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ByJoanMorris ContraCostaTimes Ifallwentwellwithyour garden this year, you should be up to your ears in zuc- chini, tomatoes and other wonderful vegetables and fruits of the summer. In- stead of trying to give them away or find yet another recipe for squash, why not try preserving the bounty? Master Food Preserver Sue Mosbacher told the Our Garden audience this week about different ways to preserve, from tradi- tional canning to dehydrat- ing and freezing. Here are her tips: Chillingtheharvest Many fruits and vegeta- bles can be stored in the freezer, but take care that your freezer maintains a constant temperature. Al- lowing food to slightly thaw and then refreeze causes ice crystals to form and reform, making the food mushy. Produce needs a pocket of cold air around the con- tainer in order to completely freeze. Don't pack your food into the freezer during this initial stage. Once the food is frozen, then you can rear- range things to get things tightly packed in. When adding a lot of food to the freezer at once, turn the temperature down un- til the food is frozen, then you can return it to its nor- mal setting. When freezing soft, sen- sitive foods, such as berries, lay them out in a pan and freeze them individually first. Then you can put them in bags or jars. This pre- vents the food from clump- ing together and makes it easier to separate. It's important to remove as much exterior moisture as possible. Use a hair dryer on a low setting to help re- move the water before freezing. Food can be stored in glass jars, plastic containers or plastic bags, but make sure they are suitable for the cold temperatures. Jars should be tempered glass, and containers and bags should be freezer- ready. Regular sandwich bags will allow air in and cause ice crystals to form; freezer bags are less likely. If freezing liquids, or foods that have a lot of liq- uid, use straight-necked jars. Jars with shoulders can break as the food hard- ens and expands. Getting the air out of containers is important. If you don't have a vacuum sealer, you can use a straw in a baggie. Seal the baggie around the straw, then suck out as much air as you can. Drying adventures Dehydrating is a very old way of preserving food, but it has gotten new life in re- cent years with dehydra- tors. The key to successful de- hydration is to remove as much moisture in the pro- cess as possible, leaving about 20 percent in fruits and 10 percent in vegeta- bles. Food that isn't com- pletely dried can mold or grow other pathogens. Drying herbs is simple and don't require a ma- chine. You can pick the herbs, put them in a paper bag that has some air slits cut in the side, and then hang up in your kitchen or else where. There's more than one way to preserve the sum- mer bounty. Dehydrating is a fun technique to explore. The herbs will dry in a few days. Store them in jars or bags, leaving the herb buds whole. When you go to use them, cutting or crushing them will release the flavorful oils. If drying anything that might have insects or lar- vae in them, put them in the freezer for 48 to kill any liv- ing creatures. Dehydrators need to reach a temperature of 140 degrees. Good hydrators will have a heater and a fan. If your dehydrator has the heater on the top, you will need to rotate the trays to make sure the food on the top doesn't dry too much while the food on the bottom doesn't dry enough. To solve that problem, you can get a dehydrator with the heater on the back. Be sure to use a timer. Leaving food in the dehy- drator too long can over dry it, while not leaving it on enough can lead to mold while in storage. When making fruit leather — a puree of fruit that is dried — try to keep the thickness consistent and uniform to promote even drying. Leather should be flipped half way through the pro- cess. Fruit leathers can be rolled and stored in plas- tic bags. When drying fruit, keep slices uniform. Be sure to label every- thing and include a "use by" date. When storing dried fruit in jars, use jars that have shoulders. If the food still has too much moisture in it, you'll be able to see con- densation on the shoulders. If so, just pop the food back into the dehydrator. Before drying vegetables, blanch them and then put them in a cold bath. To de- termine the blanch time, add the vegetables when the water is boiling, then take them out when the water starts to boil again. Be sure to dry off the food as best you can before putting it in the dehydrator. Fruit such as grapes have a protective skin on them that needs to be perforated before dehydrating. You can cut each one by hand, or blanch them. Beans are best dried on the vine. Canning Two types of canning sys- tems are used to preserve food: water bath and pres- sure canning. Foods high in acid can be canned in a water bath; if attempting to can low acid foods, you'll need to add acid, typically in the form of vinegar. Low acid foods can be canned by pressure canning without having to add acid. In water bath canning, closed jars of food are put in a bath of boiling water. The jars need to be completely surrounded by water, which requires a rack of some sort to keep them off the bottom of the pan. The pot needs to be deep enough so that the water will cover the tops of the jars. Use newer recipes for your canned food. Things have changed since our grandmothers' days, mak- ing old recipes unreliable. For example, Mosbacher says, the acidity of vinegar is now about 5 percent, but decades ago it was as high as 15 percent. After the water bath is completed, let