, and it’s still our favorite. It makes firm, salty, garlic-flavored pickles that are pretty addictive. Best of all, it takes just a few minutes to make. This basic technique can be applied to other firm veggies equally well. For instance, think about doing this with tiny cucumbers, flavored with dill and garlic, or parboiled pearl onions, or sliced turnips, or even green nasturtium seed pods.

Ingredients:

•  Daikon radish — enough to fill a quart jar — one big one  is usually enough. Scrubbed, peeled and cut into rounds, quarters, or matchsticks, about ¼”-⅓”thick. The only shape you should not use is long spears, because the idea is to keep the pickles under liquid. We’ve figured out that as the jar empties, tall spears end up with their “heads” above the brine level, which hastens their spoiling.

•  One peeled garlic clove, and a few peppercorns. The garlic  odor/flavor is assertive, so skip the garlic if you’re not a fan.

•  Two tablespoons (or more) of sea salt or any salt that is not iodized. Iodized salt will kill lactobacillus bacteria and interfere with the fermentation process.

•  One quart of water. Bottled or filtered is best, but we’ve used  tap successfully.

Fill a very clean quart-sized canning jar with your sliced daikon, and a clove of garlic if you like. Mix your salt and water together in a separate container and pour it into the jar over the daikon slices, leaving a little breathing space at the top, say one quarter of an inch. Close the jar tight, and put it in a cool, dark cabinet. The flavor changes over time, so try opening different jars at different times to see what stage of fermentation you prefer. The earliest you should try would be three or four days after bottling; we usually wait a week or so.

When you open it there might be some fizzing, which is normal. The pickles should be crunchy (but not raw, definitely transformed) and pleasantly garlic-flavored. If they are a little salty for your taste you can rinse off the brine before you eat them. Keep the opened or unopened jars in the fridge to extend the life of your pickles.

PROJECT

L’HAMD MARKAD or PRESERVED SALTED LEMONS

This is a much-loved Moroccan application of lacto-fermentation. Should you ever find yourself in possession of a large quantity of lemons you could make lemonade, or you could make l’hamd markad.

Preserved lemons are used extensively in Moroccan cuisine, on fish and in salads especially, either straight out of the jar or cooked. We like to chop up these salty/sour lemon rinds and use them the same way we’d use olives or anchovies to add a flavor punch to whatever we are cooking. Just recently, a homesteading friend told us that she’s found that the addition of the preserved lemon pulp and rind to her homemade hummus yields fabulous results.

Ingredients

• Organically grown lemons, unblemished, scrubbed. Thinskinned Meyers are the preferred sort, but all work. Gather enough to fill at least a one-quart jar.

•  Sea salt. Tons of it.

•  Fresh lemon juice. Which means just a few more lemons.  Don’t use bottled juice.

•  Spices, optional. You could put a cinnamon stick in each jar, two or three cloves or a few peppercorns, or all three.

•  A clean, sterilized quart jar with a lid.

Warning: if you have hangnails, prepare to suffer.

 

Pat lemons dry. Cut them into quarters and coat each slice generously with salt. If your lemons are small, you can leave them whole, slit them open with four vertical slices and stuff them to the gills with salt. Put the lemon quarters or whole lemons in the jar, pressing them as you go to release their juice. Sprinkle even more salt between layers. If you want to add spices, pack those in as you go. When you get to the top add more lemon juice if necessary to cover the lemons completely. They must always be submerged in juice.

Let the lemons sit in a dark cupboard for four to six weeks before using. Turn the jars upside down once in a while to encourage the salt to dissolve and the spices to mingle. When they are done, the rinds will be soft, and the salt and lemon juice liquid they’ve been stewing in will have turned a little viscous. You eat the rinds. You can choose to use the pulp also, or just scrape the rinds clean. Rinse the rinds if you want them to taste a little less salty. Once opened, store in refrigerator where they will keep up to six months.

PROJECT

EUELL GIBBONS’ CROCK

Euell Gibbons, author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus and other classics, liked to keep big crocks of vegetables, both domestic and wild, pickling in brine and herbs. The bigger the crock, the better, he advised, saying he often kept a 10-gallon crock going through the summer.

Like our recipes for daikon radish pickles and preserved lemons, Gibbons’ crock is another way to employ lacto-fermentation in the kitchen.

A dill crock is a wonderful means of corralling random vegetables from your garden, those thinnings and extras that you don’t know what to do with, such as that handful of beans, the little green tomatoes left on the vine come frost, or a bumper crop of baby eggplants.

There is no set recipe for this. Experiment with different vegetables and seasonings. Allow each crock to be a unique creation.

What you need:

•  A large glass jar or ceramic crock

•  Sea salt for a making a brine solution (see below)

•  Lots of fresh dill

•  A few peppercorns

•  A fresh grape leaf or two to keep your veggies crisp (optional)

•  Almost any kind of firm, flawless vegetable. Baby vegetables are great. Cut up big ones into bite-sized pieces.

•  Possibilities include: carrots, radishes, hard green tomatoes (not red ones; they’ll go mushy), baby eggplants, peeled Jerusalem artichokes, tiny onions or big onions cut into wedges, cauliflower broken into florets, hot peppers, tiny summer squash, chopped cabbage, green nasturtium seeds, blanched green beans (only beans need to be blanched), and chopped leeks. Cukes are a natural too, but pick them small and leave them whole.

Start with a very clean crock or jar. Layer the bottom with fistfuls of dill, your grape leaves and a few peppercorns. If you like garlic, put some peeled cloves in, but be aware that even a few will make the whole batch of pickles garlic-flavored.

Next start to add your veggies in layers. You don’t have to fill up the whole crock at once. You can add to it over the course of a week or so, throwing in veggies as they come to you.

When your initial layers of veggies are in, cover them with a brine solution.

 

Brine solution

Dissolve sea salt (never iodized salt) with water at this ratio:
¾ measure of salt to 10 measures of water

 

Fermentation

It’s important to keep the pickles beneath the surface of the brine to prevent spoilage, so weigh them down. If you’re using a big crock, sink them under a plate weighted with a clean rock or a jar of water. If you’re using a large jar, try slipping a smaller jar filled with water into the mouth of the big jar. Another good option is to use a ziplock bag filled with brine solution. Brine instead of plain water, just in case it leaks.

Cover your setup with cheesecloth or a light kitchen towel, securing the edges with string or a rubber band to keep flies out. You don’t want to put a lid on it because the fermentation process needs air.

Leave the crock out at room temperature to ferment. Fermentation times vary according to both your taste and ambient temperatures. Minimum time is three days, maximum maybe two weeks. Start sampling your crock after three days. When it tastes done to you, it’s done. The flavors will become stronger as time passes, and the character of the vegetables will change.

During the fermentation period, check daily for mold forming on the surface. This is not such a bad thing. Just skim it off if you see any.

When you’re ready, transfer it to the fridge to slow the fermentation. It will keep for a couple of months. It’s okay at this point to take out the weight, change containers, and to use a lid (to prevent your entire fridge from smelling like pickles), but keep the veggies in their own brine.

If you make lots of pickles and want to keep them for a long time, can them in their own brine, following canning instructions for dill pickles, which can be found easily online or in any canning book.

TIP: If you want to make a bulk batch of lacto-fermented pickles or sauerkraut, you can use either a traditional ceramic crock, or a five-gallon, food-grade plastic bucket. Use a plate that fits inside the crock or bucket to keep the vegetables submerged beneath the brine, and then cover the whole thing with cheesecloth to keep flies out. Don’t panic if a little scum forms on the top of these big batches, just skim it off.

Dehydration: Why Save It For Hangovers?

Dehydration, probably the most ancient food preservation method, works best with high-acid foods like fruit, and it’s a great way to deal with bumper crops from your garden. Drying works by removing the moisture from foods, which foils moisture-loving bacteria. There are many ways to dry food — we prefer using a solar dehydrator, but you can also purchase a commercial electric dehydrator. Drying in a conventional oven is possible, but it’s hard to get the temperature low enough and you’ll use a lot of energy.

Your goal with dehydrating is to remove at least 80% of the water content of fruits and 90% from vegetables. The scientifically-minded can estimate the moisture removed by weighing the food before and after drying and doing the math. But really, after getting the hang of dehydrating you’ll get a sense just by touch if you have either dried too much or too little. If any wetness oozes out when you squeeze it it’s not dry enough. It should be leathery. The temperature range we recommend for dehydrating is between 100° and 140°. Anything more than 180° and you’ll begin cooking, any less than 100° and you risk contamination.

Preparation For Drying

Wash fruit and inspect for insects as you slice it for dehydrating. The thinner the slices, the faster the process. Some commercially-dried fruit, especially apples, apricots, nectarines and pears, is treated with sulfite to prevent browning and to deter spoilage. The safety of sulfating foods is controversial and we’ve never done it ourselves. Browning and spoilage can be more easily and safely deterred by soaking your fruit in a solution made from two teaspoons of powdered vitamin C (ascorbic acid) in one quart of water. Add another teaspoon of ascorbic acid for every third batch you soak.

When you are done drying, make sure to store dried food in airtight containers with tight-fitting lids. We once had an entire summer’s worth of sun-dried tomatoes turn into a jar full of seething larvae that would make David Cronenberg gag, all because a pantry moth got into the jar. This scenario can also be prevented by pasteurization, that is, freezing the food for several days after drying, but we like to avoid pasteurization because it destroys some of the flavor and nutrients. We reserve freezing for foods that seem to be particularly larvae-prone, like figs.

Three Methods For Drying Food

Sun-Drying

If you live in a place where the temperatures are scorching hot and the humidity low — the desert, essentially — it’s possible to dry fruits and vegetables in the sun. Otherwise please skip to the next method, the solar dehydrator.

If you are a desert person, all you will need to do to dry your food in the summer is make some racks out of wood or an old frame with a piece of plastic or stainless steel screen material stretched across them to hold the fruit. Do not use hardware cloth because the metal it’s made out of can contaminate food. Cover the trays with cheesecloth or muslin to prevent insect damage. Put the trays in full sun and turn the fruit two or three times during the day to ensure even drying. As sun-drying can sometimes take several days, make sure to bring in the food at night, since evening moisture will cause it to rehydrate and get moldy. The key factor with sun-drying is low humidity — sun drying will not work with even moderate humidity no matter how hot it is outside, so this method is limited to folks who live in desert regions.

Air-Drying Herbs

Herbs are easy to air-dry and don’t need the extremely low humidity required to safely sun-dry fruits and vegetables. Just bundle up herbs that you have picked early in the morning and tie them in bunches by the stems. Hang them upside down indoors out of direct sunlight, and they should be dry in a few days. You know they are dry when the leaves crumble at your touch. Strip the leaves from their stems and store them in jars in a dark cupboard. Exposure to light will degrade them.

Sun-Drying Meat

While indigenous peoples around the world dry fish and meat outdoors, our sensitive modernized stomachs may not be able to deal with the risk of contamination. Meat and fish should be dried in a store-bought electric dehydrator to ensure food safety.

The Appalachian Solar Food Dryer

We’ve used a homemade solar dehydrator with great success at our urban homestead for the past few years and it’s our favored method of drying. While sun-drying only works in a few hot, dry places, solar dehydrators will work just about everywhere.

Our solar dehydrator is called an Appalachian dryer. It’s composed of two parts. The first part is the collection box: a long, shallow glass- or plastic-covered box lined with black material that collects the heat of the sun. A vent at the bottom of the collection box pulls in air which is heated and flows up into the second part of the dehydrator. The second part is a cabinet where the food sits on racks, basking in the flow of hot air from the collector.

Our dryer sits in our front yard, positioned to catch the best of the morning sun, looking like an odd, homemade pinball machine. We painted it the same color as our house, but somehow that makes it even more ridiculous-looking. Nonetheless, we love it, and wouldn’t give it up for the world. The scent of drying tomatoes coming out of it is one of the best scents of summer. To give you an idea of its efficiency, it takes about a day and a half to dry tomatoes in it.

We made ours from plans found in the issue 57 of Home Power Magazine (February/March 1997). Home Power sells a PDF download of these plans for $5 online at homepower.com. Issue 69 (February/March 1999) contains further refinements to the design for increased efficiency.

Cutaway View of Appalachian Dryer

A half-size version of the Appalachian dryer can also be found in the book The Solar Food Dryer: How to Make Your Own Low Cost, High-Performance, Sun-Powered Food Dehydrator by Eben Fodor. Fodor also offers detailed plans for building another kind of simple solar dehydrator that occupies a single box.

You can make a quick and cheap solar dehydrator in a similar design out of nothing but cardboard boxes. It’s not a permanent solution, but it would be good for at least one summer’s worth of drying. Plans for this and every imaginable solar cooking contraption can be found in the resource section in the back of the book.

Commercial Dehydrators

If you can’t quite muster the ambition to build a solar dehydrator, you can buy a commercial electric model — just make sure to get one with a thermostat and fan. Store-bought dehydrators are the safest way to make fish and meat jerky, since you can control the temperature and minimize the drying time.

Electric dehydrators come in two basic designs, one with the fan and air flow oriented horizontally, the other vertically. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. A horizontal model keeps food flavors from migrating between trays if you’re drying more than one kind of food at a time. Vertical models have the advantage of being more efficient, because heat rises. In a vertical model, a top-mounted fan will prevent drippings from gunking up the fan blades and motor.

So whether you hang bundles of mint in your kitchen, or you build yourself a big honking Appalachian eyesore like ours, we hope that you will give dehydrating a try, because there is no easier, or more direct way of saving the flavors of the summer over the winter.

Preserving With Vinegar

Herb-Infused Vinegar

Infusing vinegar with herbs is an easy way to preserve your herbs for the winter. We are all familiar with those decorative condiment bottles tied with raffia and packed with lord knows what, like some country kitchen cabinet of curiosity. One has probably been sitting in your mother’s kitchen window since 1997. These are not those. These are the real thing. They will not have herb bits in them when they’re done. They will live in the fridge, not the windowsill.

Choose glass bottles with screwtop lids or corks. Bottles for vinegar should not have metallic caps, because those will corrode. Sterilize your bottles. Your herbs should be cleaned, picked free of any rot or bruising, and the leaves dry from washing. The best time to pick your herbs, incidentally, is in the morning, just after the dew dries. They are at their strongest then.

1. Choose your herbs. Good candidates are dill, parsley, rosemary, thyme, tarragon and sage. Mixes can be great, but often single-herb vinegars work best. You can use fresh or dried herbs, but never use ancient, flavorless herbs. Also think about spices like peppercorns, or make a fruit-infused vinegar with berries.

