This is how you store the harvest from your vegetable garden
More and more people, also in the big city, grow their own fruit and vegetables. August is the harvest month for many fruits and vegetables. That means more lettuce, zucchini, cauliflower, rosemary or chives than you can handle in your meal in the coming weeks. There is also a threat of a surplus of fruit such as red currants, blueberries, blackberries, peaches, plums and figs. How do you store extra fruit and vegetables without losing the vitamins?
Tip 1: Freeze and thaw
Freezing is a quick and easy way to store your vegetables, herbs and fruits. Freezing does not adversely affect the vitamin content of foods.
Some fruits and vegetables must be blanched before freezing. This destroys the enzymes that cause the quality to deteriorate. This blanching can cause a loss of vitamin C (15 to 20 percent). Make sure you cool the blanched vegetables well and quickly under cold running water or in an ice bath. As a result, vegetables keep their color and the nutritional value is preserved as much as possible. During the storage of frozen food, the vitamins are generally well preserved. Make sure that the packaging is sealed airtight.
When defrosting your fruit and vegetables, some vitamins are also lost. With pureed or finely chopped vegetables and fruit, this is more than with coarser cut products. Therefore, do not cut your fruit and vegetables too small when you freeze them.
Tip 2: From grandmother’s time: wecken
You can also store fruits and vegetables. Because you heat the products during pre-cooking, you also lose some vitamins. When preserving vegetables, it is best to add vinegar. This prevents botulism (poisoning by a bacterium). This is not necessary when preserving fruit because it naturally contains acids that the bacteria in question do not like.
Tip 3: Exchange
You die in the carrots and courgettes, while someone else has a lot of beet and cabbage. You can use the website vegetable swapping.nl trade part of your harvest with people nearby. This prevents food waste, is easy and costs nothing at all. What a good initiative!
Tip 4: Drying
Have you ever thought about drying your fruits and herbs? The drying process is traditionally done by placing it in the sun or heating it in some other way. Also here you lose some vitamins (especially vitamins C, E and some B vitamins) by heating and the taste can change.
Tip 5: Make it jam
You can of course also process your vegetables and especially fruit into a tasty jam. The disadvantage of this, however, is that some of the vitamins are lost due to cooking and that it contains a relatively large amount of sugar. But homemade jam is of course much tastier than a jar from the supermarket.
Process immediately
If you want to take full advantage of the vitamins in your home-grown fruits and vegetables, process them immediately after harvesting. If you do this in the right way, you can enjoy your own vegetable garden in the coming winter months and benefit from the vitamins that it contains naturally.
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