There is something deeply satisfying about a pantry lined with jars, a cellar full of hanging herbs, and a freezer stocked from your own land. Food preservation is one of the most essential and rewarding skills a homesteader can build. When you know how to preserve your harvest, nothing goes to waste, your food budget shrinks, and you gain real independence from the grocery store.
This guide covers 25 foundational preservation skills across four major methods: canning, fermenting, drying, and curing. Whether you are just starting out or looking to fill in the gaps in your skill set, there is something here for every level. This is your invitation to learn a new skill this year. Make sure to check out what we’re making in our homestead kitchen.
This article is part of my homestead cooking series where I share how to make from-scratch food instead of buying it at the grocery story. From homemade bread and jelly to homemade condiments. I'm Gretchen and I've been homesteading for over 15 years. Here at the Backyard Farming Connection, I connect the lines between growing your own food, raising your own animals, and putting it all together in the kitchen.
Contents
CANNING
Canning uses heat to destroy microorganisms and create a vacuum seal that keeps food shelf-stable for a year or more. There are two methods — water bath and pressure canning and knowing which to use is the first and most important lesson.
Water Bath Canning
Water bath canning is the entry point for most home preservers. You submerge sealed jars in boiling water for a set amount of time, which kills mold, yeast, and bacteria in high-acid foods.
What it’s good for: Fruits, jams, jellies, pickles, tomatoes (with added acid), fruit butters, and salsas.
The key is acid. High-acid foods (pH 4.6 or below) are safe for water bath canning because the acidic environment prevents Clostridium botulinum — the bacteria behind botulism from growing. Never use a water bath canner for low-acid foods like vegetables, meats, or beans. That is how people get sick.
Essential skill: Learn to read and follow tested recipes from trusted sources such as the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning or the Ball Blue Book. Do not improvise with canning recipes.
Pressure Canning
Pressure canning is the only safe method for low-acid foods. A pressure canner heats jars to 240°F (116°C), well above the boiling point of water, which is the temperature required to destroy botulism spores.
What it’s good for: Green beans, corn, carrots, beets, potatoes, soups, stews, broths, and meats.
The learning curve is steeper than water bath canning, but once you understand how your canner works — how to bring it up to pressure, maintain a steady dial or weighted gauge reading, and vent it safely — it becomes straightforward. Do not let fear of pressure canners keep you from this skill. They are safe when used correctly.
Essential skill: Have your dial-gauge pressure canner tested for accuracy at your local extension office once a year.
Jam and Jelly Making
Making jam and jelly sits at the intersection of cooking and science. Getting a proper set depends on the right balance of fruit, pectin, acid, and sugar. Too little pectin and you have syrup. Too much and it turns rubbery.
Types of set:
- Full-sugar jams use commercial pectin and set quickly.
- Low-sugar or no-sugar jams use low-methoxyl pectin or rely on natural pectin in the fruit.
- Jellies are made from strained juice only, producing a clear, firm product.
Essential skill: Learn the wrinkle test or the cold-plate test to check for a set without relying solely on timing.
Learn exactly how to make jam and jelly.
Pickles and Relishes
Pickling means acidifying food, either with vinegar (quick pickling) or through lacto-fermentation (see the fermenting section). For canning purposes, we are talking about vinegar-based pickles.
The rules: Use vinegar with at least 5% acidity. Do not reduce the vinegar in a tested recipe. The brine-to-vegetable ratio matters for food safety, not just flavor.
What you can pickle: Cucumbers (of course), but also green beans, okra, peppers, cauliflower, beets, carrots, watermelon rind, and more.
Essential skill: Make crisp pickles by choosing the right cucumber variety (pickling cucumbers, not slicing), removing the blossom end, and using calcium chloride or grape leaves to maintain texture.
Learn how to make pickled food.
Tomato Preservation
Tomatoes deserve their own entry because they are one of the most important canning crops and one of the most misunderstood. Modern tomatoes have been bred for lower acidity, which means plain tomatoes can no longer be reliably water-bath canned without added acid.
Always add: 2 tablespoons of bottled lemon juice or 1/2 teaspoon of citric acid per quart. Bottled lemon juice is preferred over fresh because its acidity is standardized.
Tomato products you can can: Whole or crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato juice, diced tomatoes, salsa, and ketchup.