jars sit undis- turbed on a towel for 12 to 24 hours to ensure the lids are firmly sealed and the air has escaped. In pressure canning, you need a pressure canner, not a pressure cooker. The can- ner is specially designed for canning while the cooker is not. Follow directions and recipes for best results. GARDENING Preservingthe summer harvest The Associated Press NEW YORK McDonald's plans to start selling its packaged coffee at super- markets nationally by early next year, a move intended to help raise the profile of the coffee sold at its U.S. restaurants. The world's biggest ham- burger chain has made a deal with Kraft Foods to manufacture and distrib- ute the bags of McCafe ground and whole bean coffee, as well as single- cup pods that can be used in at-home coffee machines. Other chains, such as Star- bucks and Dunkin' Donuts, already sell branded pack- aged coffee at retailers. McDonald's, based in Oak Brook, Illinois, has highlighted coffee as a key growth opportunity, with CEO Don Thompson say- ing it can be a way to get customers into its more than 14,000 U.S. restau- rants. The chain has re- designed its coffee cups to have a more appealing look that people would want to carry around. And it's try- ing to make a bigger push into more profitable cof- fee drinks, such as flavored lattes, rather than just drip coffee. Last year, for instance, it introduced a pumpkin spice latte. A similar drink at Starbucks has a loyal fol- lowing. At an investor conference late last year, a McDonald's executive noted the chain's coffee sales have surged 70 percent since the introduc- tion of McCafe specialty cof- fees in 2009. McDonald's Corp. and Kraft Foods had said last year they were testing the packaged coffee in select markets. Before Kraft split with Mondelez in late 2012, the packaged food maker had distributed Starbucks pack- aged coffee. But Starbucks broke off the relationship in 2010, saying Kraft failed to live up to its contract. Kraft challenged the early termination of the deal, and an arbitrator last year ruled that Starbucks had to pay $4.76 billion to settle the dispute. That award goes to Mondelez In- ternational. COFFEE McDonald's to sell packaged coffee By Jessica Yadegaran Bay Area News Group He is the original Rhone Ranger, a winemaking philosopher and maverick marketer, respected by his colleagues and adored by legions of Doontastic fans for his ability to wax po- etic on wine. Despite this, Randall Grahm of Santa Cruz's Bonny Doon Vineyard is concerned, anxious even, about the future of his company. Grahm worries that the wine industry perceives him as a past-tense con- tributor, a caricature not unlike his wacky Ralph Steadman labels, when the truth is, he has big plans — huge, groundbreaking plans — and believes he is now making the best wines of his career. During a recent farm-to- table dinner, as the sun set on Grahm's new property, Popelouchum, a sprawling, 280-acre polycultural farm in San Juan Bautista, the winemaker spoke with zeal about the site's future. His plan: to breed, through hy- bridization, a new legion of viniferagrapesthatcanout- smart climate change and, ultimately, deliver a true vin de terroir. His wines up un- til now, while good, have been wines of effort, he ex- plains. Now, it is time to make a truly great wine. "While it could be a di- saster and create an utterly wretched wine, it could also have tremendous sig- nificance to the wine in- dustry," Grahm says. "The project is not obviously monetizable. It will take a very long time before it yields real tangible results. But it is a supremely inter- esting project and one that has potentially real value. I really feel that my most in- teresting work is ahead of me, and I just can't wait to get to it." In 2010, Grahm was in- ducted into the Vintners Hall of Fame for his contri- butions to the wine indus- try. Last year, the Rhone Rangers honored Grahm with a Lifetime Achieve- ment Award, their first, for introducing and mar- keting Rhone-style wines in the United States. His first vintage of the flag- ship Le Cigare Volant de- buted in 1984 as an hom- age to the principal grapes of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Before that, few people in California drank, let alone made, syrah. "Randall is fearless and willing to experiment and challenge the status quo," says Alison Crowe, who served as Bonny Doon's enologist and later as as- sociate winemaker from 2000 to 2004. She is now the winemaker at Garnet Vineyards in Napa. "He would never say, 'I need to make this cabernet taste like this so it can get 100 points.' He taught us to get out of the way and let the grapes speak, to not have wine blinders on, to learn about and taste wines from Germany and Hun- gary. He is a citizen of the world and encouraged us to be as well." WINE The Rhone Ranger Winemaking maverick Randall Grahm aims to breed a new type of grape JOANMORRIS-CONTRACOSTATIMES There's more than one way to preserve the summer bounty. Dehydrating is a fun technique to explore. Sponsored by the Downtown Red Bluff Business Association and the Tehama County CattleWomen. • 13,000 pre-event household Distribution via newspaper & mail. • Published online 9/14-21 at www.redbluffdailynews.com • Detailed "pull out" Downtown Beef and Brew serving locations Map included inside. (Premium ad spaces available!) • …and much more! Advertising Deadline: FRIDAY, AUGUST 29 For rates, details and space reservations: The official promotional Program for Red Bluff's annual "party of the year," that is! 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