Pineapple Preserved in a Jar of Honey Wine Mead

In the early days of this project, before I had any gardens growing, I brought in a lot of canned fruits and vegetables, many of which weren't of the highest quality. I just wanted to be sure I could survive the harsh elements until my gardens got established, and have a relatively balanced diet of whole, yet sometimes not perfectly pure foods. Luckily, I've been able to phase them out completely after the first year, but during that year they were staples.

Because few of them were appropriate meals onto themselves, so that i'd rather not eat an entire can at once and have no means to refrigerate leftovers, I quickly got my long over-due wild fermentation with brine game on. Ever since I've had multiple glass jar fermentation vats, first filled by canned vegetable leftovers, now stocked with garden vegetables and spent green tea leaves.

Although there are many world famous recipes and traditions of savory salt brined fermented fruit dishes, I wanted to preserve some of the normal, sweet, fruit experience of canned and fresh fruit leftovers and I first did so with citric acid crystal powder. It was effective at keeping them safe to eat, though it was quite sour, rough on the teeth and esophagus, and seemed to ultimately degrade and flavor beyond my liking, not to mention the dangers involved with the material itself as it can cause serious injuries if mishandled.

I quickly discontinued the citric acid method and switched to preservation with alcohol from my home-made honey mead wine. There was plenty of alcohol content percentage in the mead solution to prevent mold and kill other pathogens. I discovered over time that while much of the sweetness will be eaten away by the remaining living yeast that created the alcohol in the first place or by other yeast vectors, there is a window of time within a day or two where the fruit will be almost as fresh as when it was cut up to be put in the wine. Or rather, if it was canned fruit, it would remain of a similar flavor and texture for a day or two. This worked out well for times when I'd only want to eat half a can of fruit, or when the can was bulk sized.

I would simply spoon out the remainder into a jar of wine and eat it within a day or two. Or, as I would later eventually discover, if I forgot about it or intentionally let it stay in the wine solution for a longer period, it would essentially flavor the wine with a different profile. I tried this with a number of berries, tropical fruits, beet juices, cane juices, store bought fruit juices, and others with almost invariably satisfying results. Now I'm very convinced that the trade-off is minimal, just a little bit of potential "head-change" from a serving of wine preserved fruit is a small, and sometimes fun and playful price to pay for totally eliminating the need for fruit refrigeration.