residential weekend course

preserving food

venue: Redfield Community, Bucks

Would you like to recreate the smells of granny’s kitchen? Make unique gifts for your friends and family? Or just explore new methods of prolonging the bountiful harvests of autumn’s hedgerows and allotments?

This course is useful for anyone wishing to learn more about the various age-old methods of food preservation; techniques that helped our predecessors utilise the natural resources around them and feed their families all year round. These skills are coming more into vogue as people wake up to the inherent problems with a food chain that imports a vast amount of produce, instead of taking advantage of the wonderful food that is produced much closer to home. Preservation techniques can add value and nutritional diversity to food, and offer an alternative to bland supermarket produce.

The course is run by Tammi Dallaston, who lives on a smallholding in mid-Wales growing produce and preserving food for the weekly market and the Centre for Alternative Technology.

The course includes:

  • an introduction to food throughout the ages
  • the importance of food hygiene and sterilisation
  • an insight into a myriad of food preservation techniques, including canning and bottling; preserving using sugar, honey, vinegar and alcohol; making vegetable clamps; using nature as a fridge-freezer; drying; dehydration; salting; pasteurisation; fermentation; freeze-drying and fermentation
  • an opportunity to collect wild produce and discuss the various methods of preservation
  • practical sessions using home-grown produce
  • the opportunity to take home a variety of preserved products

Participants will need to come equipped with aprons, 6 clean jam jars, and favourite recipes or techniques to share.

dates: see 'book online' below


more on preserving food

how to book:

  

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arrive:
  
Friday evening at 6.30 for dinner at 7.30
depart:
  
Sunday after lunch (served at 1.00)
directions:
  
click here for directions by bicycle, public transport and car
what to bring:
  
pen and notebook; towel; work clothes or overalls; (meals and bedding are provided)
NO DOGS PLEASE
let us know:
  
if you are vegan or have any food allergies, or any special needs
accommodation:
  
3-4 people sharing single-sex rooms
prices:
  
£190 high-waged; £170 waged;
£150 student / unwaged
Refundable up to two weeks prior to course (minus £30 admin fee)
No refunds for cancellations within two weeks of course
car sharing:
  
visit our car sharing forum to offer or request a lift
 

 

 

 

course participants showing the preserves they have made - from left to right: apple jelly with rosemary, onion marmalade and pickled onions

 


 

 

 

 

 

you can harvest your carrots and keep them buried in damp sand in a cool place to last the whole winter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

course tutor Tammi using a dehydrator to make dried fruits and fruit leathers - very healthy snacks