Essential skill: Grow or source paste tomatoes like Roma or Amish Paste for thick, rich canned products with less water.
Canning Meat and Poultry
Canning meat is one of the most practical preservation skills on a working homestead. A jar of home-canned chicken, beef, or venison on the shelf means a fast, protein-rich meal any time.
Raw pack vs. hot pack: Meat can be packed raw into jars (it will cook during processing) or cooked first and then packed. Both are safe and tested methods.
What you can can: Chicken, beef, pork, venison, rabbit, ground meat, and fish.
Essential skill: All meats must be pressure canned. Processing times vary by type and jar size — always use a tested recipe.
Canning Beans and Legumes
Home-canned beans are dramatically more affordable and often better-tasting than store-bought. Dried beans are soaked overnight, partially cooked, and then pressure canned in brine.
One pound of dry beans yields roughly five to six half-pints of canned beans — comparable to five or six cans from the grocery store — at a fraction of the cost.
Essential skill: Never can dried beans without pre-soaking and pre-cooking. Packing dry beans into jars and adding water is dangerous — they expand during processing and can cause seal failures or uneven heating.
Fruit Butters and Preserves
Fruit butter (apple, pear, peach, plum) is fruit cooked down with sugar and spices until thick and smooth. Unlike jam, it contains no added pectin and relies on slow cooking to reduce moisture.
Preserves contain larger pieces of fruit suspended in a soft gel, landing somewhere between jam and whole-fruit conserves.
Essential skill: Fruit butter is excellent for using imperfect or overripe fruit. Cook it in a slow cooker on low overnight to avoid constant stirring and scorching.
FERMENTING
Fermentation is the oldest food preservation method humans have. Beneficial bacteria, yeasts, and molds transform food, creating acids, alcohols, or carbon dioxide that preserve it and often make it more nutritious in the process.
Lacto-Fermentation
Lacto-fermentation is the foundation of a huge range of fermented foods: sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles, kvass, traditional hot sauce, and more. The process relies on naturally occurring Lactobacillus bacteria, which convert sugars into lactic acid — the sour flavor you taste in these foods and the preservative that keeps them safe.
The basics: Salt (and sometimes water) draws moisture from vegetables, creating a brine. The vegetables must stay submerged under this brine, away from oxygen, while fermentation happens.
Essential skill: Use non-iodized salt. Iodine inhibits the beneficial bacteria you are trying to cultivate. Kosher salt, sea salt, and pickling salt all work well.
Sauerkraut
Sauerkraut is the perfect beginner ferment. You need two ingredients: cabbage and salt. Shred the cabbage, massage in salt at about 2% of the weight of the cabbage, pack into a jar, and press until the brine rises above the cabbage. Wait one to four weeks.
The longer it ferments (within reason and at cooler temperatures), the more sour and complex the flavor.
Essential skill: Weigh your cabbage and calculate salt by weight for consistent results. A kitchen scale is one of the most useful tools in a homestead kitchen.
Fermented Vegetables
Everything that works for sauerkraut can be applied to other vegetables: cucumbers (fermented pickles), carrots, green beans, beets, radishes, garlic, and mixed vegetable blends.
Unlike vinegar pickles, fermented vegetables are alive — full of probiotic bacteria and a complex, funky sour flavor that vinegar cannot replicate.
Essential skill: Keep vegetables submerged. Anything above the brine can develop mold. Use a small zip-lock bag filled with brine as a weight, or purchase fermentation weights designed for wide-mouth mason jars.
Kimchi
Kimchi is a Korean fermented vegetable dish, most commonly made with napa cabbage, but also with radishes, cucumbers, and other vegetables. It uses a paste of chili pepper (gochugaru), garlic, ginger, and sometimes fish sauce or shrimp paste.
It is slightly more involved than sauerkraut but deeply worth learning. Kimchi is versatile in the kitchen and one of the most flavor-forward ferments you can make.
Essential skill: Traditional kimchi is packed into jars and left to ferment at room temperature for one to five days before being moved to cold storage, where it continues to ferment slowly for months.
Fermented Hot Sauce
A fermented hot sauce is simply peppers (and often garlic, onion, and other aromatics) lacto-fermented and then blended. The result is brighter, more complex, and more alive than cooked hot sauce.
