Horseradish

 

There are plenty of “back to the earth” bloggers out there who do amazing things with their gardens and livestock. As much as I admire them, at this point in my life I either don’t have the energy to do what they do, or I’d rather use that energy for other things. I suppose that if modern society as we know it collapsed, I’d be out there building a greenhouse out of milk jugs and Amazon boxes.

That being said, there are a few things we’ve done that fall into the self-sufficiency basket. A few years ago, I started to tap our maple trees and made syrup. We don’t have the “right kind” of maple trees, but it still works, and the end product is really nice.

This year I wanted to try making horseradish.

We planted our horseradish oh, maybe 15 years ago. Up until last weekend we’d never done anything with it, but after watching a half-dozen YouTube videos it seemed like something easy enough to do. And, other than being a little time consuming, it wasn’t bad.

We dug up some roots – the ones that go down below the plants are the most potent. We learned that the stuff will not die, no matter what you do to it, so that was good to know.

After cleaning the roots you peel them like a turnip to get the skin off. Then you cut them into smallish pieces. The next part will be a challenge if you’re off the grid, but you’re supposed to put the chunks into a food processor, blender, or something like that. The alternative is to grate it, which is quite laborious and caustic.

There are as many “recipes” as there are videos, but we settled on pouring unpasteurized apple cider vinegar into the chopper right away. Some people use distilled vinegar and water, and some but just a few tablespoons of vinegar in after it’s been chopped. Apparently, the vinegar arrests the process of the horseradish getting hotter. So if you want it really hot, don’t put the vinegar in right away. Even though we did add it at the outset the result is plenty hot enough for us.

Then you put it in a glass container with a plastic lid. Ta-da! Horseradish!

The above is much simplified, of course, but what we made worked out, and tastes pretty good. Neither one of us has a death wish, so we use only the tiniest bit when we eat horseradish.

We read that the root you grind up has great health benefits beyond clearing your sinuses, but you can look into that yourself.

So, we’ve made very sweet maple syrup and very hot horseradish. Our grandparents would be proud, I think.