Author: Julie Laing | Twice As Tasty

Learn how to eat well year-round by preserving, pickling, freezing, dehydrating, fermenting, and more at TwiceasTasty.com.

Canning It Forward

On By Julie Laing | Twice As TastyIn Canning, Event, Topic2 Comments

This is a big week at Twice as Tasty, and it’s all about canning it forward. For the second year, I’ll play a part in feeding more than 100 hungry sailors at the Montana Cup, an annual sailing regatta hosted by the North Flathead Yacht Club in Somers, Montana. Jars of preserves and other Twice as Tasty treats will be shared for meals and awards. Coincidentally, the regatta’s opening day is the Ball brand’s seventh annual Can-It-Forward Day.

Gifting and sharing home-preserved food cans it forward to the joy of both creator and eater. You’ll find plenty of recipes here to inspire your canning projects. But this blog is just one small voice in the world of home preserving, and much of my inspiration began with other voices. Here are some of my favorite canning recipes from other sources.
Read more about my favorite recipes from other sources

Garlic and Nasturtiums

On By Julie Laing | Twice As TastyIn Canning, Ingredient, RefrigeratingLeave a comment

When it comes to making pickles, I often think big: pounds of produce, half-gallon jars for fermenting, multiple batches of quart and pint jars for canning, and hours spent cleaning, preparing, and processing. But when it comes to eating pickles, a few often go a long way: a couple of Definitely Dilly Beans in a Grilled Tomato Bloody Mary, a few slices of Better Bread-and-Butter Pickles to serve with or stuff in Gorgeous Grilled Cheese, a handful of Cumin-Spiced Zucchini Refrigerator Pickles to accompany Indian dishes.

As I’ve already shared this month, some pickles are best in both small batches and small doses. This makes them ideal condiments to pack quickly and easily into small jars, store in your fridge, and dip into as needed. Two I always try to have on hand are pickled garlic and nasturtium “capers.”
Learn to make Pickled Garlic and Pickled Nasturtium Seeds

Refrigerator Pickles

On By Julie Laing | Twice As TastyIn Refrigerating, Topic, Workshops4 Comments

I don’t advocate small-batch canning, but I am a fan of quick and easy pickling that fills your refrigerator one jar at a time. If your only experience with pickling is opening a store-bought jar, then refrigerator vinegar pickles will convert you to homemade. Even if you grew up in a household that put up shelves of pickled vegetables every summer, like I did, refrigerator pickles have surprising benefits.

The disadvantage of refrigerator pickles—that they aren’t sealed in heated jars and thus shelf stable—can be an advantage in freshness and crispness. Small-space gardeners or CSA members can put up a jar at a time as produce ripens. Even expansive gardeners can use fridge pickles to test new flavor combinations. Cucumbers are ideal refrigerator pickles, because they soften so quickly when heated. You should still only use pickling cucumbers; the thick-skinned slicing cucumbers you find in grocery stores and even lemon cucumbers are really only useful as fresh pickles. After years of pasteurizing summer squash, I’ve switched from the canner to the fridge to keep the pickles’ crunch.
Learn to make Cucumber Refrigerator Pickles and Cumin-Spiced Zucchini Refrigerator Pickles

Fresh Pickles

On By Julie Laing | Twice As TastyIn Refrigerating, Topic2 Comments

When I think of fresh pickles, I immediately envision a platter of sushi, accompanied by pickled ginger (gari) and preceded by a quickly pickled cucumber salad (kyuri asazuke). The Japanese know a thing or two about pickling. They find a range of uses for pickled foods, including condiment, relish, garnish, palate cleanser, and digestive aid. Small portions of these foods can appear at any meal, even breakfast. Traditional Japanese pickles feature ingredients ranging from vegetables to eggs to fish to even cherry blossoms.

In America, the primary exposure to Japanese pickles comes as an appetizer before a meal and as a palate cleanser during it. A favorite local sushi restaurant serves sunomono, small portions of freshly pickled cucumber salad, before every meal—so of course I needed to come up with a version for our home-rolled, and more importantly boat-rolled, sushi nights. This salad is best made fresh when cucumbers are in season. Learn to make Quick-Pickled Cucumber Salad and Pickled Ginger

Pick a Pickle

On By Julie Laing | Twice As TastyIn Canning, Fermenting, Refrigerating, Topic, WorkshopsLeave a comment

Almost every vegetable garden explodes in July. My first July harvest included the last of the spring greens and asparagus, midcycle broccoli and garlic scapes, and the first snap peas, carrots, beets, and bulb onions. The harvest will go straight into our mouths, but as the yields grow jugs of vinegar and a box of salt will be front and center, ready for pickling.

