on the Olive podcast the art of preserving

Food writer Kylee Newton shares her expertise on this ancient skill

History

As a practice, preserving has been around for thousands of years, and flourished in times when fruit and vegetables were scarce. So people have preserved to feed the family and survive the winter months, and that’s created lots of traditional and hand-me-down recipes that are still around today. I feel like it needs to be more championed as a practice, though it’s definitely become more popular in the last six to eight years with a lot of chefs coming on board and doing more preserving in restaurants, especially fermenting and pickling.

Pickling

It’s quite important that you have really fresh ingredients when pickling. It’s almost like you are creating a time capsule, so you want to keep whatever you are preserving as fresh as you can in this little time capsule of brine. So, if it was a cucumber, you’d want it

Kylee Newton is a food writer, teacher and author of The Modern Preserver and The Modern Preserver’s Kitchen – listen to her episode on the Kitchen Crafting Series of the O magazine podcast for more great advice. to be like almost just off the plant, really firm and ready to eat – not underripe but just right. This is not the place to use past its best veg.

Quick pickles

If you want to start with something easy, try quick pickling, which you can make and eat the same day. The brine ratio is 3-2-1, which is three parts vinegar to two parts water to one part sugar, which balances out the flavours and gives a sweeter, palatable brine. Then you can add spices and herbs along with your sliced veg (use any kind of vegetable you like but crisp ones such as carrots and radishes are good) and they’ll be ready to eat after pickling for one to two hours.

Chutney

I do think that chutney is the best thing for when you’ve got fruit and veg that are starting to age and might be on the turn. If you no longer want to eat them as they are but you don’t know what to do with them, try dicing them up and putting them into a pan with spices, sugar and vinegar, and let them simmer and render down to make a chutney. It’s as simple as that and you will have saved veg that might have gone in the bin.