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Full Version: Keeping the Essential Foods Going Part II
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I have now had a chance to further investigate sugar beet, and the possibility of making your own sugar at home. Purloining a sugar beet from a large pile was easy (friendly farmer), and I hit the search button on Google. O.K., this is the process.

Sugar beets look a bit like large parsnips. They have the same tough, wrinkly skin and are just as exasperating to peel. A nice veggie peeler or very sharp nice will do the job. Peel the beet thoroughly, taking as little off as possible to expose the flesh. Chop (or shred if you have a very good grater) finely and lob into a saucepan. I did at this point try pressing the chopped flesh to extract any juice, but it wasn't particularly effective; actually about as effective a trying to squish an uncooked parsnip (try it!). I added enough cold water to cover the chopped flesh and gently simmered it. I've got to say the colour wasn't brilliant - sort of muddy grey/brown, but I persevered. When the beet was quite soft and I could mash it a bit, I drained it off. I did this with a fine sieve, but muslin or a teatowel would do it. I guess the objective is to get as much juice off as possible. Anyway, pressing on. The next step was to reduce the juice to a bit of a syrup - a bit like sugar syrup. So a gentle simmer; keeping an eye on it until I judged the reduction to be quite thick. I then took the liquid off the heat and set it aside to cool. The idea was to cool it right down and see what happened. Actually, as it cooled it did thicken and sort of granulate. The colour was still not brilliant, but there was a definite sugar hit there. I need to experiment more, but so far, all things considered, not bad. Tick.

The next little project was to investigate producing some form of cooking oil/fat. Now, there is always lard from cooked meat to consider. It does, however, require fairly rigorous straining to make it useable, and the more "bits" remain the more likely the fat will go of sooner. There is also the problem of keeping lard cool - not easy in hot weather. Lard, however, is pretty easy. Oil though is not. Good old Google threw up all sorts of ads for dinky little grinders and various exciting prospects for flavoured gourmet stuff. All I want is the possibility of oil - not necessarily masses of it - when I need it. Not just for cooking, but also potentially for medicinal purposes. I thought I would give it a try neolithic style, by just grinding a few sunflower seeds and seeping them in water. This did produce a smear of oil on the surface. The process of grinding seeds in a pestle and mortar was a pain though. I need to think this through, but I can see light at the end of the tunnel. I may need to invest in a better processing method. Sigh!
Maybe the way to go with oil Mary is to press the seed to extract the oil, you could achieve this using a hydraulic car jack.....when i get settled i will have a go making the press....the trick would be to make a sort of cylinder so that the car jack ram could be forced into one end and the juice being forced out the other .
There is a bloke on a bushcraft forum (can't remember his name) but he did a long write up on getting 'sugar' from beet. IIRC it works but its pretty labour intensive. I'll try and find a link.

Re: lard/fat; you can 'can' butter in Kinder jars and it keeps well so I would think lard and dripping would too? http://www.nourishingdays.com/2013/10/st...-freezing/

I've not done it but its something I'll try in the future for sure.
When I was younger my family killed hogs and rendered lard every year. We strained it and packed it into tin buckets called "lard stands". It kept from one year to the next and I can not remember ever having lard go bad.

http://www.agrisupply.com/tin-lard-can/p/57213/

In the old days there were only a few options for oils in sufficient quantity for normal use; lard, tallow and olive oil. Some nuts also render enough oil for practical use but they were not commonly used for kitchen fry ups.

The rendering of lard and tallow was a big part of preps since they are the easiest ways to obtain the oils needed for baking and frying foods that do not contain their own fats. All it takes is a good sized kettle and a cloth to strain the cracklins from the liquid. We dumped every shred of trimmed fat into that kettle and wasted nothing.

But remember that in the old days they were prepping for a year at a time, not for "just what I need when I need it". If you did not have space for storage you made space because you were not going to go out and slice some belly fat from the hogs every now and then as desired.