2. Choose your vinegar. Plain white vinegar is good for delicate herbs. Apple cider vinegar is good for fruit vinegars. Wine vinegar is good with the stronger herbs.

3. Pack your clean herbs into your bottle or jar. The amount does not have to be precise. In recipes you’ll often see a ratio of about one part herb to four parts vinegar. You do not have to chop or bruise them, but you may if you wish. If you do, they might infuse a little faster.

4. Heat your vinegar on the stove until it is very hot — just about to boil. Use a funnel to pour it over your herbs while it is still hot, and seal the bottle.

5. Let the infusion steep in a dark cabinet for three or four weeks. Take it out and strain the vinegar through cheese cloth or a coffee filter into a freshly sterilized bottle. This will keep for six to eight months in your refrigerator, or three months in your cabinet.

Pickling With Vinegar

Most pickle recipes you find will use vinegar instead of salt water. The lactofermentaion process described above is much older, and has been largely supplanted by vinegar pickling.

If you want to try pickling in vinegar, all you have to do is bring white or apple cider vinegar up to a boil along with any spices you like — garlic cloves, peppercorns, red pepper, cloves, and dill being common; add some sugar if you like sweeter pickles, and pour the hot, flavored vinegar over any firm vegetable packed into a sterile jar. Good pickling candidates are cucumbers, green tomatoes, green beans, carrot sticks and baby onions.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. This is pretty much impossible to screw up. But if this much freedom of choice makes you nervous, vinegar pickle recipes abound in books and on the internet.

If you are pickling tougher veggies, like green beans, you should parboil them first (parboiling means just dunking them in boiling water long enough to turn them bright green). After packing the jars, put them in the fridge and let it sit a day or so, then you can eat them. They’ll keep in the fridge like this for at least three weeks.

If you wish to can them so you can keep them longer, pack them into hot jars, and consult a canning guide to find out the appropriate processing time for that vegetable and the size jar you are using. Canning instructions follow which will explain this all a little more.

Preserving Fruit In Alcohol: Le Cherry Bounce (Cerises à l’eau-de-vie)

Our friend Jean-Paul contributed this ancestral recipe from the Monsché homestead in Alsace. It requires sour cherries (also called tart or pie cherries — like the Morello or the Montmorency varieties). These are emphatically not the table cherries you buy in stores. You might get them at a farmers’ market, or out in the country, or maybe off your own tree.

In the States this kind of thing is called a cherry bounce, though the high-class addition of cherry eau-de-vie makes it particularly French. We encourage you to also try stewing whatever fruit takes your fancy in brandy and sugar, and see what happens.

1. Put two lbs. of sour cherries (clean, but not stemmed or pitted) into a big glass jar, or divide them between two jars.

2. Add ¾ lb. granulated sugar, and then cover with cherry eau-de-vie (also called kirschwasser, or kirch). For reasons of economy, you may substitute regular brandy for up to ⅔ of the volume of kirschwasser/ cherry eau-de-vie.

3. Close the jar hermetically (otherwise the spirits will evaporate). Gently swirl the jar around to distribute the sugar. It will dissolve more over time.

4. Wait two months before opening.

5. Sip the liquor, nibble the cherries.

6. Happy maceration!

Preserving Root Vegetables

Root vegetables can be convinced to keep through the entire winter without canning or freezing. Folks used to depend on this fact to feed themselves during snowbound months, but we seem to have forgotten these old-fashioned, but highly effective, storage methods.

One note: if you live in the southern latitudes where the winters are mild, these techniques will not work, because they depend on cold ambient temperatures. But you are compensated for this loss because unlike your snowbound friends, you can grow food all winter long.

Keep It In The Ground

The first thing to do is to extend your harvest as long as possible. The first frosts of the season are deadly to tomatoes, but they don’t harm root vegetables. And some greens, like kale and broccoli, are actually improved by the cold. Seriously, you can dig kale out of the snow and it will be perfectly good, and you can harvest like this until the ground freezes solid.

To stave off freezing, mulch super-heavily over your root vegetables. Put down a full foot of straw over your vegetable beds, or even pile all your fallen leaves there, marking where your plants are as you go, so you can find them again.

You can also make a temporary greenhouse out of plastic sheeting to protect your plants from frost and extend your harvest. With the proper setup — deep mulching, tents, cold frames, etc., — you can contrive to keep a few crops growing most of the winter. This is one of those cases where it will really help you if you can tap into the local databank of knowledge and experience.

Take It Inside

All root vegetables keep best where it is cold, but not freezing — somewhere between 32 and 40 degrees is ideal. The warmer it is, the faster the vegetables will rot, but even a 50- or 60-degree environment is better than your warm kitchen. If you have an unfinished, unheated basement or cellar, especially one with a dirt floor, your are in luck. That is the best thing you can have. A cold garage will also work. If you have a finished, heated basement, you can build a cold storage room in it, one that encloses a window or a vent to the outside. If this room is heavily insulated, and the cold winter air is allowed in, it makes an ideal storage space. It is ambitious, yes, but it could be very deluxe, what with all the racks and shelves you could build to hold your boxes of food.

Storage Conditions

Now, some vegetables require wet conditions, and others like it dry. Garlic and onions like it dry. They are best kept in airy bags or boxes. Potatoes are the same way. They need a combination of air and darkness and coolness. They can go in burlap bags, ventilated boxes or even a laundry basket. Just sort through all of your potatoes first and make sure all of them are in perfect condition. A little rot in one will spread to all the others.

All the rest of your root vegetables: carrots, beets, radishes, parsnips, celeriac and similar need moisture to keep from withering while in storage. If they are kept moist and cold they will last all winter long. But cold is the operative word. 32°- 40° is the ideal temperature. If they are kept moist and warm they will turn into compost. You keep them moist by layering them in damp sawdust, peat moss or sand.

As with all stored food, first sort them out and keep only perfect specimens. The imperfect ones can be eaten immediately, used to make stock, offered to your animals or sent to the compost pile. Layer the veggies and damp sawdust (or whatever you’re using) in plastic buckets or bins so that the veggies don’t touch each other, only sawdust. The sawdust should be moist, not sopping wet. Top off the bucket with one last layer of sawdust that covers everything, and keep these boxes or buckets uncovered in the coolest place you can find.

Or Take Them Outside Again

The most intriguing storage ideas involve digging holes in the ground. If you don’t have a basement or a garage, but you have open ground, you can make yourself a little storage pit. There are a lot of ways to do this, and our resource guides will lead you some different sources and illustrations which will make this easier to understand.

One basic technique is sink a vessel of some sort into the ground and make a mini-cellar of it; something like an old cooler or fridge would work well. It needs to be rust- and rodent-resistant. Then you pack it with straw and vegetables, or wet sand and vegetables, as described above. The top foot or so should be packed with dry insulation, like straw or leaves. Top it off with a sturdy lid to keep out the critters.

If critters are not a worry, you can store your vegetables above ground in mounds. You make these by spreading a thick, circular layer of soil on the ground (somewhere high and well-drained so rain won’t pool around your cache). Pile your veggies there pyramid-style. Pack about 12 inches of straw around the pyramid, and then pack it all down with a three-inch layer of earth, forming a dome shape. Take a handful of straw and let it stick up vertically through the dirt at the top. This “chimney” will allow moisture to escape the dome. Since you have to destroy the mound to get into it, they are one-use affairs, so it is best to make a few smaller ones rather than one large one.

Transforming Excess

The following projects are not preservation techniques that keep food around for a long time, but they transform food that might otherwise be wasted into more useful forms.

How To Culture Milk

One way to deal with excess milk is to transform it. Yogurt, cheese, sour cream, cultured buttermilk are all ancient methods of dealing with abundance.

Milk spoils quickly at room temperature, but if certain bacteria colonize it, it becomes something new and useful. Over time, people learned how to encourage the bacterial colonization in different directions, so that a humble pail of milk could yield yogurt or sour cream or farm cheese.

But why should you, as a city dweller with a nice fridge, learn to culture milk? First of all, it’s good for you. When milk is cultured it becomes much more digestible, because the live cultures break down lactose. Cultured products, most famously yogurt, also colonize with good bacteria, repairing damage done by courses of antibiotics and a bad diet, and helping to control yeast populations. What would we do without sour cream, yogurt smoothies and buttermilk for pancakes? Being able to make your own allows you to control quantity and quality, avoid trips to the store and excess packaging.

Making Yogurt

Yogurt is a fermented milk product made tasty by a culture of Lactobacillus bulgaricus (or L. acidophilus) and Streptococcus thermophilus and its health benefits are widely acknowledged if it has active cultures. To make yogurt you need to gather:

•  One quart of milk. (Whole milk makes the creamiest yogurt, but you  can use whatever you want.)

•  One tablespoon of live yogurt as a starter. For this first batch you need living yogurt, either from a friend, or from store-bought yogurt. If you buy it, be sure the container reads “contains live cultures.” Some yogurt is pasteurized, which kills the cultures, but you can usually find live yogurt even in an ordinary supermarket. You can also order exotic yogurt cultures online if you are a real yogurt connoisseur.

•  Quartjar

•  Small, insulated cooler

•  Thermometer 

Vegetable Storage Mound

To begin you should sterilize everything that will come into contact with the final product. Keep your hands and work surfaces clean.

Pour the milk in a pot with a thick bottom or use a double boiler to prevent burning. Heat the milk up to 180°. Stir frequently to prevent burning. Don’t bring it to a full boil. Then remove it from the heat and let it cool to 110°. While you wait for it to cool, heat up your quart jar and your cooler by pouring hot water into them.

When the milk is down to 110° (this is a touchable temperature, like a hot bath) stir in just one tablespoon of live yogurt to inoculate the milk. More is not necessarily better. Use just the one tablespoon.

Pour the cultured milk into the hot jar, cap it, and put the hot jar in the hot cooler. Fill the rest of the cooler with 110° water and maybe also jars full of 110° water (literally hot water bottles!). Let it sit for 8-12 hours, checking the temperature of the water periodically, adding fresh hot water if necessary.

Check on it after some time has passed. The yogurt should be thick and have a tangy flavor. If not, it needs a boost. Add one more spoonful of starter, and heat up the cooler again by filling it with hot water. Keep this water around 110°. The Lactobacillus needs a hot place to breed. Let it sit again for several hours, and with luck it should firm up. If it doesn’t, maybe your culture is no good.

Your yogurt will keep for a long time in the fridge, though it will get more and more sour as it gets older. Use some of your last batch of yogurt to make your next batch. As long as it isn’t covered in mold, you know the cultures are still there.

Making Labaneh, Or Yogurt Cheese

If you drain the water from yogurt, you end up with a tangy, spreadable cheese along the lines of cream cheese. This cheese is made anywhere people eat yogurt, and goes by many names, but we call it by its Lebanese name, labaneh.

Take a big piece of cheesecloth and use it to line a strainer or colander of some sort. Pour in your yogurt. It shrinks down, so if you want one cup of cheese, use two cups of yogurt. Tie up the ends of the cheesecloth to make a bundle. Set the strainer with the bundle in it over a bowl that will catch the liquid that drains off. Put it in the fridge, and let it drain overnight, or all day while you’re at work.

When the cheese is drained, it will be a little tangier than cream cheese, but similar in texture. Fattier yogurt makes creamier cheese. You can flavor this cheese with herbs or fruit to make an excellent bagel spread. Or you can make a classic labaneh sandwich by spreading it on bread or pita, studding it with olives, spicing it up with thyme and/or mint, and garnishing with tomato slices.

TIP: For small batches we use strawberry baskets instead of a colander. Alternatively, you could hang the cheesecloth bundle from one of your refrigerator racks, and put a bowl beneath it to catch the drippings.

By the Whey - That liquid that drains off is called whey, and it is rich in protein. You can add it to smoothies, or use it in the place of water in just about any recipe. It will keep in the fridge about as long as milk will keep.

Fil, Piima And Viila

All three of these are dairy cultures well known in Scandinavia, but not here. Each has a slightly different character, but they are similar enough that what we’re going to say about the fil culture, which is the one we keep here on the homestead, applies to all three. All three transform milk and cream into delicious yogurt and sour cream-like substances with minimal effort on your part.

Our introduction to Fil and Lactococcus came through the gift of a baby food jar filled with filmjölk. The original culture came from Sweden — a bottle of it was smuggled back from a trip, and then nurtured. You can purchase fil and many other cultures through the mail from G.E.M. Cultures. We got ours by visiting an inspiring group of people called, naturally enough, the Culture Club. They all know each other because they are part of the same food co-op, and now they get together in a café once a month to swap cultures and plot revolution.

To keep fil alive you just have to keep making more fil. Unlike sourdough starter, it doesn’t need much care. All you have to remember is to transfer a little of your last batch of fil to some fresh milk or cream every week or so, and you’ve always got some on hand.

Being lazy, we really like the fil lifestyle. Fil needs no heating at all. It’s like magic. If we want to make the filmjölk all we do is put a couple of spoonfuls of the last fil batch into a jar of milk or cream. Then we leave it sitting on the counter, or maybe on the back of stove where it’s a little warmer, for about 24 hours. No temperature gauge, no special equipment needed. The Nordic people are geniuses!

All there is to making fil is waiting for it to thicken to the consistency we want. Then we put in the fridge. How many times during your childhood did your mom yell at you to put the milk back in the fridge? It is not at all comfortable at first to leave dairy products sitting around. Certainly not overnight. The first time we did it, we were highly dubious of the result. But it smelled fine, and it tasted even better. Fil is mild and clean-tasting, and its sourness has a pleasing lemon quality.

Put it in milk (whole or not). Put two teaspoons of anything cultured with fil into a quart of milk and leave it sitting out overnight and you will get filmjölk, something sort of between buttermilk and yogurt in terms of texture. We bake with it, because we like quick breads which require buttermilk, and love not having to run to the store to buy a quart of buttermilk whenever we want to bake, half of which always goes bad because we don’t like to drink cultured buttermilk. This fil stuff we like to drink. If you salt it and put mint and cucumbers in it, it is very like a salty lassi, or ayran or doogh — any of that family of cooling yogurt drinks from hot places. If you blend it with fruit, you’ve got a fruit smoothie. Or you can eat it out of a bowl with muesli or fruit like the Swedes do.

Put it in cream (or half and half) and watch a miracle happen. It resembles crème fraiche, or clotted cream, or something similar. Cream infused with the fil culture turns silken and ever so slightly tangy, good enough to eat straight off the spoon. It works as both sour cream and whipped cream, so it ends up smeared on scones, wrapped in burritos, tossed with pasta — or best of all — in a bowl with strawberries. Just add one teaspoon of anything cultured with fil to a pint of cream and let it sit out overnight.