Essential skill: Wear gloves when handling hot peppers. Use a food processor to blend the fermented peppers into a smooth sauce, and strain if desired. Add a small amount of the brine to adjust consistency and saltiness.
Sourdough Starter and Bread
A sourdough starter is a live culture of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria maintained in a mixture of flour and water. It leavens bread without commercial yeast and, when well-maintained, lasts indefinitely — some starters have been passed down for generations.
While not a food preservation method in the strictest sense, the ability to maintain a sourdough culture and bake from it is a fundamental homestead skill that connects you to long-standing food traditions and removes dependence on store-bought leavening.
Essential skill: Feed your starter regularly (daily if kept at room temperature, weekly if stored in the refrigerator). A starter is ready to use when it doubles in size after feeding and smells pleasantly sour and yeasty.
Learn how to make your own Sourdough
Kombucha and Water Kefir
Kombucha is fermented sweet tea, produced by a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast). Water kefir is fermented sugar water produced by kefir grains. Both produce lightly fizzy, tangy drinks rich in beneficial bacteria.
These are intermediate fermentation projects — they require ongoing maintenance of a live culture but reward you with a healthy beverage you can produce indefinitely at very low cost.
Essential skill: Second fermentation (bottling kombucha or water kefir with added fruit juice and leaving it sealed at room temperature for one to two days) creates carbonation. Be careful — bottles can over-pressurize. Burp them daily and refrigerate before they get too fizzy.
DRYING
Drying, also called dehydrating removes moisture from food, which prevents the growth of bacteria, mold, and yeast. Dried foods are lightweight, shelf-stable, and concentrate flavor in ways that other methods do not.
Solar Drying and Air Drying
The oldest form of food drying requires nothing more than sun, air movement, and low humidity. Herbs, chili peppers, certain fruits, and beans have been air-dried for thousands of years.
How to air-dry herbs: Bundle small bunches and hang upside down in a warm, dry, well-ventilated area out of direct sunlight (which fades color and destroys some volatile oils). Most herbs dry fully in one to three weeks.
Essential skill: Dry at the right stage. For herbs, harvest just before flowering, when essential oil content is highest. For peppers, harvest when fully ripe and unblemished.
Dehydrator Use and Technique
An electric food dehydrator is one of the highest-return investments on a homestead. It gives you precise temperature control and consistent airflow, making it suitable for a much wider range of foods than solar drying.
Temperature guidelines:
- Herbs: 95°F to 115°F
- Fruits and vegetables: 125°F to 135°F
- Meats and jerky: 160°F (USDA recommendation for safety)
Essential skill: Pretreat fruits prone to browning (apples, pears, bananas) with a dip in lemon juice or ascorbic acid solution before drying to preserve color and vitamin content.
See my favorite Food Dehydrator
Making Jerky
Jerky is one of the most practical and popular things you can make in a dehydrator. Properly dried jerky is shelf-stable for one to two months at room temperature or much longer when vacuum-sealed and refrigerated.
Lean cuts work best: flank steak, eye of round, venison. Fat does not dry properly and causes rancidity.
Essential skill: For food safety, either heat meat to 160°F before dehydrating (by baking briefly in the oven) or ensure your dehydrator reaches 160°F during the drying process. This step is often skipped and should not be.
Drying Fruits
Dried fruit: apples, pears, peaches, apricots, figs, cherries, tomatoes, is a concentrated, calorie-dense, long-storing pantry staple. Slice evenly for consistent drying. Pieces should be roughly 1/4 inch thick.
Fruit leather (fruit roll-ups) is pureed fruit spread thin and dried until pliable: a great way to use overripe or bruised fruit.
Essential skill: Condition dried fruit before storage. Place it in a loosely covered container for seven to ten days, shaking daily. If any moisture appears on the container walls, the fruit needs more drying time. Conditioning prevents mold from developing in sealed containers.
Drying Vegetables
Dried vegetables are useful in soups, stews, and trail food. Onions, garlic, carrots, celery, corn, peas, tomatoes, mushrooms, and peppers all dry well.
Most vegetables benefit from blanching before drying: a brief dip in boiling water (two to four minutes) followed by an ice bath. Blanching sets color, stops enzymatic activity that causes deterioration, and shortens drying time.
