Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation

Loaded with great info!

Given as a gift. It was well received and appreciated for someone who is working to return to the simpler life of food preparation and providing for themselves.

Not as comprehensive as expected. Still a good one to have, but the listing currently doesn't mention that the book is made up of donated recipes from random people. None of the methods described were tested by the author. It's a collection of folk methods, literally, but none were double-checked or tested by the author, or by any other authority.As a result, some of the methods, (or recipes, as the "methods" are printed out in a style like reading a recipe) look reliable and useful. Others, I looked at with skepticism. There was a range of kind-of-sketchy-not-so-great, to oh-hey,-seems-pretty-legit, throughout.Nowhere are there any warnings about botulism or other food poisoning types, how or why it can happen, how to check for it, the conditions it thrives in. Especially for oil-preserving recipes, those things should always be noted. This should always exist in ANY food preservation book where food poisoning can pose a threat to life should things go wrong in its preservation."Mostly it's obvious when food has spoiled" is absolutely not good enough and that's what you get for safety advice in this book. If you know food "un-safety" danger signs from elsewhere, cool. If not, don't make this your sole source of food preservation information.The book has no methods for preservation of meats.It has one method for salting anchovies and for flat fish. That was simple, which was good. The recipes didn't include what the interim or the end product should look like, smell like, texture, or troubleshooting, and mentioned only that once salted, the salted fish should be cooked like any fresh fish should, which, ehh... hmm. My experience with salt-preserved fish usually = the fish becomes very salty... with changes to texture, and usually it's good to soak some salt out, from before using it.The other method was for drying fish on a very tall pole so that flies couldn't fly high enough to reach it, but extra details there would have been welcomed. How long does it take? What conditions should it be, weather-wise? Do you leave them out when it's raining, or hot out, or during any season? For that matter, how high can flies fly, anyway?This book does not contain information on preserving through jerky, old fashioned potted meat, biltong, cooked pork preserved in a barrel under a layer of lard. Nowhere in this book is anything- meat or otherwise- preserved with smoke.Some of the recipes are for foods that are not applicable to my region (USA) or/and that are not commercially available. The preservation recipes for foods I haven't heard of don't actually describe what kind of vegetable they are. Most of the recipes assume a knowledge base that in some cases, like those, is unrealistic to expect. I'm more educated than many in a wide variety of foods spanning many cultures, so that was kind of weird to experience.What the book does offer is recipes for making dried fruit and dried vegetables using solar dehydration or electric dehydration or drying by tying up with string. It offers a few recipes for chutneys- basically jam without added sugar. It offers a big chunk of lacto-fermentation recipes. It offers recipes that use oil poured on top of fresh produce and recipes with vinegar as the preserving factor. It offers salt or sugar-using recipes for preserving. (Which sometimes use canning jars.) It offers a rendered lard recipe and a rendered butter (ghee) recipe. It offers salt brine preserving (vegetables) recipes. It offers a cottage cheese preserving recipe but calls for unsalted cottage cheese, which isn't commercially available.This isn't a comprehensive review of the entire contents of this book. It's things I would have preferred to know prior to purchasing detailing better what's covered in this book, somewhat lacking in the product details.It doesn't offer any Indian style (oil) pickle recipes. It doesn't ofer any grain preservation recipes. It doesn't mention things like drying pasta. It doesn't teach you how to make miso or soy sauce. It doesn't tell you how to make cheese or butter. You don't get any ways to preserve eggs.There is brief mention in different recipes of using sawdust, newspaper, sand, or straw to extend the freshness life of produce.There's a few types of root vegetable caching shown which include black and white illustrations, which is neat. (FYI- not mentioned in this book- If you own land to dig a cache for vegetable storage in/on, in USA the national call-before-you-dig hotline is 811. Don't want to dig up a utility on accident!)Also FYI- having myself tried to preserve apples using newspaper in the past, let me tell you that it makes your apples rot twice as fast and makes them taste like gross old newspaper ink. Big yuck. Skip that method/recipe from this book.Backing up a minute, the sawdust mentioned in one place points out that most sawdust you get today is (indirectly intentionally) loaded with poisons like creosote or chemicals, so you would want sawdust from un-treated wood, not treated wood, in any food storage context. I thought that was an excellent detail to include (and it would have elevated the book if that level of guidance and knowledge had extended throughout the entire book.There is just one nut mentioned- chestnut- for which there are 2 recipes suggested for extending their edible lifespan for up to several months. No recipes for preserving seeds that I noticed, either.Another reviewer mentioned that there is no other book that covers these topics in print, and that influenced me to purchase it. I'm not totally sure I agree though, now that I have it, to look through.This book at times reminded me of Susan Gregerson's "Food Storage: Preserving Everything, Every Way!" (except she and her co-author tested most or all of the recipes/methods listed in her books, and those books were more comprehensive overall than this book.) It also had the "country wisdom" appeal of Sue's preservation books and blog. (Though, I had a complaint about Sue's book too- it didn't include the dry canning of meat method I always referred to from her blog, which was why I wanted to buy it, to have it.)I have also seen many specialized books on most of the topics covered in this book ( "Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning) - that are far more comprehensive and better researched. Ethnic cookbooks from Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Greek, etc. with methods of preserving- pickles, vegetables, legumes, sea vegetables, dairy, lacto-fermentation, smoking, salting, jerking, curing, fish and meats, and eggs, not to mention condiments.This book has a little of some of that, main focus on some veggies and some fruit, in one volume, together.In that way it is comprehensive. It doesn't specifically only tell about using one single specific method in preservation. This book has plenty to offer in the category of "folk preserving-type" recipes of some foods, but take it with a grain of salt (or a drop of oil.)It's not an ultimate bible for all non-canning, non-freezing food storage. It has uses and some neat parts and a beautiful cover, but has room for improvement.If you have never heard of any other way to put foods by than to can them or freeze them, you can take the overall ways brought up in this book and do a web search for more targeted info for what you specifically want to preserve in that method- for instance, "Lacto-fermenting cabbage to make sauerkraut recipes" or "raspberry fruit leather" or "how to preserve vegetables in the ground."In some ways it's like this book scanned 3 months of a user forum on food preservation, lifted a bunch of comments that contained certain specific preservation type keywords, organized them roughly by overall topic, weeded out some of the incomplete results, then hit the print button, bypassing its final contents ever going to a test kitchen. Or a food safety inspector. So some of the "recipes" are great, others I'm staring at thinking, "didn't I read in other cookbooks that doing this = probable botulism? I mean, that's moisture underneath oil in an oxygen-deprived environment there, isn't it? And it doesn't say how long it can be kept there like that. Should I be looking this back up??"So... Grain of salt, double checking on internet anything that raises my eyebrows. Parts of the book great, other parts of the book "hmm." If I knew what this book actually was before buying it, I'd rate it 4 stars for the countryside wisdom, and I'd expect to use my better judgement on any recipes that don't quite sound right to me. Hopefully this review helps out anyone else staring at their screen trying to divine whether this book is one up your alley.