Cheesemaking

…cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality.

— Clifton Fadiman

 

Cheesemaking is a fascinating process. All of the great cheeses that you know by name — Brie, Comte, Stilton — have their origins in particular cultures. You can order these cultures, and all of the equipment you need, from cheesemaking suppliers. Read Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll for a clear overview of cheesemaking processes, terms and equipment. In the meantime, we’re going to show you how to make ricotta with a few things you’re likely to have on hand.

Whole Milk Ricotta

Genuine ricotta is made out of the whey (a protein-rich liquid) which is a byproduct of cheesemaking. You can make your own quick and dirty ricotta using whole milk. It’s a good way to use up extra milk that might go bad.

½ gallon organic whole milk. Pasteurized milk is fine, ultra-pasteurized
(UP) is not.
¼ cup lemon juice
½ teaspoon sea salt, or more to taste

1. In a large pot mix together the milk, salt and lemon juice.

2. Heat the milk to 185°, while stirring to prevent burning.

3. As the temperature rises you will start to see the curds separate from the liquid. When the milk gets to 185° turn off the heat and let it set for 10 minutes.

4. Take a colander and line it with muslin. Ladle the curds carefully into the muslin, tie up the corners and let it drain for 30 minutes.

5. You can eat the cheese immediately or store for up to two weeks in the refrigerator.

Variations:

1. Use more lemon juice for a lemon-flavored cheese.

2. Use ¼ cup apple cider vinegar instead of lemon juice for a queso blanco. Let the cheese drain in the muslin bag for a couple of hours for a firmer texture.

3. Flavor this cheese with olive oil and herbs to make a savory filling, or add honey and spices to make a sweet filling.

Ambitious cheesemakers can move on to making hard cheeses, which begin their life as a soft cheese just as above, but continue on to being pressed, air-dried and aged in a cool (55°- 65°) environment. There are also more advanced forms of soft cheeses made by introducing molds that will produce blue cheeses. For these you can use mold harvested from store-bought cheese or order mold cultures.

Making Butter

Butter, particularly if salted, lasts a good long time, so it is another classic method of transforming excess milk into something that keeps. It may not seem worthwhile at first glance, but it actually is not all that hard, and makes a much more rich, fluffy, fresh tasting butter than store-bought. It’s definitely one of those things worth doing for company, or if you have a pint of cream near its expiration date.

Start by acquiring a pint of cream. It can be any kind of heavy cream, as long as it is not marked “UP” or “ultra-pasteurized.” UP products are processed with extremely high heat, allowing for more lax sanitation standards in the factories, and also making the product more shelf-stable than regular pasteurized products. This means they can be shipped great distances from factory farms, and it means they can hang around the store for weeks without going bad. But UP is a peculiarly lifeless substance, one that can’t be used to make homemade yogurt, cheese or butter. So look for cream without the UP label, organic preferably.

Put your pint of cream into a clean quart-sized jar. This leaves lots of sloshing room, and that is important. The more sloshing, the better. Leave the cream out to ripen at room temperature (72°) for about eight hours — say you put it out in the morning and make the butter that evening for dinner. (This, by the way, is why dumpster cream is okay — you’d be souring it anyway.) If you forget to make the butter that night, you can put the soured cream in the fridge to arrest the ripening process, and continue the next day. Just be sure that you let the cream come back to room temperature, or close to room temperature (50°-- 70°) before you start the next step.

The next step is best done through teamwork, or perhaps delegated to the more hyperactive members of your household. Screw down that lid tight and shake that jar in the air like you just don’t care. You have to shake hard! Some people put a marble in the jar to speed up the process.

If all that shaking and hopping around is not your style, you can also use a food processor fitted with a plastic blade, a standing mixer fitted with a paddle or even a regular old blender. Perversely, we only make butter by the shake method, and want everyone else to as well, because it is such a simple miracle. But if you must use a machine, this is how you do it. Start with the cream at room temperature. It’s not necessary to let the cream sit out all day, but the flavor will be better if you do. Set your machine to mix at a low setting, if possible.

However you go about churning, you will eventually see the butter “break” — globules will appear in the liquid. It will look like cottage cheese. Keep shaking, cranking, blending, or whatever a little while longer until it seems like no more globules are coming. The break will happen within a minute or two with an electrical device, and between five and ten minutes if you’re shaking the jar.

The solid globs are butter. The liquid is true buttermilk. True buttermilk bears no relationship to the substance sold in markets as “buttermilk.” That stuff is a thick cultured milk product, more closely related to yogurt than butter. It was developed to replace real buttermilk, not in taste, but rather its function in baking. Buttermilk (real or cultured) is used in biscuits, pancakes, etc., because it gives the bread a tender, springy quality, and it helps the dough rise. The difference between them is that real buttermilk is sweet and thin and mild. Try it! It is a pleasure to drink, a forgotten treat.

Back to the buttermaking. Drain the buttermilk off the butter lumps and set it aside for drinking or cooking. The newborn butter will have the consistency of whipped butter, but will be richer-tasting on the tongue. Don’t worry that it is so soft, it will stiffen up when you chill it. The final steps are to “wash” the butter, and then to salt it — otherwise it will quickly go rancid.

Butter Washing

Put the butter in a bowl. Add a splash of ice-cold water to the bowl and press the butter with the back of a big wooden spoon to squeeze out the buttermilk. Any hidden buttermilk in the butter fat will turn the butter bad within a couple of days. Pour off the cloudy liquid and repeat several times until the water runs clear. That means the buttermilk is all out. Another method is to keep the butter in the jar (if you used the shaking method), and keep adding water and shaking and draining until the water runs clear.

Salting

The last step is to add salt to preserve the butter even more. This is purely optional. Let your taste buds be your guide. Just massage it in thoroughly so you don’t end up with extra salty chunks. Press the butter into a little dish with a cover and refrigerate. The butter will become more solid when it chills. If you decide to make butter churning a habit, you might want to get a butter mold so you can form your butter into appealing shapes.

Troubleshooting

If the butter tastes cheesy, you left the cream sitting out too long in the ripening stage. The warmer the ambient temperature, the less time the cream should sit. If the butter will not form, check to make sure it is not UP cream after all. If not, well…keep churning.

How To Make Fruit Butter

A Process Of Reduction

Fruit has an annoying way of all coming in at once. When you find yourself up to your earlobes in whatever kind of fruit you grow or pilfer from around the neighborhood, it is time to make fruit butter. Fruit butter is simply a cooked-down puree of any substantial fruit, apple butter being the best known, but you can also make peach butter, apricot butter, plum butter, etc. Any meaty fruit will work, but not fruits high in water content like citrus or melons.

Fruit butters are really tasty, easier to make than jams and jellies, and getting hard to find in stores. They do not contain any butter, but are called butter because of their creamy thickness. Because of this density, and because they are often not as sweet as jelly, they pair well with meats. They also find employment as dipping sauce, tart filling and pancake topping.

Fruit butter, like stock, is simple, endlessly forgiving, easy to improvise on, and hard to screw up. We offer you an apple butter recipe here. You use the same technique to make any other kind of fruit butter. As you read these instructions, don’t be put off by the long process. Apple butter doesn’t mind at all if you have to go away and do something midway through the making of it. Just put it in the fridge until you have time to come back and finish.

Apple Butter

There are three basic steps to making apple butter. First, the apples are cooked in liquid just long enough to soften them. Next, the apple stew is removed from the heat and pulverized into applesauce. Then the applesauce is cooked down until it thickens into a spread.

The variables include the liquid you use to cook the apples, quantity of sugar used, type of spices employed, how the apples are pulverized and cooked. It is the kind of recipe that can be made to suit whatever kind of supplies and equipment you have on hand.

There are no amounts here because precision really isn’t necessary. All you should know is that it really, really cooks down, so you have to start with a fair amount of apples for it to be worthwhile. Two pounds of apples results in about one cup of apple butter.

If you are making apple butter with the intention of canning it, this is not the recipe for you. Please read the note below before you begin.

Apples, any type, peeled, cored and cut into rough chunks

Apple cider or water

Sugar or honey

Cinnamon

Ground cloves

Lemon juice

NOTE: if you use a food mill or sieve instead of a blender, you don’t have to peel or seed the apples before boiling, as the mill or sieve will filter out peel and seeds. You know that, of course. This is just for the enlightenment of others.

Put the apples in a big, non-reactive pot — stainless steel, copper or enamel — and add just enough cider or water or both to cover them. You want to use a deep pot, because this stuff bubbles and splatters. A heavy bottom helps prevent burning. Cook over medium high heat, simmering until the apples are fork tender, about 20 minutes.

When the apples are tender remove them from the heat and pulverize them. You can do this in the pot with a hand-held blender, in a countertop blender, in a food mill, or by pushing the apple mass through a sieve. If you use a countertop blender only fill it halfway, otherwise you’ll have a hot apple puree explosion. You do not have to use all the liquid in the pot. You are making applesauce, basically. Aim for that texture. More liquid means a longer cooking time. If you think there’s too much liquid, pour some off before you start blending.

Return your applesauce to the pot and simmer it a long time over medium heat to reduce the volume of the liquid. It will behave like burping lava. Stir frequently so the stuff at the bottom doesn’t burn. This is a good project for when you are doing something else in the kitchen, like baking, so you can keep half an eye on it.

Taste the apple puree as it cooks down, and stir in sugar, spices and lemon to taste. If you use sweet apples, or cider instead of water, you may not wish to add any sugar at all. Remember, the natural sugars of the apples are being concentrated. Whatever you do, add the sugar sparingly, a spoonful at a time. You can keep sweetening it until the end, but you can’t take the sugar out. Add the spices and lemon juice just as carefully.

Keep cooking, and stirring, stirring lots at the end as it dries out, thickening and darkening. It will transform from hot applesauce into something very thick and rich. You can feel the difference in your mouth when it becomes true apple butter. It should not be at all liquid. Test by putting a spoonful of sauce on a cold plate. It should glom on to the plate, nice and firm. If it is runny, you have to cook it more.

The apple butter will keep for a couple of weeks in your fridge. It’s so good that we’ve never had to resort to preservation. It’s never lasted more than a few days. If you have more than you can eat within two or three weeks, the simplest thing to do is freeze the excess, or can it.

Important note on canning the apple butter: If you want to can your apple butter, you need to be aware of a couple of things. Apple butter made as described may not be acidic enough to can safely using the water bath method. If you have a pressure canner, you have no worries — those were made for canning low-acid foods. But if you don’t, then you have to use a different recipe for apple butter than the one offered here.

The difference will be that you will have to add vinegar to the recipe stated above to acidify it, at the ratio of ¼ cup vinegar (white or apple cider) for every pound of apples, then it is necessary to adjust sugar ratios to balance out the sweetness. The Center for Food Preservation Safety offers a recipe on its website: uga.edu/nchfp/how/can_02/apple_butter.html

Jams And Jellies

Jams and jellies are another great way to deal with a bumper crop and/or imperfect fruit. Jam is easier to make and more forgiving. Jelly by definition is clear — it is made with fruit juice, so it requires the extra step of cooking the fruit and then pressing the juice out.

Jams and jellies gel through the combination of sugar and a substance called pectin. Jelly is not hard to make, but you need to find a good recipe and follow that recipe exactly to insure that the jelly will set correctly.

Pectin is present naturally in some kinds of fruits such as the citrus, plums and cranberries and is especially concentrated in apples. With low-pectin fruits such as nectarines, strawberries, peaches, pears and figs you’ll need to add pectin to your jam or jelly, either by mixing in apples or by buying pectin, which can be found in the baking isle of your supermarket. The pectin box comes with instructions for each different kind of fruit, so if you buy the pectin, the secret to success is to follow the instructions it provides to the letter, especially for jelly. Three good recipe sources are any early edition of The Joy of Cooking, The Jamlady Cookbook, or for more sophisticated recipes, Mes Confitures: The Jams and Jellies of Christine Ferber.

Making Stock

Soup stock is frugal in the best of ways, and solid homesteading. It takes all the scraps you would otherwise throw out and makes them into something completely delicious and useful.

Stock is not just the basis for soup, though it does make great soup. You can sauté vegetables in stock instead of fat. You can drink it straight. You can cook rice, risotto, beans or polenta with stock — it makes simple things like that taste heavenly. Hell, you can boil your boxed mac ‘n’ cheese with it. Try it once and you’ll be an addict. Use it whenever a recipe tells you to add water. You’ll get a boost in both flavor and nutrition. It is not for nothing that the French call stock fond de cuisine: “foundation of the kitchen.”

Stock doesn’t keep more than a week, so make a big batch and freeze it. Freeze some in ice cube trays so you can access small quantities. You can make a stock concentrate by letting your stock simmer down by half.

There are a million ways to make stock. The best thing is that you can’t screw it up. Throw scraps in pot and boil is the gist of it. It’s caveman cooking, and yet, as any chef will tell you, it is the basis of fine cuisine.

Any good recipe book will show you how to make meat or fish stock, and we highly recommend you try it. But for now, we’re just going to explain how to make vegetable stock, since once you start farming you’ll find you have vegetables in abundance, and the desire to make good use of them.

Vegetable Stock

The only rule with vegetable stock is that you should not use cabbage in it, or cabbage’s cruciferous friends like broccoli and cauliflower because they will overpower the stock with their special, slightly stinky scent. Tomatoes make good stock, but too many make tomato soup, so add sparingly. Otherwise, you can make stock of any vegetable matter that is clean and not too far gone. This is where you put all your peelings and trimmings and odds and ends — potato peels, mushrooms, artichoke leaves, everything. Even that half bag of slightly dried baby carrots from the back of the fridge.

The simplest way to make veg stock is to just throw all your vegetable scraps in a big pot along with a quartered onion, some salt, a few peppercorns, a bay leaf and maybe some parsley, or thyme. Cover with about an equal amount of water. Simmer for up to an hour, strain the liquid off and throw the stewed veggies in the compost heap.

A richer stock comes from sautéing a little chopped onion and herbs of your choice in some butter or olive oil at the start, then adding the veggies to that base as above.

Five Ways to Preserve a Tomato

At the height of summer, the abundance of even a small garden can be overwhelming. You eat as much as you can, give a lot away, and then what? You preserve. We are going to put the lessons of this section to work here, and show you five ways to preserve your homegrown tomatoes. We could have chosen any vegetable to illustrate this section, but we chose tomatoes because they are most people’s favorite homegrown food, and their season is all too short. It is possible to keep some of that flavor all year long, so you won’t have to resort to buying tasteless tomatoes and tomato sauce. Each time you enjoy your preserved tomatoes during the long winter, you will remember the warm summer air, the bushes heavy with fruit, and the green scent of tomato foliage.

