How to Preserve With Chef Steve McHugh

I’ve been curious about preservation for more than a decade. Right before I had my first child, I was branching out to try things like cooking a whole fish (trout) and making my own yeast pizza dough. But preservation defeated me—I bought a fermentation crock and tried to make sauerkraut, and I can’t honestly remember what happened, only that I was unsuccessful and it felt like a lot of work to cut up and pack all that cabbage in salt. As for canning, forget it. The idea of having to sterilize jars both bored and terrified me: It was like baking, where you had to get something exactly right, but worse, because you could make people sick if you didn’t.