Essential skill: Make vegetable powder from over-dried vegetables or scraps. Dried tomatoes, peppers, onions, and mushrooms can be ground into intensely flavorful powders that function as seasoning blends.
Drying Beans and Grains
If you grow dry beans or grains, letting them mature and dry fully on the plant before harvest is itself a preservation skill. After harvest, they must be dried further to a moisture content low enough to prevent mold in storage.
Essential skill: Test beans for adequate dryness by biting one. It should be rock-hard. Store in airtight containers — glass jars are ideal — away from light and heat. Oxygen absorbers can extend shelf life significantly.
CURING
Curing uses salt, sugar, smoke, and sometimes nitrates to draw moisture from food, inhibit bacterial growth, and develop distinctive flavors. It is the method behind bacon, ham, smoked salmon, corned beef, and many traditional sausages.
Dry Curing with Salt
The simplest form of curing is packing meat or fish in salt. Salt draws out moisture through osmosis, creating an inhospitable environment for most bacteria.
What you can dry cure: Fish (salt cod, gravlax), pork belly (pancetta, bacon), pork leg (prosciutto-style), egg yolks, and butter.
Essential skill: Use the right amount of salt. Too little and the food is not safe. Too much and it is inedible. Equilibrium curing — using a percentage of salt based on the weight of the food — is more reliable than burying food in salt. A typical equilibrium cure is 2.5% to 3% salt by weight.
Brine Curing (Wet Curing)
Wet curing means submerging food in a salt and water solution, sometimes with sugar, herbs, and spices. Corned beef and brined pork are classic examples.
Brine curing penetrates large cuts more evenly than dry curing and can be faster. It is also easier to manage the flavor profile by adjusting the brine.
Essential skill: Use curing salt (pink salt / Prague Powder #1) for any cured product that will not be cooked to a safe temperature immediately. Curing salt contains sodium nitrite, which prevents botulism in anaerobic (low-oxygen) curing environments. Do not skip this for meats going into cold smoking or extended curing.
Smoking
Smoking is both a preservation technique and a flavor development method. Cold smoking (below 90°F) preserves and flavors without fully cooking. Hot smoking (above 165°F) cooks and flavors simultaneously.
For preservation, cold smoking combined with prior curing is the traditional method for foods like smoked salmon, country ham, and hard sausages. Hot smoked foods are primarily preserved through the cooking process and should be treated like cooked food for storage purposes.
Essential skill: Learn which woods complement which foods. Fruitwoods (apple, cherry) are mild and sweet — good for poultry, pork, and fish. Hardwoods (hickory, oak) are strong, good for beef and heavily seasoned pork. Avoid softwoods like pine, which contain resins that produce bitter, potentially harmful smoke
See my favorite outdoor smoker.
Rendering and Fat Preservation
Lard, tallow, and duck fat are not just cooking fats they are preservation media. Traditionally, cooked meats were submerged in rendered fat and stored in crocks (a technique called confit), where the fat protected them from air and microbial contamination.
Learning to render your own fat from pasture-raised animals is a dying skill with enormous practical value. Properly rendered and stored lard and tallow are shelf-stable for many months and have a higher smoke point than most vegetable oils.
Essential skill: Render fat low and slow — in an oven at 225°F or in a slow cooker on low — to produce clean, white, mild-tasting fat. High heat produces a dark, strong-tasting fat suitable only for soap making.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
You do not need to master all 25 of these skills at once. A good starting point for any new homesteader is:
- Water bath canning for tomatoes and jams
- Sauerkraut or lacto-fermented vegetables
- Herb drying
- Dry curing a piece of salmon (gravlax)
From that foundation, you can build outward based on what you grow and what your family eats. The goal is not to have every skill perfectly polished it is to be less dependent on systems outside your control and more connected to the food you produce.
The pantry full of jars, the crocks of fermenting vegetables on the counter, the bundles of herbs hanging from the rafters — that is not just food storage. That is self-reliance made visible.
RESOURCES FOR FURTHER LEARNING
- USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning (free at nchfp.uga.edu)
- Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving
- The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz
- Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn
- Your local Cooperative Extension Service office (free canning consultations and pressure canner testing)
Just straight up homesteading ideas sent directly to you.