1. Extend the harvest

Tomatoes don’t do well in the cold — it ruins their texture. But if you still have unripe tomatoes on the vine when you get your first frost warning of the year, you can save them. Bring them inside and they will ripen slowly. They won’t be as good as they would have been had they spent more time in the sun, but they’ll still be better than store tomatoes.

There are two schools of thought on bringing tomatoes inside. One says to pick all of the tomatoes, wrap each of them individually in newspaper and stack them in a box, putting the ripest on top, the greenest on the bottom. They will ripen up over the next couple of weeks, faster or slower depending on the temperature. The other method is to just pull up the plant, shake the dirt off the roots, and hang the whole thing upside down. The fruit will ripen on the vine. Whether on the vine or in a box, store them out of the freezing cold, but keep them somewhere relatively cool if you can.

If you don’t have space for storage, have a green tomato party. You can make lots of things out of green tomatoes, like fried green tomatoes, green tomato jam and green tomato chutney. We use green tomatoes as a vegetable in their own right. Just slice or chop them, squeeze some lemon juice over them (this is important — it brings out their flavor) and then treat them sort of like bell peppers: sauté them, put them on skewers, over pasta, that sort of thing.

2. Dried tomatoes

Homemade dried tomatoes are amazing. Drying heightens their sweetness turning them into a kind of tomato candy. They are so good, especially those made with cherry tomatoes, that we are hard-pressed not to eat them all up as they come off the dryer. This is another food where once you have the real stuff, it is very hard to go back to the store-bought version.

The best tomatoes for drying are cherry and Roma-type tomatoes, also called plum or paste tomatoes. Paste tomatoes have more meat and fewer seeds than the big juicy slicing kind. Cherry tomatoes are good for drying because they have an intense flavor that only deepens with drying, so you don’t really care if they are a little seedy, or if they dry up to the size of a dime.

See the section titled “Dehydration: Why Save It For Hangovers?” to learn more about your options.

3. Candied tomatoes for the freezer

We figure if you’re going to take up freezer space with tomatoes, it ought to be with something spectacular. These fit the bill. They’ll keep for about three months in the freezer, just long enough to help you ease through the dreaded tomato withdrawal at the end of the summer.

These are tomatoes baked in oil. They are truly wonderful, rich, succulent and fragrant. They can be used in any sun-dried tomato application, or just tossed over pasta. This recipe is adapted from The Italian Country Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper who explains that in Italy these are traditionally made in cooling bread ovens, thus the slow decline in heat while cooking.

Oven Candied Summer Tomatoes

2 to 2 ½ pounds of ripe, delicious summer tomatoes. Not plum
tomatoes, unless they are extremely flavorful
1 cup robust extra-virgin olive oil
Salt

1. Preheat the oven to 400º F. Core the tomatoes and halve vertically, but do not seed them. Leave small tomatoes in halves; cut slightly larger tomatoes into wedges.

2. In a half-sheet pan, or two 2 ½ quart shallow metal baking pans (not glass or enamel), arrange the tomato wedges cut side down and ½ to 1 inch apart. Coat the tomatoes with the olive oil. Sprinkle with salt.

3. Bake 30 minutes, then lower heat to 350ºF and bake another 30 minutes. Turn the heat down to 300ºF and bake 30 more minutes, or until the edges are slightly darkened. If the edges are not yet colored, turn the heat down to 250ºF and bake another 10 to 15 minutes.

4. Remove the tomatoes from the oven. Cool 20 minutes.

5. Layer the tomatoes in a storage container, cover them with their own oil, and refrigerate. Or freeze them in sealed plastic containers up to three months.

4. Home-canned tomatoes

You need:

2 ½-3 ½ pounds of tomatoes for each quart canned, plus extra for juice. These should be ripe, flavorful and unblemished. Remember, canning doesn’t make them any better. The truth is rather the opposite, so start with good stuff.

Bottled lemon juice, because of its predictable acid levels

Salt

A big pot for cooking the tomatoes

Pint- or quart-sized glass canning jars with rings and brand new lids (meaning the disk parts)

A canner with a rack, or a big, tall stock pot with an improvised rack at the bottom, or a folded dish towel at the bottom of the pot

Tongs for lifting the hot jars out of the water

A ladle

A chopstick or long wooden kitchen implement of some type

Paper towels or clean kitchen towels

Prepare your jars and lids for canning as described in the canning section.

In the meanwhile, prepare your tomatoes. Dip them into boiling water for one minute, then dip them into cold water. After that, you should be able to peel them easily. After you peel them, cut out their core, and either leave them whole, or chop them into halves or quarters. They just have to be small enough to fit through the mouth of the jar.

Establish a base of juice at the bottom of a large pot by cutting up and squishing some of your less perfect tomato specimens. Add the peeled and cored tomatoes to this juice and bring it all up to a boil. You are not cooking them, just heating them to a boil. As soon as they are hot, you can start to pack your jars.

Use your jars hot. Pull the first one out of the water bath, or dishwasher, or oven, and keep the rest in.

Before packing, add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice to your quart jars, 1 tablespoon of lemon juice to each pint jar. This is necessary to acidify the tomatoes, which makes them safe for water bath processing. You can add a little salt too, if you want.

Use your ladle to scoop hot tomatoes into hot jars, pressing down as you do to squeeze out their juices. You want them surrounded by their juice, and the juice to come up within a ½ inch of the top of the jar.

Remove any air pockets from the jar by running the handle end of a wooden spoon or a chopstick around the inner wall of the jar.

Wipe the mouth of the jar clean with a towel, and put on a lid. Finger-tighten the band over the lid — meaning tighten only as tight as you are able using finger strength only.

Start your next jar. Do all the jars one by one until you are done. Don’t do them all at once, assembly-line-style. You don’t want the contents, or the jars, cooling while they wait for you to get to them.

Then put the jars in the hot water bath in a rack or on a folded towel. The water should cover the jars by 2 inches. Bring the water back to a rolling boil and start timing. The quart jars need to spend 45 minutes in the bath, the pint jars 40.

When they are done, take them out carefully with the tongs and put them on a cloth on the counter to cool overnight. Don’t move them around or fiddle with them while they cool. After 24 hours take a look at the lid to make sure you have a good seal. If you press the lid it should not pop up and down. If it does, it is not sealed. Either process it again, or put that jar in the fridge and eat it first.

Keep your jars in a dark, cool place and they should be good for a year.

5. Canned tomato sauce

More useful than whole tomatoes might be jars of simple tomato sauce ready for eating or a little doctoring. This is a recipe that eats up a lot of tomatoes, because it is a reduction sauce. But it is very easy to make, and you’ll learn to love having it on hand through the winter. It is tasty and thick and versatile enough to go on pizza or over pasta, to dress up meat or polenta.

Note: consider putting your sauce up in pint jars instead of quart jars unless you have a big family.

Fundamental Tomato Sauce

Ingredients:

All of the tomatoes you have on hand, any kind, the more the better. They should be cored, but peeling is optional.

Garlic cloves, coarsely chopped — about 5 for every 3 pounds of tomatoes

Salt and pepper

Bottled lemon juice or citric acid

Cover the bottom of a big stock pot with olive oil and sauté the garlic over medium heat just until it’s soft; don’t let it brown. Add all your tomatoes. Either chop them first, or squish and tear them with your bare hands as they go into the pot. Bring it to a lively bubble and then let it burble at moderate heat until the volume reduces by half. Stir frequently. This reduction really condenses the flavors. Salt and pepper it to taste.

Once it is reduced, take it off the heat and let it cool a little, then smooth it into a nice puree using whatever device you have on hand: a mixing wand, a countertop blender, or a food mill.

You could freeze this sauce instead of canning it. Try freezing it in ice cube trays, then transferring the cubes to a freezer bag. That way you can grab as many cubes as you need at a time. Or can it for long-term storage. Please consult any canning source for precise directions, but the process is very similar to canning whole tomatoes, as described previously.

Any canning recipe you find will instruct you to acidify the sauce by adding lemon juice or citric acid to the jars. This is unfortunate from a culinary standpoint, but necessary for food safety since tomatoes are on the borderline in terms of the level of acidity required for canning without a pressure canner. If the sauce tastes a little off as a result, counterbalance the lemon by adding a bit of sugar.

The Homestead Speakeasy: From Mead To Moonshine

The ancient art of fermenting grains and fruits into alcohol is another iteration of the concept of preservation through transformation. But this transformation is the most profound of all, because it leads to the creation of intoxicating, even sacred, spirits.

Beer

Most beer is made in soulless factories, the remainder is in the hands of microbrewers. God bless the microbrewers for doing what they do, but somehow they also make beer-making look really hard. We need to return beer making to its rightful place — the kitchen — as part and parcel of the homestead economy, along with bread making, pickling and other fermentation processes. To do so would be a quiet revolution, and the reinvigoration one of the ancient housekeeping arts.

Beer making is not such a serious affair as the authorities might have us believe. Never be put off by technicalities, or intimidated by the process — and this applies to all home brewing, not just beer making. As herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of Sacred Herbal Healing Beers, says, “There is a lot of talk about the necessity for the use of chemicals to keep everything sterile, the need for other chemicals to make the beer work well, the crucial necessity for Teutonic authoritarian temperature controls, and the importance of complex understandings of minuscule differences in grains, malts, hops, and yeasts. Generally, this frightens off a lot of people and takes all the fun out of brewing.”

So don’t let the Man get you down — get brewing! Begin with a basic brewing text, or a class at your local homebrew supply shop. We took one evening class, but John Palmer’s book How to Brew, while overly technical, does have some simple step-by-step instructions that will get you started. Most beginners start brewing with what is called malt extract, a thick molasses-like syrup plus a few grains added for flavor. Advanced homebrewers graduate to all-grain brewing where you extract fermentable sugars with special equipment that you can make yourself. We advise skipping beer kits and just asking for a reliable recipe using a malt extract at your local homebrew shop.

One of the most compelling reasons to brew beer is to experiment with sacred, medicinal and even psychotropic additives that used to be a part of traditional beer making. For these sorts of recipes seek out Buhner’s Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, an astonishing read complete with a set of recipes that will further your understanding of the significance beer has played in indigenous cultures for thousands of years. Your herb garden can complement beer making nicely by providing additives not found in over-the-counter brews.

Country Wines

Our definition of wine extends beyond grapes, which is slightly heretical. There are those who will argue that if it is not made with grapes, it simply is not wine. For the sake of this discussion we’re going to agree to disagree. Whether you are making your ferment with grapes or dandelions, the process is similar enough to be considered under one name: wine.

“Country wines” are fermentations made with virtually anything except grains (in that case they would be beer). Everything from apricots to stinging nettles can be encouraged to become an alcoholic beverage. Most country wine recipes involve soaking your harvest, again anything from fruits to flowers to weeds, in boiling water, adding sugar and then straining the liquid into what is called a “carboy,” a large glass bottle with a narrow top such as a five-gallon glass water jug or a one-gallon glass cider bottle. You throw in some wine yeast, which can be found at homebrew shops. (Regular bread yeast will ferment wines but will lead to nasty flavors.) Your carboy is then fitted with a fermentation lock, an inexpensive glass or plastic device that allows carbon dioxide gas, a byproduct of fermentation, to escape but prevent contaminants from entering which can spoil your fermentation and create vinegar.

After the initial fermentation slows, you’ll “rack” the wine, which means siphoning the liquid into another carboy and leaving the solids behind. After the fermentation has completed you bottle your creation for aging, with corks, old bottles and a special corking tool. Some country wines are left to age in the bottle, others are enjoyed young.

Mead

Even if you don’t tend a hive, mead — fermented honey — is one of the most straightforward fermentations to pursue on the urban homestead. The mead maker mixes together honey and water, perhaps some herbs or fruit, adds wine yeast and allows the mixture to ferment for a period of weeks, months, or years depending on the desired results. The process and tools are basically the same as with country wine. Bottle it up and enjoy the oldest of humankind’s fermented beverages, the mead of inspiration.

Vinegar

Traditional vinegar making involves the introduction of a “mother” culture, acetobacter bacteria, to wine, beer, cider and countless other fermented beverages. You can purchase a mother of vinegar culture, use already-made vinegar, or wait for wild spores floating in the air to start the vinegar process. You can also make it by accident, and in fact will when some of your fermentation experiments fail. Quality vinegar, however, is made purposefully, another reason to give it a try.

Sake

Sake is made by first cultivating a specific kind of mold called Aspergillus oryzae contained in inoculated rice grains called koji which you can get at Japanese markets and some health food stores. You cook up a batch of rice and add koji to get the special mold growing. There are a few different ways of proceeding, but all involve adding yeast and fermenting the moldy rice you’ve just created. You end up with what the Japanese called doburoku, a difficult-to-translate word that basically means something like “sake moonshine.” You can also use koji to make a sweet non-alcoholic rice beverage called amazake.

Distillation

Distillation is an advanced, and in most places illegal, practice which involves heating fermented fruit or grain in a still in order to concentrate and collect a beverage containing a high level of alcohol. In the civilized nation of France, you take your fermented fruit to a farmer who is licensed to run a still, and he’ll make up a small batch of your own house brand of eau de vie for you. Lacking the assistance of a genial French farmer, you’ll have build your own still if you want to make your own “water of life,” or any other hard spirit.

Begin your distillation research with a copy of Matthew B. Rowley’s book Moonshine!, which contains instructions for building a still, recipes and an amusing history of the craft. Additional resources for detailed plans for stills are in the resource section at the end of this book.

Baking On The Homestead

Baking With Sourdough

A sourdough starter is the traditional way of leavening bread, a process wherein wild yeasts are cultured in a container you keep on your countertop. It’s more accurate to call breads made with such a culture “wild yeast” or “naturally leavened.” Bread made with a wild yeast starter was, of course, the only way to make bread for thousands of years before the advent of commercial yeasts, and we happen to think it is still the best way. It creates a sturdy loaf with a tangy, chewy crust. The crumb — the inside of the loaf — is both springy and tender to the tooth. A hot slice of crusty sourdough smeared with fresh butter is about as close to heaven as we can get on earth. What’s more, sourdough is better for you than regular bread. In Good Bread is Back, which details the revival of sourdough bread making in France, Laurence Kaplan points out that sourdough “is richer in certain vitamins and enzymes that are by-products of lactic fermentation, and it contains less phytic acid, which blocks mineral absorption.” And he also points out what we know from experience: sourdough keeps longer than bread made with commercial yeast.