I write and teach self-reliant, sustainable living. I've preserved my garden produce for decades. Since I discovered this book 5 yrs ago, it has consistently been in my Top Ten books you should have. This book teaches how to preserve almost every food you can grow without canning or freezing. For years my favorite go-to book on food preservation has been Stocking Up: The Third Edition of America's Classic Preserving Guide But this book goes into topics not covered in most food-preservation books. The key to good self-reliance and sustainability is to have a wide range of options, in case one crop fails or another overwhelms your freezer or pantry capacity. This book gives you that variety and weaves it into a complete, sustainable Whole.The chapters on Root Cellaring and Drying are not as detailed as some might like, but there are dozens of books on those topics and anyone that has gardened or homesteaded for any time is very familiar with these techniques.Where the book really shines is in the chapters on the lesser-known (and ages old) techniques of brining, lacto-fermentation and preserving in solutions such as oil, vinegar and alcohol. I attended a class on brining and lacto-fermentation where we were given taste samples of the brined and fermented food. The taste, color and texture are stunning! After tasting brined green beans--bright, crisp and still tasting garden fresh after 4 years in a jar--I could never go back to colorless, tasteless, soggy home-canned green beans. Family and friends go nuts over my sauerkraut and mixed vegetables brined one jar at a time. (It was this class that led me to this book.) I love that I can use non-canning jars with this process. This saves me on my food budget, keeps more out of the landfill and I don't have to worry about getting valuable jars back when I give the food away.One reviewer worried about the lack of food safety in these methods. No need to worry. These are ages-old techniques, used for centuries before home canning was ever thought of. They do not create the anaerobic environment that botulism thrives in. If one uses good-sense--wash your hands and clean all work surfaces and start with clean, sterilized equipment and jars--these methods are every bit as safe as any other food preservation.This is one of very few books that get my complete, unreserved endorsement. Trust me, you WANT this in your home library. [...]