All of my recently harvested vegetables can be pickled, along with snap beans, summer squash, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, garlic, cabbage, and even fruit. That’s the beauty of pickling: it lets you preserve any low-acid vegetable safely. And like many of my favorite processing techniques, it’s endlessly variable. Various pickling techniques let you preserve everything from a single cucumber to a box of cukes. You can flavor them to fit any meal: American dills or bread-and-butters with burgers, Japanese kyuri asazuke with sushi, Indian kheer uragai with curry—and that’s just a few variations on cucumber pickles.
Read more about quick and easy pickling

Any-Fruit Jam

On By Julie Laing | Twice As TastyIn Canning, Topic5 Comments

Sweetness defines jams—and sometimes overpowers them. To my mind, a jam that leaves a lingering coat of sugar on your tongue misses the point: savor the fruits of summer. Making fruit-forward jam is simple once you understand a bit of the science behind it.

Fruit needs three things to set, or thicken, a spreadable consistency: acid, sugar, and pectin. Think of the molecular interactions in fruit like a high-school romance: Pectin molecules are attracted to water, but water is attracted to sugar. If water and sugar “hook up,” the pectin molecules will bond—with a little encouragement from their best friend, acid—and the jam will thicken.

The traditional method of encouraging this interaction is to throw enough sugar into the batch to distract all the water molecules. But more sugar is not the only option. An acidic pectin, like one based on citrus fruits, is an effective matchmaker for pectin molecules. Another method to encourage pectin couplings is to reduce the pool of available water molecules.
Learn to make Any-Fruit Jam without Added Pectin and Any-Fruit Jam with Added Pectin

Homemade Sorbet

On By Julie Laing | Twice As TastyIn Freezing, Topic2 Comments

I started making sorbets a few years ago after tasting rhubarb–rosemary sorbet created by our local Sweet Peaks shop. I believe these purveyors of handcrafted ice creams had recently opened and were peddling their chilly concoctions from a converted horse trailer at the weekly farmer’s market. The sorbet was to die for. I immediately thought, “I can grow rosemary, and my shady property produces rhubarb all summer. I could make this!”

A bit of research revealed that I needed to make sorbet: not only does it burst with fruit flavor undiluted by dairy, but it requires no special equipment, like an ice cream maker (although if you own one, you can put it to use). A few tricks and techniques produce a silky sorbet from just about any fruit you can think of and show off herbs and other botanicals. I use two methods, depending on the featured fruit.
Learn to make Raw Fruit Sorbet and Cooked Fruit Sorbet

Birthday Desserts: Year 1

On By Julie Laing | Twice As TastyIn Baking, Event, TopicLeave a comment

I am all about birthdays—especially mine. I’ve long moved on from celebrating for a day, to a week, and now to a month. So it’s not a stretch to spend much of this month celebrating the first year of Twice as Tasty.

It’s not a birthday without dessert, but I’ve never been a huge fan of the traditional cake loaded with frosting. As a kid, I always wanted homemade angel food cake, buried in berries and carrying a dollop of home-whipped cream. Pies have also topped my list of celebratory sweets, particularly when you can load a table with a dozen varieties. But both of these choices can be labor intensive for a crowd. For today’s party, it was hard to resist easily created desserts that show off freshly harvested botanicals and fruits of summer.
Learn to make Strawberry Shortcake with Lilac Cream and Rhubarb Crisp

Fruit Syrups

On By Julie Laing | Twice As TastyIn Canning, Freezing, Refrigerating, Topic1 Comment

Syrup. For most of us, the word brings to mind pancakes or waffles drizzled with—OK, drowning in—liquid maple sugar or its cheaper, corn syrup–based counterpart. But as you start harvesting from your garden, the word expands to endless options based on the fruits of summer and enhanced with herbs.

My love of fruit syrups grew when I learned how to extract bonus jars of the flavor-packed liquid from fruit solids intended for jam—and make jam more easily in the process. Syrups are less finicky than jelly but can still be processed for long-term storage or simply stashed in the fridge. Traditionally made from boiled fruit that’s been strained to separate its juice, I’ve found a cold method separates the juice even more effectively from almost any fruit and a roasted method gives an extra boost of flavor.
Learn to roast and freeze fruit for syrup

Twice as Tasty Turns 1

On By Julie Laing | Twice As TastyIn Event7 Comments

Twice as Tasty turns 1 this month, and what a first year. The blog is going strong, with pages of recipes and techniques available. It’s been the launchpad for live food events and workshops, which are already so popular I’ve taken them on the road. Many of you are part of a core group of subscribers and followers who regularly check in and play with the foods found here—I couldn’t do this without you. If you’re still looking for a regular Twice as Tasty fix, here are some options beyond the blog:

As we roll into the second Twice as Tasty year, I want to point out some posts and recipes you may have missed and share some things I’ve learned since they went live. We’ll also be celebrating, and you’re invited!
Read more about year 1