Now, the idea of making real, crusty artisanal loaves of sourdough in your own kitchen might sound impossible, but it is in fact entirely within your grasp. And once you get into the groove of baking with your own starter you’ll never want to go back to the stale and lifeless loaves from your local supermarket. The science behind sourdough is complex, but the process of actually making and maintaining a starter is simple.

But first a brief mention of the science. When water meets flour a miraculous biological process begins. As the mixture ferments wild yeasts, which in most cases probably originate in the flour itself, form a symbiotic relationship with lacto bacteria. The lacto bacteria feed on metabolic products produced by the yeast, while simultaneously producing lactic acid which serves to prevent unwanted organisms from infecting your starter and gives wild yeast bread its distinctive flavor.

But you don’t need to know the science to make a sourdough. All you need is a starter, or what some people call a “mother,” and that is nothing but flour and water.

Starting The Starter

1. Get yourself a glass or ceramic container with a lid. It should be able to hold at least three to four cups of liquid. A quart-sized Mason jar works well. Don’t use a metal container. It’s okay to use metal utensils to stir your starter, since they are only in contact with it for a few moments — not enough time to cause any damage.

2. We’ve created starters from rye, whole wheat and white flour. You use different starters to make different types of bread, but more on that later. We recommend beginning with a white flour starter. Later you can convert the white starter to a whole wheat or rye starter. The reason to begin with white flour is that both whole wheat and rye flours have a tendency to rot before the beneficial symbiotic culture of lactobacillus and wild yeast have an opportunity to develop.

3. To begin your white flour starter, mix one cup of white flour with one cup of lukewarm water in your glass or ceramic container and stir until smooth. Put it in a warm place. In the winter we keep it on top of our stove, so it is warmed by the pilot light. Optimal temperatures are in the 70°- 80° range, so in the summer we keep the starter on the countertop.

4. Every day, pour off one cup of your starter and add a half cup of flour and a half cup of lukewarm water back in to feed what remains. The biggest mistake most people make, and probably the most common cause of a starter failure, is neglecting to feed it every single day. Unfed starters will begin to mold very quickly, and in any case will not create a successful loaf. We can’t repeat this enough — if you want sourdough bread you need to feed the starter every day without fail.

5. Your starter should begin to get bubbly in a few days. A layer of liquid, known in sourdough circles as “hooch,” will form on top. Don’t be concerned, this is natural and simply stir it in every morning when you add the additional flour and water.

6. After two weeks, you should have an active culture of wild yeasts that you can bake bread with. You can now throw out all those little packages of commercial yeast in your cupboard. Their day is over.

7. After a week or so has passed, instead of throwing out that cup of starter in the morning, use it to try to make a loaf of bread. The starter will get stronger as it gets older, but give it a try at about a week, certainly by two weeks. You can also use it to make a batch of the best sourdough pancakes you’ve ever eaten.

8. If you aren’t going to bake for a few days put the starter in the fridge, and feed it once a week. To revive it, take it out of the fridge and give it two or three days of feedings before you use it.

9. To create a whole wheat or rye starter first begin with a living white flour starter at least two weeks old. Instead of feeding it the half-cup of white flour and half-cup of water, instead feed it a half-cup of whole wheat or rye and a half-cup of water. In a few days you will have “converted” your white flour starter to a whole wheat or rye starter. With both whole wheat and rye it is especially important to feed every day, as these flours have a tendency to develop molds much more quickly than white flour starters.

Sourdough Mythologies

Unfortunately the internet and bread cookbooks contain a great deal of misinformation about sourdough. Here are some myths that we’ve debunked from personal experience:

 

You should add grapes/potatoes/rice to the flour and water mixture to hasten the development of wild yeasts. Sorry folks, the wild yeasts are in the flour and you don’t need anything except flour and water to get your starter going. The wild yeasts on the skin of grapes are a different beast and not the kind that make bread rise.

You should add some commercial yeast to get it going. Wrong. Commercial yeast is another type of beast entirely. More, it does not survive in the acidic bacterial stew that makes up a healthy starter culture, so adding it is a waste of time.

You should mail-order a sourdough starter to replicate a regional flavor. In all likelihood the wild yeasts in the flour you use will eventually dominate any mail-order cultures you purchase. Your starter will become local to wherever you live. Just make your own starter. It will be ready to use about the same time it would take to mail-order a starter. Wild yeasts, like love, should be free.

You have to use bottled water. We’ve made starters with plain old chlorinated Los Angeles tap water with no problems. If your water is heavily chlorinated and you’re having problems with your starter you can de-chlorinate your water by letting the water stand without a lid for 24 hours.

Wild yeasts are in the air and you have to “catch” them. Yes, there are yeasts in the air, but there are many millions more in the flour which, in all likelihood, is the origin of the beasts that will make your starter bubble. So now you have no excuses — get into your kitchen and get your starter on.

Baking A Sourdough Loaf

Our sourdough bread making method results in an artisanal, old-world loaf with a hard crust and complex flavor. Every time we make it, we can’t believe we made something so good. The thrill just doesn’t wear off.

The miracle of this bread is its accessibility. You don’t need a wood-fired oven, or a culinary degree. All you need is persistence. The first few loaves you try might be successful, or they might be complete disasters. If they are disasters, you simply must persevere. We promise you will get a feel for it. Once you get the hang of it, your loaves will not only be better than execrable supermarket bread, but will even be better than high-end bakery breads. Yes, that good.

All you really need to make bread is flour, water, salt and your own two hands. However, there are a few tools that will make the job a lot easier.

Heavy-Duty Mixer

If you’ve got the time, by all means knead by hand, but what we like about heavy-duty mixers such as the highly dependable KitchenAid mixer is that you can throw the ingredients in the bowl and eat breakfast while it kneads your bread with its dough-hook attachment. When you’re finished with your coffee, your dough is ready to start rising. Heavy-duty mixers ain’t cheap, but they will pay for themselves eventually if you take up bread making as a routine part of your domestic life. Keep an eye out for a used one. A heavy-duty KitchenAid goes for about $200 new, but a friend of ours just found one for $25 at a garage sale, in what must be the garage sale coup of the year.

Baking Stone

Baking stones help more evenly distribute the heat of your oven and assist in producing a good hard crust. Get an inexpensive square one and don’t ever clean it with soap. You don’t really need to wash it at all, just sweep it off. Ours just lives in the oven all the time.

Scale

One of the keys to bread making is being able to repeat the process reliably. And due to the vagaries of humidity it’s difficult to get accurate measurement of flour with just volumetric means, i.e. measuring in cups. Measuring your ingredients in ounces will help ensure consistency from loaf to loaf. You don’t need a fancy scale — a simple cheap one will do.

Bread Forms

Bread forms, which come in wooden and plastic models, give your bread an attractive shape, and leave a nice flour pattern on the crust. Sometimes known as bannetons, they are available at high-end kitchen shops in oval, oblong and round shapes and cost around $30. We use a small round one. You don’t need one, however. You can just shape the loaf in a bowl lined with a heavily floured towel.

Sourdough Recipe

This recipe, inspired by Nancy Silverton’s techniques in Breads from the LaBrea Bakery, will yield a gourmet loaf with a hard crust and scrumptious sourdough flavor. Though the instructions are long, this is an easy recipe with a reasonable chance of success, assuming that you have been good about feeding your starter every day and keeping it in a warm place.

Though far less complicated than manufacturing methamphetamine (not that we know anything about that), sourdough also benefits from precision in measurements, so the use of a scale is the only way to guarantee success. That is why the measurements are given in ounces, not cups.

You’re aiming for dough that is somewhat sticky. In general it’s better to have dough that’s too moist than a dry and stiff dough. Moist dough helps in the formation of carbon dioxide bubbles that give a good dough a light and open texture, though an extremely wet dough will be too sticky and hard to handle when it comes time to remove it from the proofing basket later. Repeat this recipe enough times and you’ll learn to tell if your dough is the right consistency.

Some health circles hold any use of white flour as heretical. This loaf can be made with both a white flour-based starter or a whole wheat starter. We like to use a mixture of whole wheat and white flours for our dough, since the white flour helps to lighten the texture of the bread. You can adjust the proportions to your own taste. Many store-bought “wheat” breads are not actually “whole wheat” and many have preservatives, sugar and long lists of unnecessary ingredients. This naturally leavened bread is close to bread at its most elemental — flour, water and salt.

Ingredients

8 oz. sourdough starter
13 oz. unbleached white bread flour
3 oz. whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons wheat bran
8 oz. cool water
1 ½ teaspoons sea salt

1. Mix the starter, flours, wheat bran and water into a dough. If you are doing this by hand, stir the ingredients together and then knead the loaf vigorously for five minutes. If you have a standing mixer, put all the ingredients in the mixing bowl, fit the machine with the dough hook attachment, and just let it stir for five minutes. It will mix the dough, and then knead it for you.

2. Cover the dough with a cloth and let it rest under a cloth for 20 minutes.

3. Mix in the salt and knead by hand or machine for another six minutes. If you’ve used a mixer you should do a small amount of hand kneading to make sure that the salt has been thoroughly integrated into the dough.

4. Put the dough in an oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap or lid. Let it ferment in a warm place for three to four hours. We use our stovetop, which is always warm from its pilot light.

5. Shape the dough into a boule, which is a pretentious way of saying a flattened ball, and place in a floured proofing basket. We recommend using a wooden proofing basket, called a banneton. The alternative to a banneton is to line an ordinary basket, or even a bowl, with a floured cloth, called a proofing cloth. Your proofing cloth should be made out of a piece of linen or canvas which you rub with flour, quite heavily, so the weave is saturated. Never wash either the banneton or the proofing cloth. Just shake off the excess flour and let them dry before storing so they don’t go moldy. They get better with age, becoming less “sticky” and developing native yeast populations which will help your bread proof.

6. Cover your basket or bowl with a plate or plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator for eight to 24 hours. This long rest gives the loaf time to develop complex flavors.

7. Take the boule out of the refrigerator and put it in a warm place to ferment for another three to four hours.

8. Preheat the oven to 500°. Take the boule out of the proofing basket by turning it upside down onto a stiff piece of cardboard that is covered with flour or cornmeal. You’ll use this to slide the loaf into the oven. Professional bakers and pizza makers use a flat, shovel-like tool called a peel to do this, but a piece of cardboard will work just as well. Shake the loaf around on the cardboard a little to make sure that it will slide off smoothly into the oven without sticking.

9. Using the cardboard, slide the loaf into the oven on top of your baking stone. (If you don’t have a baking stone, you can bake your loaf on a floured cookie sheet which has been preheating in the oven, but the crust will not be as good as it would be if you have a stone.) Immediately turn the oven down to 450°. Get some steam going either by giving the oven walls several quick squirts with a spray bottle, or by tossing a shot glass full of water against the wall. Either way, do it quickly and close the door so you don’t lose heat. This simulates the fancy steam injection systems that commercial bakeries have. Steam will give your loaf a hard crust. The revolution will not be soft-crusted.

10. Over the next five minutes open the oven two or three more times and spray more water in. We’ve also just tossed in a little water from a glass if we don’t have a sprayer on hand.

11. After the five-minute steam injection period is over, continue to bake for another 20 minutes, and don’t open the oven door.

12. After 20 minutes open the oven and rotate the loaf. Bake for another 15 to 20 minutes for a total of 40 to 45 minutes until the crust turns a dark brown.

13. Remove the loaf from the oven, but resist the urge to break into it. It’s still cooking, and you could get a stomach ache from the still-active wild yeasts. Let it cool down before slicing.

After reading this you might think this is too much work, but it really isn’t as bad as it looks. Once you get into the groove, there’s really not much labor involved with making this bread especially if you’ve got a mixer, but it does require some scheduling.

Sourdough Pancakes

These are our favorite kind of pancakes, and a great use for excess starter. This recipe requires two cups of starter. This is one more cup than you will have to spare daily if you are following our starter-feeding instructions, which generate one cup of extra starter a day. You can make a half-batch with one cup, which will make four large pancakes — enough to feed two people if they’re willing to be reasonable about calorie intake. But if you plan ahead you can either double your feeding of the starter the day before, or stockpile starter for a couple of days.

This recipe is also adapted from Nancy Silverton’s Breads from the La Brea Bakery, which should be on your bookshelf if you start baking in earnest.

2 cups sourdough starter
2 tablespoons maple syrup
3 tablespoons light oil
2 eggs
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder

In a large mixing bowl whisk together the liquid ingredients: the starter, eggs, syrup and oil. Then add the rest of the ingredients, making sure they’re well incorporated. Preheat a griddle or skillet and then oil it. It’s hot enough to cook when you flick a drop of water on the surface and it skitters around and burns off quickly. Pour 1/4 to 1/3 cup of the batter on the pan and cook over medium-high heat until bubbles cover the surface of the pancake. Flip it and cook for about one more minute more. You’ll see that this batter makes thin, tender, elastic pancakes riddled with little holes. Keep the finished pancakes warming in the oven while you cook the rest.

Soda Bread

As much as we love our sourdough bread, we still make soda bread. Soda breads and yeast breads are entirely different beasts. Soda breads are more related to cake than anything else. They lack the chewy, elastic quality of yeast or sourdough bread. Soda breads are heavier and more crumbly, and are best eaten by the slice, smeared with butter, or dipped in soup. They need the leavening agents of buttermilk and baking soda to come alive, unlike the marvelously elemental sourdough loaf which is nothing but flour and water. But soda breads have their place in the urban homestead kitchen. They have their own comforting qualities, they are easy to make, forgiving and endlessly adaptable. And best of all, they are there for you whenever you need to round out a meal. You can have a hot loaf of soda bread on the table one hour after you get the notion to make it.

Brown Soda Bread

This makes a hearty, nutty, ever so slightly sweet loaf bread that comes together quickly. Like all soda bread, it isn’t very springy, so doesn’t stand up too well to sandwich duty (though it can be made to work), but is excellent with cheese, or soup, or just toasted and buttered.

This recipe and the classic soda bread that follows are adapted from recipes in the May 1996 issue of Bon Appétit. You know a recipe works when you use it for more than 10 years

1 ¾ cup all-purpose flour
1 ¾ cup whole wheat flour
3 tablespoons toasted wheat bran
3 tablespoons toasted wheat germ
2 tablespoons old-fashioned oats
2 tablespoons packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons chilled unsalted butter cut into pieces
2 cups or so of buttermilk, or any soured milk

Note: The oats, bran and wheat germ are optional. They add texture and fiber to the loaf. Omit them or change them up as you please.

Preheat oven to 425ºF. Butter a 9-inch loaf pan.

Put everything except the butter and buttermilk into a large bowl and mix thoroughly. Add the butter and rub it into the flour with your fingers until you can’t find any chunks of butter anymore. You can opt to cut the butter into the flour using a food processor, but then you have to wash the food processor. Sheer laziness keeps us using our fingers. Stir in the buttermilk until a soft dough forms and you can scrape up most of the dry bits from the bottom of the bowl. You might want to use your hands bring the dough together, but don’t overwork it. This will be a fairly wet dough.

Put it in a greased loaf pan and bake about 40-45 minutes. Do the toothpick test in the center to make sure it is done. The toothpick should come out clean. Turn it out of the pan, and let it cool on a rack.

Classic Soda Bread

Classic soda bread is a white loaf. We often make this recipe with a kind of King Arthur flour called “white whole wheat,” a very mild whole wheat, which gives the loaf a little more nutritional integrity. This loaf is even quicker and easier to make than the brown loaf above. It is made all in one bowl, and doesn’t even need a baking pan. It comes together in seconds.

3 ½ cups flour
2 tablespoons caraway seeds (optional)
1 teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon salt
1 ½ cups buttermilk, yogurt, or other soured milk

Preheat oven to 425ºF. Flour a cookie sheet and set it aside.

Mix all the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Stir in the buttermilk a bit at a time, just until the dough turns into clumps. Put down your spoon and use your hands to gather the dough together into a ball, adding a little more buttermilk to make all the dry bits come together if necessary. Don’t knead it too much. Unlike yeast breads, soda breads, biscuits and all their kin don’t like to be handled. Just shape the dough into a ball as quickly as possible. Drop this ball onto the cookie sheet and flatten it slightly so that it is 2 or 3 inches thick. Take a sharp knife and cut a deep X across the top of it. Bake until it browns, about 35-40 minutes. Test to see if it is done by tapping the bottom — it should sound hollow. You can also do the toothpick test into the center of the top. The toothpick should come out clean.

Variations:

Sometimes we make this white loaf into a sweet loaf, something reminiscent of scones. There is no set recipe for this, just a little improvised tricking up. It starts by adding a little bit of sugar, white or brown. Since the goal is not to make it super-sweet, just slightly sweet, that means adding about ¼ cup of sugar. Then you can up the fat content to make the loaf a little richer and longer-lived by working some butter into the flour. Take ¼ to ½ stick of chilled butter, cut it into chunks and use your fingertips to rub it into the flour until it disappears. This only takes a couple of minutes, but you can also do it with a food processor. Then throw in some dried fruit, like raisins, currants or chopped dried apricots. Leave the caraway seeds in, or take them out. We like the way their flavor blends with raisins.

Add the buttermilk and form the loaf and continue as described in the original recipe. You can brush the top of the loaf with milk to make it a little more attractive. The cooking time will lengthen a little because of the fruit and butter. Do the toothpick test after 40 minutes to make sure that there isn’t any wet dough in the center.

Cleaning The Urban Homestead

Anything they have to advertise is something you don’t need.

 

We didn’t make up that little bit of brilliance above, we paraphrased it from Jerry Mander, author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, a worthwhile read if there ever was one.

We’re starting off our section on cleaning talking about advertising, because advertising is really at the heart what we think of as our national cleaning problem. Cleaning is a simple task, requiring nothing more than soap, water, and a rag. Advertising is what convinces us that we have to buy new, improved, and extra-strength whizbangs, different products for every task and for every room in the house. All this false specialization would just be another relatively harmless iteration of the marketplace if the ads weren’t peddling poisons.

There is no dust bunny, window smudge or grease stain that warrants chemical warfare, yet a lifetime of watching commercials has convinced us that unless we’re cleaning our homes with an arsenal of the strongest chemical compounds available, we’re just not cleaning. Peruse the labels of the things you are cleaning with right now. Do you see the words POISON, WARNING or DANGER anywhere? Most likely you do. When you clean, you are distributing these dangerous chemicals all over your house, cleaning your dishes with them, washing your clothes with them, letting them taint the air you breathe. How can a home full of toxins ever be called “clean”?

Is toxin too strong a word for our standard store-bought cleaning products? No, it is not. You might (reasonably) think that nothing all that harmful would ever be allowed to be sold in stores for home use, but you would be wrong. Cleaning products do not have to be independently tested to confirm their safety before they go to market. Companies are legally free to sell just about anything they want, and don’t need anybody’s okay to bring it to market. They don’t even have to disclose all the ingredients in their products on the labels.

The individual chemicals that make up commercial cleaning products are not particularly well regulated either. Thanks to the Toxic Substances Control Act, an Orwellian name if there ever was one, chemical manufactures are not required to prove a new chemical is safe. Instead, the burden falls on the EPA to demonstrate that the substance poses a significant risk to the public. Over 2000 new chemicals go to the agency for approval each year, leaving little time for a thorough vetting. Most applicants are approved in just three weeks.

So most of the chemical compounds in our cleaning products are of recent invention and for the most part, ill-tested, especially for long-term health and environmental effects. Serious scientists, not just New Age paranoiacs, are beginning to associate these common household cleaners (or perhaps the chemical cocktail they create in mixed use) with cancer, asthma, allergies, immune system disorders and reproductive disorders. And that is just in us humans. They are also tainting the water, and affecting the entire ecosystem.

Are We Too Clean?

If you watch advertisements, or cruise the supermarket shelves, you can’t fail to notice that everything is anti-bacterial now, as if common household bacteria have suddenly become as exotic and deadly as Ebola.

It’s a great marketing coup, but potentially a dangerous one. In our enthusiasm for all things anti-bacterial we are, thanks to the law of natural selection, breeding even more deadly forms of bacteria that laugh at our anti-bacterial handsoap. Just as with the overuse of pesticides and antibiotics, the overuse of anti-bacterial products assures that only the fittest bacteria survive, thereby selecting out ever more virulent strains with each new generation.

For this reason, in 2000, the American Medical Association recommended that the practice of adding common antimicrobials to household products be discontinued. Of course, no one listened to them.

And in our quest for antiseptic environments we lose the low-key exposures to both friendly and not-so-friendly bacteria that keep our immune systems in good working order. This is not to say we should wallow in filth, but it may well be healthier to wallow in a mud hole than in a vat of antiseptic gel. Soap and water are quite enough for any cleaning you have to do, and more than enough to keep your hands clean.

DIY Cleaning Products

Here at our homestead the majority of our cleaning is done with homemade solutions, though we resort to the commercial eco-products for a few things, which we’ll mention later on. We choose to make our own for health reasons, to save money, and to reduce packaging waste. The contents of our kitchen cabinet have changed a lot since switching over. If you look there now, you’ll see a gallon of vinegar, a big box of baking soda, a bottle of castile soap, and three or four recycled spray bottles filled with different homemade solutions.

You may have tried homemade cleaning products in the past, or heard that they don’t really work. Give them another try. The trick of it is to use the right substance for the task at hand.

One common thing we hear is “I tried cleaning (fill in the blank) with vinegar and it didn’t work.” A weird cult has risen around vinegar, so if you’re surfing the internet seeking information on cleaning with vinegar, you’ll find a lot of dubious claims. Vinegar is very useful, but for specific applications. We’ll talk more about that later.

If you can’t quite give up the alluring convenience of packaging, there are eco-friendly cleaning products to be found at health food stores and fancy supermarkets, and we recommend you use those. But be sure they are the real deal. Beware of “greenwashing” — products claiming to be natural or environmentally friendly when they are no better than regular products. The words “green” or “natural” in the name don’t mean anything at all. Those terms are not regulated. Warnings like “Avoid contact with skin” and “Use in a well ventilated area” are hints that these products are not the gentle daisy juice their labels might lead you to believe.

Our Three Principles Of Clean

1. Everything we clean with should be nontoxic and easy on the skin. You shouldn’t have to clean with gloves on.

2. Everything we clean with should be cheap.

3. Everything we use for cleaning should serve multiple purposes — we want as few items beneath our sink as possible, both to save our sanity, and to save on packaging. For example, baking soda has uses in cooking and cleaning, in the bath and in the laundry.

Our Cleaning Cupboard

The Big Three, All You Really Need

Baking Soda

Baking soda is a scrubber and deodorizer. It replaces scouring powder and is gentle enough to use on porcelain. It can be dissolved in water and used for all-purpose cleaning, but we don’t do that because it can leave behind a white residue that has to be rinsed — there are more convenient all-purpose cleaners, which we’ll talk about later. But baking soda is great for scrubbing out sinks, tubs and toilets. It is also a laundry additive: it improves the performance of your soap by softening the water. You’re going to be using it by the cupful, so buy it in quantity at restaurant supply stores or big-box outlets.

I make my own cleaning products because it’s cheaper, time-effective, and “eco-friendly,” as we say these days.

I find it much cheaper and more time-effective to mix vinegar and water for example, instead of having to go to the store, find the equivalent product, buy the product, come back home, and finally realize that I don’t like the feel or smell of it. Even if it’s a product I have used many times and am satisfied with, I will get tired of the scent, so I prefer to make my own, mix in the essential oils I want, and switch whenever I feel like it by not making too big quantities.

The other main reason for me to do this process is because at least I am sure of what I put in my products. I don’t particularly enjoy finding out that the products I buy in a general store don’t biodegrade, pollute our water sources and/or are simply bad and sometimes dangerous to breathe or be in contact with!

 

Severine Baron, Montreal

Distilled White Vinegar

Vinegar is a mild acid, a disinfectant, a deodorizer, and a fabric softener. It is great for wiping down tabletops, appliances, mopping the floor and cleaning toilet seats, because it is a mild disinfectant, and it leaves nothing behind except a slight shine. But we’ve found it doesn’t do much to cut grease or heavy soap scum. It prefers to leave the heavy lifting to soap and baking soda. The smell is not a problem because it vanishes as soon as it dries, and takes any other unpleasant odors with it. It is easy to find white vinegar in gallon containers at any grocery store.

Liquid Castile Soap

Castile soap is used in place of all liquid detergents and soaps as a general cleaner for home and body because it is simple and safe. Castile soap is soap made with 100% vegetable-based oils, and nothing else. Other liquid soaps and detergents are often made with petroleum byproducts. They clean very well and rinse easily, but when they go down the drain, they throw off the chemistry of our natural waters.

The best-known brand of castile soap is Dr. Bronner’s which is widely available in health food stores and some mainstream markets and drugstores. Remember to follow the advice on the bottle: “Dilute! Dilute! Dilute!” If you don’t like Dr. Bronner’s, remember that all castile soaps are not the same. They vary in character and price depending on what types of oils they contain. Take a look online and you’ll find a lot of options.

Other Cleaning Aids You Might Want to Keep Around

Essential Oils

Use these to tart up your cleaning preparations. Citrus, lavender, eucalyptus and rosemary are commonly used to evoke “clean” associations. But hey, if you want your toilet bowl to smell like patchouli, we’re behind you 100%. Look for them in health food stores, or order them online for better prices.

Tea Tree Oil

Lots of folks like to add tea tree oil to their cleaning products for its antibacterial properties. Tea tree oil is also found at health food stores.

 

Hydrogen Peroxide is a non-toxic disinfectant and a bleach. Use the 3% solution, the drugstore kind.

 

Olive Oil or lighter oils like safflower can be used with vinegar to polish furniture.

 

Beeswax makes a really high-quality furniture polish for the über-homemaker. You can buy beeswax from beekeepers/honey suppliers, and anywhere you buy candle-making supplies, but if you only need a limited quantity it might be easiest just to buy a small beeswax candle.

 

Lemon juice is another acid, like vinegar, and is often used for bleaching. Scrub your cutting boards with salt and lemon to disinfect them.

“Green” Cleaners We Are Not Really Down With, But Others Use:

Borax (usually found in the laundry section of the supermarket as “20 Mule Team Borax”) is a naturally occurring mineral salt, often used in the alternative cleaning circles as an all-purpose cleaner, scrub powder and laundry booster.

While it is certainly better for the environment than most of the cleaning products you find on the supermarket shelves, borax does not make our cleaning cut for two reasons. The first is that it is irritating to skin and eyes, so you have to be careful when you use it, and the second is that it is toxic if swallowed.

Baking soda duplicates borax’s functions: scrubber, cleaner, laundry additive, but baking soda is actually good for your skin (you can bathe in it, use it as an exfoliator, or use it to soothe insect bites) and while you should not ingest lots of it, you can take it as an antacid. Why would anyone bother keeping borax around when baking soda is the safer alternative? Probably because borax is a little stronger. But that’s not enough of a reason for us.

 

Ammonia is a naturally occurring substance, and it often finds it way into green cleaning lists. Its functions are similar to vinegar, but it is stronger. However, it is also caustic, and irritating to the lungs and eyes, so it is just too much trouble to use. Stronger is not always better. Vinegar is the common-sense alternative.

Non-Toxic Cleaning Formulas For The Homesteader

We’ve spoken to a lot of urban homesteaders about how they mix up their cleaning products. It turns out that none of us do it exactly the same way twice. We’re all mixologists and mad scientists on cleaning day. So consider the recipes that follow as starting points for your own experiments.

All-Purpose Spray Cleaners

Formula 1 for kitchens:

Fill a regular-sized spray bottle ⅓ of the way with vinegar, fill the rest with water. Add a tablespoon of castile soap. Shake before each use.

If you have a clear bottle, you’ll see that when you first add the soap to the vinegar water, a reaction happens which separates the fats out of the soap. This will disperse after a few minutes, but a tiny bit of fat ends up floating at the top of the bottle. Since you’re drawing water from the bottom of the bottle, this is not going to be a problem.

This formula mixes the shining and deodorizing qualities of vinegar with just a little soap to cut grease, making it a great all-around cleaner. We use it primarily in the kitchen on things like the grimy fridge door or the greasy stove. It’s also good for wiping down counters. The vinegar smell disperses as it dries, and deodorizes the whole room.

Vinegar-Free Variation: If the fat dispersal or the vinegar smell bothers you, a simple solution of ⅛-¼ cup of castile soap in a quart-sized spray bottle full of water also works very well for kitchen clean-up.

Formula 2 for bathrooms, and anything that shines:

50% water plus 50% white vinegar in a spray bottle.

We find this blend good for general wipe-down purposes, as long as what you’re wiping isn’t greasy. Vinegar and water is particularly good for bathroom cleaning, since vinegar is a mild disinfectant and a deodorizer, and is good for shiny surfaces, tile, toilet tanks, even mirrors. It doesn’t require rinsing. The little bit of soap found in Formula #1 makes it not as ideal for leaving a shine.

We keep a bottle of this mix in the bathroom, and use it to clean everything in there except the tub and toilet bowl. The soap scum on the bottom of the tub requires a scrub, and the bowl gets a dose of straight vinegar. More on that later.

 

NOTE: Vinegar should never be used on stone surfaces. If you have granite countertops, marble floors, or the like, you might be stuck using the manufacturer’s recommended cleaners. We have no experience with stone and don’t want to be accountable for the ruination of your $30,000 countertops. That said, washing them with water infused with a couple of drops of castile soap seems safe enough (acids like lemon juice and vinegar are your big concern), but the soap might leave a film. For what it is worth, we know one intrepid natural cleaner who wipes down his granite countertops with a very dilute (5% or less) solution of rubbing alcohol in water, but the safety and effectiveness of this will surely vary by how your stone surface is sealed.

All-Purpose Scouring Powder

Get a sugar shaker from a restaurant supply store — or be trashy like us and punch some holes in the lid of a jar — and fill it with baking soda. If you want scented scrub, add a few drops of essential oil to the baking soda in the can, cover the holes, and shake well. The scent will last a long time, and can be refreshed as necessary.

Baking soda is a gentle and effective scrubber, safe for porcelain sinks and tubs, tile and grout, pots and pans, and strong enough for stovetop grime. It is also good for getting stains out of mugs.

For tough, baked-on crud in pots and pans, make a paste with a little water and soda and let it sit for a good while, then come back and scrub with a scouring pad. If the soda is not enough try scrubbing with regular salt. Salt is much more abrasive, though, so don’t use it on delicate surfaces.

Sink Bleaching

If after you scrub your sink clean it still looks a little yellow, try doing a second scrub with the rind of a lemon. Leave the juice and pulp sitting for a little while, then rinse. Put the used rind down the disposal to make it smell better.

Floor Cleaner

Vinyl, linoleum and tile floors can be mopped with ¼-½ cup of vinegar in a bucket of water. A wood floor can carefully damp-mopped with the same mixture, just make sure your mop is only damp, barely even damp, in fact, and certainly not wet.

Use hot water to increase your cleaning power, and for fun add just a few drops of an essential oil of your choice. Rosemary and eucalyptus oil clear the sinuses as you mop. Keep a little of the soft scrub (see below), or your baking soda shaker, to attack really gunky spots.

NEVER use vinegar on marble, and to be safe, any stone floor.

Dish Liquid & Automatic Dishwasher Detergent

Here we confess to resorting to store-bought. Castile soap leaves a slight film on dishes. Some people use borax for hand-washing dishes, but as we’ve said, we’re not huge borax fans. So we look for a plant-based, phosphate-free, biodegradable dish liquid made with the fewest ingredients possible. The longer the ingredients list, we find, the more likely there is to be trouble.

Similarly, we don’t know of any effective homemade substitute for dishwasher detergent, and so have to rely on an eco-product for this as well. If you are disappointed with the first alternative dishwasher detergent you try, keep looking. All eco-products are not all alike, and you’ll find one that works for you.

Disinfecting Sprays

Here at the Urban Homestead we sigh rather heavily at the thought of a disinfectant spray (see our rant above), but our friends with babies swear they need disinfectant. So if you don’t trust soap and water to do the job it was born to do, and need to specialize, these are our recommendations:

 

Regular Old Hydrogen Peroxide (3% Solution): Keep it in the opaque bottle it comes in because it is light-sensitive. Just screw a spray bottle nozzle on the original bottle, spritz and wipe. Remember, peroxide is a bleach, as any truck stop blonde can tell you, so don’t spray it on fabric. Straight vinegar is also a fair disinfectant, by the way.

The Nuclear Option: If you want the true nuclear option for disinfecting, we’ve got a neat trick for you. Spray your suspect surface with straight hydrogen peroxide and follow it immediately with a spritz of straight vinegar. Actually you can spritz in either order, but keep the two liquids in their own bottles. If you mix them together in one bottle they create a new substance called peracetic acid which is dangerous. But used separately, one right on top of the other, they pack a devastating one-two punch for the bacterial kingdom and remain perfectly safe for you.

This technique was developed by Susan Sumner, a food scientist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and tested in their labs. They tried this technique on heavily contaminated surfaces and found that it eliminated virtually all salmonella, shigella and E. coli bacteria.

She actually developed this as a food treatment, as a way to disinfect meat and produce. It is non-toxic, and after rinsed off under running water, is said to leave no flavor behind. We’re sure Susan is right about this, but we’ll stick with rinsing our food with water.

 

What About Tea Tree Oil?: Many people we talk to regularly add a few drops of tea tree oil to their homemade cleaning products hoping for a boost in antibacterial powers. Straight tea tree oil is a powerful natural antibacterial and antifungal agent. The problem is that we don’t know how well it works diluted, and have not found any research on the subject. A solution of one tablespoon of tea tree oil to one cup of water is effective at removing musty, mildewy smells from things that have been in storage, that we know. Does that mean that concentration will kill other bugs? That we don’t know. Caveat emptor.

Fruit And Vegetable Wash

There is no need to buy or make special fruit washes. Rinsing your produce under running water, and perhaps scrubbing with a brush, is perfectly adequate and recommended by the FDA. The exception to this might be if your soil is carrying heavy amounts of lead. Under ordinary conditions, just rinsing with water and maybe scrubbing does a good job of removing bacteria and surface pesticide residue. Tests have shown that commercial washes are no more effective than plain water. Homemade preparations involving soap, vinegar or bleach are also not recommended because they may leave a residue on the food that will, at the very least, affect flavor.

If you are worried about pesticides, buy organic because pesticides are not only on the skin, but also absorbed into the produce. Or better yet, grow your own food.

If you are worried about E. coli and other bacteria, wash your hands before handling food. You are probably the biggest food contamination risk in your kitchen. Then cut off or discard any wilted or bruised sections of your produce before putting it away — these spots are where bacteria breed. And, at the risk of sounding redundant, grow your own food.

Loving The Rags

You can spray disinfectant all you want, and clean every minute of the day, but if your sponge is full of bacteria, you’ll just be spreading a fresh layer of bacteria around every time you wipe down a surface or wash a dish. We recommend you switch away from using cellulose sponges in the kitchen and use cotton dishcloths instead, changing out to a fresh one every couple of days. They don’t add too much to the laundry burden, and they’re a lot more sanitary than sponges. When they become stained and worn, they can be downgraded to cleaning rags. Best yet, if they are all-cotton, you can compost them at the end of their lives.

Toilet Cleaner

The 50/50 vinegar and water spray works very well for the toilet seat and bowl. It cleans, deodorizes and leaves no residue behind. To clean the inside of the toilet, lower the level of the water in the bowl by bucket flushing (dumping a bucket of water in the toilet). Then pour straight vinegar around the sides of the bowl and scrub with a toilet brush. This basic vinegar approach is more than sufficient cleaning for any toilet. The idea that stronger, more toxic cleaners are necessary is ridiculous, because no matter how sterile the bowl is after cleaning, that state lasts only until the next time the toilet is used.

If the state of the bowl is dire, after bucket flushing escalate to scrubbing with straight baking soda with your toilet brush. If you mix baking soda with vinegar it will foam like crazy. This foaming is harmless (unlike the dreaded bleach and ammonia reaction).

Magic Soft Scrub For Soap Scum On The Bottom Of The Tub And Other Things

Put a half-cup or so of baking soda in a little bowl. Mix this with a little castile soap. Keep adding soap until the mix resembles frosting. Add a few drops of essential oils if you wish. This stuff is really good for scrubbing bathtub rings and gunky sinks. It excels at removing soap scum. It is so pleasant to use (especially if it smells like peppermint, like ours does), you might end up wandering around looking for more things to scrub. You do have to rinse after scrubbing, or it will leave a powdery residue behind.

If we’re in a rush, we clean our tub scum by spritzing first with our spray bottle of soapy water, then sprinkle on some baking soda and scrub with a nylon poof. The combo of soap and soda dissolves soap scum very well, no matter what form it comes in.

Mold And Mildew

Spray vinyl shower curtains with straight vinegar and then scrub to remove mildew spots. If there’s lots of soap scum and mildew on the curtains, it’s easier to take the curtains down and put them in the washing machine on the cold cycle.

Freshen stuff like camping gear which has taken on a mildew odor in storage by misting it with your 50/50 vinegar and water blend, or if it’s really bad, straight vinegar or, if you have it around, a solution of one tablespoon of tea tree oil in one cup of water.

Mineral Deposits

Vinegar is great at removing mineral deposits. That is why manufacturers recommend running vinegar through their coffee makers now and then. If you have mineral build-up at the bottom of a teakettle, boil a little vinegar in the kettle and it will come right off with no scrubbing. Vinegar will also dissolve lime deposits around faucets or in a toilet bowl — just soak paper towels or rags with vinegar (hot vinegar works faster) and lay them directly on the mineral build-up for a while, then scrub off the softened lime with a scouring pad and/ or some baking soda.

Vinegar also removes hard water deposits from shower heads. Mix a half and half solution of hot water and vinegar, and soak your shower head in it, either by taking off the head, or putting the vinegar solution in a bag and putting the bag over the shower head. WARNING: vinegar is an acid and might dull some metal finishes, particularly if left in contact with them for an extended length of time. Check after 15 minutes and see if the deposits are dissolved. Here at the homestead we dulled the finish around the edge of our nickel finish bathroom faucet by forgetting we had a bag of vinegar on it for…oh, about 12 hours.

Mirrors And Shiny Fixtures

Spray with your 50/50 vinegar and water mix and wipe clean. Dry the mirror to avoid spots. If you’re cleaning for company and want everything extra-shiny, try using vodka. Just dampen a rag with it and wipe.

Drain Cleaner

To keep drains clear of greasy build-up, every so often put a cup of baking soda down your drains, followed by a couple of cups of boiling water, or a cup of vinegar. Now, if your drain is actually clogged, it is too late for baking soda. Hair is the source of most clogs, and so if possible, put one of those little mesh baskets in your drains to catch hair and prevent clogs in the first place.

The best way to unclog a drain or a toilet is with a device called an auger. The ones for sinks or tubs are called crank augers, and the ones for toilets are called toilet (or closet) augers. They both have a long flexible metal rope called a “snake.” You twist this snake down your pipes to physically break up the clog. The two kinds of augers are not interchangeable — a toilet auger has a snake inside a protective tube which allows you to run the business end into the toilet without damaging the bowl’s porcelain.

It is far better to use these simple tools to manually remove a clog than to send caustic drain openers into our water supply, or to pay for an expensive plumber’s visit. In fact, we learned about toilet augers from our plumber, who said as he cranked a toilet auger down our clog-prone toilet, “You can get yourself one of these, or you can call me out to do this for you for a hundred bucks a pop.” Both kinds of augers will run in the $30 range.

Window Cleaner

Rigorous scientific studies here at our urban homestead have revealed a surprising truth: hot water and a rag works better than anything else at removing the combination of smog and dog snot on our windows. The key to window washing is not so much in the washing, it seems, but in a thorough drying.

Vinegar and water works too. Whether plain water or vinegar water works better might depend on what’s dirtying your windows. If you keep a 50/50 mix of vinegar and water around for general cleaning, you can just use that for quick touchups. But you can dilute the mix more if you are mixing it up special for windows. A bucket of steaming hot water with about a ¼ cup of vinegar in it would be a good mix for a big job.

If you get streaks when you try using vinegar on your windows, it is probably because you have a wax build-up from using commercial window cleaners. Add a squirt of soap to your vinegar mix, and it should cut through the wax. After that, you can go back to just plain vinegar.

Carpet Freshener

Sprinkle a generous cloud of baking soda over your carpet, then use a broom to brush it into the fibers. Let it sit for at least 15 minutes before vacuuming it up. If you wish, you can scent the baking soda first with essential oils by mixing a few drops of oil with the baking soda and shaking them together in the box or in a bag. Baking soda also makes your vacuum bag smell better.

Furniture Polish

Dusting and wiping with a just barely damp cloth to remove any grime does a whole lot toward maintaining wood. Only furniture polish manufacturers expect you to polish every week. But if the wood looks thirsty, you can mix up a little salad dressing: three parts olive oil to one part vinegar and rub that on sparingly with a rag.

Too easy, Martha? This is an advanced furniture polish recipe given to us by our Montreal-based urban homesteading friend, Severine:

Lemon furniture polish:

1 ounce beeswax
8 ounces jojoba oil (or other light oils such as grapefruit oil)
¼ teaspoon lemon essential oil
¼ teaspoon orange essential oil
¼ teaspoon grapefruit essential oil
⅛ teaspoon thyme essential oil

1. Measure the beeswax and jojoba oil into a Pyrex measuring cup and place the cup into a bath of boiling water. When the wax is nearly melted, remove the cup from the water and stir the ingredients to thoroughly combine.

2. Allow the mixture to cool for about one minute.

3. Add the essential oils next and stir well to combine. Pour into a wide-mouthed jar so you can easily dispense it. Let cool completely for a few hours, best overnight.

4. To use, apply the mixture a little at a time to clean furniture surface using a soft wool or cotton cloth. I like to use worn dish towels because they are very soft and pliable.

Laundry Soap

Try using ¼ to ⅓ cup pure liquid castile soap to wash your next load of laundry. It may feel slightly transgressive. “What? No cleaning crystals? How’s this going to work?” It works surprisingly well. Castile soap works fine for cleaning jeans, t-shirts and dark cotton knits, especially when boosted with baking soda. It also works well for lingerie and other delicates. But it is not fantastic for whites. Over time whites washed in soap can take on a grayish cast. So for them use an eco-brand laundry detergent supplemented with oxygen bleach.

Laundry Boosters And Rinse Aids

Increase the cleaning power of your soap by tossing in ½ cup of baking soda along with your soap (or any detergent) as the washer fills. Be sure the soda has a chance to dissolve before you add your clothes, otherwise you might end up with white soda residue on your laundry. One cup of straight vinegar can be used in the rinse cycle in place of fabric softener. A vinegar rinse also helps deodorize stinky laundry.

Laundry Bleach (Chlorine Alternatives)

For bleaching purposes, you are best off using one of the chlorine-free bleaches sold by the green cleaning folks. As a class these products are called oxygen bleaches. At heart they are basically hydrogen peroxide, and are quite safe for you and the environment.

The thing to understand about oxygen bleaches is that they are really best for preventive whitening: you add a little to every load of whites to keep them white. If your whites are already yellow or grey, they are probably beyond the reach of oxygen bleach.

The Power Of The Sun

A really simple way to keep your whites fresh, at least in the summer, is to hang them out in the sun. Sunlight is a powerful bleaching agent. You may have discovered this if you’ve ever left something like a beach towel or t-shirt lying out in the sun for a few days. Even if you don’t have a laundry line, you can drape your wet laundry over shrubs. Just give the foliage a hose-down first to make sure the leaves aren’t coated with city smog.

Extreme Measures

Ellen Sandbeck, author of our favorite book on green cleaning, Organic Housekeeping, makes an interesting suggestion for saving any white item that seems hopelessly grungy or stained. She recommends that you treat it with something called a color remover, also known as a reduction bleach. Found in craft stores, hardware stores and some drug stores, color removers are used to strip color from fabric before dyeing. The well-known dye company, Rit, makes Rit Color Remover and Rit White-Wash, but there are other brands too. The active ingredient in color removers, sodium hydrosulfite, is what the paper industry uses as a less toxic alternative to chlorine bleach.

Stain Removers

Stain removal is an art — what will remove blood won’t remove coffee. If you want to keep sweat stains from setting in the armpits of your favorite shirt, try spritzing your shirt with vinegar. Protein-based stains respond very well to a little presoaking in a strong solution of any commercial oxygen bleach (which is safe even for colored fabric). Follow the instructions on the container. Soap lifts grease stains, which makes sense, but it actually sets tannin stains, like wine or tea, so never try to spot clean those with soap. Instead, do as much as you can just flushing those with water, and then launder with detergent — any cleaning agent which does not contain plant or animal oils.

 

GREYWATER REVOLUTIONARIES: If you are recycling the water from your washing machine, you have to do business differently than directed above. Castile soap, vinegar, and baking soda are not so great for your soil. Nor are most commercial detergents, even the green ones. All of these substances are easy on the public water supply, and on aquatic life, but are not so good for terrestrial plants. You must use a product specifically formulated for greywater use, like Oasis Biocompatible laundry detergent.

Less Toxic Ways To Deal With Unwelcome Critters

Pantry Moths

If you frequent bulk bins, you’ll get moths. One way to prevent them is to freeze anything you bring home for four days, or just keep all of your bulk grain and flour in the fridge or freezer all the time. If you open your cabinet and a moth flies out, don’t ignore it. Kill it, and find out where it came from. At least one item in your cupboard is infested. Check the cereal first — oatmeal containers are a big favorite. They also like flour, corn starch, nuts and sugar, but won’t turn their noses up at pasta. Look for larvae and webbing or strange clumping or crumbling.

If you catch the outbreak in time, you might get away with just throwing away that one source of infestation, but if you continue to see moths, you have trouble. Then you have to throw away everything in your pantry that is not canned. They can get into anything, all plastic bags and boxes, even some kinds of lidded jars. Jars have to have threaded screw tops or rubber seals to keep them out. After you’ve emptied your pantry, clean the shelves with straight vinegar, being sure to shoot vinegar into all the cracks and crevices where their eggs are hiding.

Ants and Roaches

Prevention first. Keep surfaces clean, and food in sealed containers or in the fridge. Put away cat and dog food. Get a garbage can with a tight lid, like one of those snazzy ones than open with a foot pedal. If you are under siege, keep everything in the fridge.

Boric acid is a low-toxicity mineral that is a much safer solution to ant and roach problems than poison sprays. That said, keep it out of reach of kids and pets, and follow the safety precautions on the label. Use it by dusting the powder in crevices and inaccessible areas where ants and roaches travel. You can also make an ant bait by mixing a little sugar with the boric acid. Look for boric acid in the pest control section of a hardware or drug store, where it will be sold in squeeze bottles under the label “ant and roach powder.” You can also add about a tablespoon of boric acid to a bucketful of whatever you use to mop your kitchen, and mop as usual. Don’t rinse. The thin layer of dust it leaves behind will not be dangerous to you or your pets, but it will clog the breathing tubes of your bugs.

Hazardous Waste Disposal

Once you make the switch to non-toxic cleaning, you might be left with a cupboard full of potent chemicals that you never intend to touch again. Don’t let them sit, because they change over time and may eat their own bottles, and please don’t flush them down the toilet. Dispose of them safely, and for free, by taking them to the hazardous waste facility nearest you. To find out where your hazardous waste drop-off point is, contact your city government.

A Homestead Of Your Own

Wherever you are now — that’s your homestead. Never put off homesteading because you think you are in the wrong place. Even if you live in a windowless box, or in the most tight-assed planned community ever conceived by a black-hearted developer, there are ways to homestead. Even if you can’t grow food in your own backyard, you can forage for edible plants, tend a plot in a community garden, preserve and ferment foods, whether they are from a farmers’ market or a dumpster dive. You can lessen your dependence on the car, or build community in your neighborhood. The homestead is about much more than just growing food.

That said, if it is moving time, it makes sense to keep gardening in mind as you search for a new apartment, look for a house to buy, or plan to build your dream home. Everyone has certain preferences that guide their house hunt. You have to have wood floors, for instance, or you have to be near a certain school. You might want to add agricultural concerns to your list as well.

If You Are Looking For An Apartment

Search for an apartment with a south-facing balcony or patio for outdoor gardening, or at least banks of south-facing windows for indoor growing. Look for complexes with little bits of undeveloped land that you might be able to colonize. Look for ground floor units with little patches of soil around the front door.

Talk to the building manager, and see if they’d be cool with you festooning your public spaces with lots of potted plants. Check the other units out. Is there any kind of conformity standard at work, or is everyone sort of doing their own thing on their porches and balconies? Ask about roof access, too. Could you keep “a few” plants up there?

Renting Or Buying A House

Whether you rent or buy, the basic considerations for choosing a house are the same, though of course as a renter you must get permission for your farming endeavors. Enlightened, or at least negligent, landlords do exist who will not mind if you start a compost heap, keep chickens, or grow food on their property. If they are uneasy about you digging in their yard, propose that all of your growing be in raised beds. At least you will not be digging holes in the ground, and theoretically the entire thing could be thrown away when you leave.

Take Note Of These Things As You House Hunt

How big is the backyard? How is the sunlight back there? Is it shaded out by neighboring buildings or trees? The best situation for the garden is the south side of the house, so that the plants get the maximum amount of sunlight. Western and eastern exposures are second best, but north-facing yards are to be avoided, because they probably won’t get enough light to grow food.

If the light or space in the back is poor, how’s the light in the front yard? Are there side yards that you could plant in, too? Would the neighbors have a conniption fit if you replaced the front lawn with a vegetable garden? Is there a neighborhood ordinance again line-drying clothes? How about chickens?

Check out the current landscaping, or lack thereof. Mature fruit trees and good soil are a big plus, if you are lucky enough to find a property so blessed. If not, concentrate on avoiding big negatives. A backyard sheathed in concrete, for example, is a big negative. Yes, you can rip it out, but then you have to start building your soil from scratch.

For your own comfort and pleasure, look for mature shade trees planted where they will cool the house but not shade your vegetable garden. A big deciduous tree can do a lot to cool a house in the summer, but unlike a big pine tree, it will not make the house shadowy and chilly in the winter, because its leaves will be gone.

The Ecology Of The House

Look for homes that have access to good cross ventilation and ways to deal with the heat of the summer without resorting to air conditioning. Houses like this might have windows protected by awnings or deep eaves so the sun doesn’t heat up the house in the summer, but can shine in the windows in the winter. They might have sleeping porches and screened porches for the summer, and sun rooms for the winter. Good insulation is a definite plus. If you’re considering converting to solar, look for property where either the roof or the yard has good exposure to the sun. And remember, the most efficient way to conserve energy is to choose to live in a smaller space.

Water Harvesting

If you are interested in harvesting rainwater or using greywater, look for these things:

•  A house where the garden is lower than the plumbing in the house  so that you can use gravity instead of pumps and tanks to bring greywater to your garden. Look for ways that rainwater flowing from your roof, from any slopes on the property or from your neighbor’s yard, can be redirected toward the yard to water your crops.

•  Accessible plumbing. Some houses sink the plumbing into a  concrete slab, others put it in damn unpleasant, nearly inaccessible, crawlspaces. The ideal setup is a house with a basement where you can standup straight, and all the pipes are exposed.

Location Location Location

Proximity To Culture

When you choose your house, imagine you don’t have a car. How would you get around? Can you walk to anything from your hypothetical house? Draw a circle with a one-mile radius on a map with your home in the center and consider what falls into that circle. It is especially nice to have a few restaurants close at hand, as well as a market. And at the risk of sounding like a couple of lushes, we enjoy having a dark and cushy bar a few blocks from our house. That way we can go out, have a couple of martinis, and not have to worry about the drive home.

Also consider the house’s proximity to public transportation, and the quality of the bikability of that neighborhood. Is it possible for you to walk, bike or take public transport to your job? To the places you like to shop? To your gym, yoga studio, or school?

Neighborhood Character

Take a walk around your prospective neighborhood and look for signs of life. Is it one of those professional ghost towns inhabited only by housekeepers during the day, or are the residents out and about — on the front porch, working the garden, or playing with their kids. Are there any fellow gardeners in the neighborhood? Conversely, do you see any weedy, ill-kept yards? Yards like that mean it’s more likely that you’ll be able to get away with revolutionary schemes in your own yard. All in all you are searching for a neighborhood that is lively, and diverse, and not uptight. In such a neighborhood you’ll probably fit in well and find some good neighbors.

Building a Homestead

Nowadays the style sections of newspapers and magazines are full of profiles of spacious and sleek “green” houses made with novel eco-materials by famous architects. Eco-design is the wave of the future, these articles promise, it is going to save us all. This is all very glamorous, but the truth is that if you want to take the truly environmentally conscious route, you can do two things: renovate an old house instead of building new and live in the smallest place you can, whether you rent, buy or build.

Tearing down an old house is wasteful; the craftsmanship and materials used to build old homes cannot be replicated today. More than that, the construction of a new house — any type of house — generates three to five tons of waste that goes straight to the landfills. We urban homesteaders suggest that you revitalize a house instead, a home in the dense urban core, somewhere central where you can walk and bike around. Your footprint will be much smaller than someone who builds a “green” house on pristine land at the edge of the city and has to get in the car and drive for miles just to get a carton of milk.

There is much to be said for living in a small place. It seems counter to the American dream to suggest that we downsize. The size of our homes has been growing steadily since World War II, and along with it our home energy use and our personal debt. We have to stop thinking big, at least when it comes to material things.

When you live small, you’ll be living in a more ecologically sustainable way. Small homes are significantly easier to heat, cool, light and maintain. Apartments, even more so. Nothing trumps size in terms of energy efficiency. But more compelling than energy savings is life savings. A small home supports you and allows you to do what you want to do, rather than burdening you with debt, worry and upkeep.

When We Say Small, We Mean SMALL

Living in California, we dream about a lot covered with lush crops and fruit trees, but which contains no central house at all. Instead it would have a small trailer or micro-house for sleeping, sheds for offices, and a sheltered deck for gathering and entertaining and outdoor cooking. Our friends would live with us, in their own tiny houses. The entire setup would be so energy-wise that we could go off-grid. It would be a village within the city.

For the past five years I’ve lived on top of a sandstone bluff in a territory overlooking the confluence of the number 2 freeway and the number 5 freeway. I live in the middle of a dense garden in a 26-foot trailer that I purchased sight-unseen near the Mexican border some seven years ago. The trailer came to me complete with critters and a rotting floor — an investment which seemed questionable to me at the time, but in hindsight, the greatest material gift that has entered my life thus far. This trailer has not only served as my shelter and work space for the past years — but as a kind of entry into another understanding of what life (and specifically life in a massive city) can be. I am surrounded by a small group of brilliant, lovely people I get to call neighbors, and collectively we grow food, build spaces, sew clothing — live on and enjoy this plot of land in which we are all so completely invested. By living in a small space, in a more or less rent-free scenario, I have been able to shift the locus of my life energy and imagination to tasks and work which are for me ultimately meaningful and nourishing.

I am convinced that a first step towards emancipation from the pressures and brutality of meaningless work (perpetuated cyclically by rent/ bill-paying slavery) can be found by living in smaller spaces, or trailer-like spaces — and slipping into the cracks. The benefits of living in a trailer/ small space are endless, some of the possibilities being: minimizing major expenditures in your life; learning about and inventing living systems (such as understanding where your source(s) of energy and water come from) with the very real possibility for employing alternative energies and “offgrid” technologies; living more autonomously, experimenting with indoor/ outdoor living situations which might allow for the transformation of a tiny living space into an expansive environment to share with others, learning how to fix and maintain a variety of household systems: plumbing, electrical, hot water, refrigeration (when you live in a small space, the scale of these such systems are far more manageable and basic); inventing alternate ways to “pay” for a place to park your trailer or build your small abode — barter, work exchange, etc., building tents, tree houses, outhouses(!), living more simply, consuming less — creating more!

The downsides to living in a small space (in my understanding) are very few. At times there can be hassles or inconveniences, such as running out of propane and having freezer meltdowns…or strange brushes with the Department of Building and Safety. No matter where you live, there is a set of sacrifices or payment for shelter, space, and infrastructure. Choosing to live in a trailer or small space is a deliberate and conscious effort to take on a slightly different set of sacrifices, which lead to a more expansive, liberating, and productive life. In these uncertain times, when the default, standard modes for living are becoming harder and harder to maintain (both physically, and spiritually), you can invent alternate methods, which can be energizing and transformative for your well-being, as well as the lives of people who surround you.

 

Eva, Los Angeles

We’ve been experiencing fantasies like the one above ever since we discovered The Tumbleweed Tiny House Company (tumbleweedhouses.com). The founder of the company, Jay Shafer, builds perfectly planned, exquisitely crafted tiny houses, and also sells plans for them. What sets his designs apart from playhouses is their perfect planning. Not an inch of space is wasted, or ill-considered. His houses are so small they do not even qualify as dwellings fit for residences in many cities, therefore his houses are often fit with wheels so that they qualify as “trailers.”

Tumbleweed House

Alternative Living Strategies

Anybody who is willing to live a compact domestic life is freed up financially to follow their dreams. We know of urban homeowners who have bought a tiny house or trailer and parked it at the back of their own property. They rent out their big house as an income source. That way, they don’t work for their property, their property works for them.

Other people might live in a guest house, or in a trailer on someone else’s property, or they might be gypsies, or they might park their trailer behind their business and call it an “office,” and so be able invest their housing dollars into doing what they love.

Unfortunately, at this time, city officials take a dim view of people “camping out” in trailers, so to avoid hassles you need to keep your trailer behind a legitimate house or business, so that it can reasonably be argued to be an office, or a recreational vehicle.