This is the very last harvest of the season. I just about managed to do it the very day before we got the first meaningful snow and frost.

It all started with this one patch in our garden, where horseradish grew without being planted there. It showed up when I was a kid, and it is still there, several decades later, despite several attempts at eradication. We did occasionally dig a few roots, but never many – it is a lot of work, and my mother did not know how to preserve them. All attempts failed until she stopped trying.

Horseradish occasionally grows in the meadows surrounding my garden, too, although it never gets very big, because it is being cut down when making hay. But there is one spot in front of my garden where there is a pole marking a gas pipeline. The tractors mow around it, and I only sporadically bother to mow the space between the pole and my garden myself. So a few horseradish plants got pretty big in that patch, and last year, I decided to try to harvest them. I dug out circa 700 g of usable roots. Technically, this was poaching, since roots are not covered by the same law as berries.

I tried dehydrating one half and preserving the other. And both cases were a success.

For dehydrating, I cleaned the roots, cut them into slices, and dried them in the dehydrator at 70°C until they were crisp. I found a scientific study on the internet that postulated this temperature as the best option to get dehydrated roots with minimal discoloration and retaining the maximum taste. I shredded the dried chips in a food mixer, and when I need some, I can re-hydrate a spoonful on a saucer. This white powder does clean sinuses a treat, but I do not recommend ingesting it nasally.

After I processed the roots, I had some offcuts that were not worth much. So I planted them along the edge of my compost pile. In late spring, they sprouted and started to look promising.

And just before the first big frost and snowfall, the huge leaf fans started to die back and yellow. I was considering whether to wait one more year or to harvest them. I decided to harvest them, because whilst I still have some dehydrated horseradish, I ate all that I preserved. Horseradish is an excellent source of vitamin C, and I like it.

The roots were much deeper than I thought they would be after a single year, which is, I guess, one of the reasons why horseradish is not grown commercially very often. It does require some know-how and work to grow roots that are easy-ish to process.

I lack the skill, so my roots were a mess. Still, I harvested circa 900 g of usable mass, and that is not too shabby. This time, I preserved all using the following recipe (which I found on the Czech internet last year)

Ingredients:
300 g clean horseradish roots
50 g vinegar
200 g water
100 g sunflower oil
7 g salt
16 g sugar

Mix/dissolve water and the rest, and cut the horseradish roots into small pieces directly into the solution to prevent browning. Then blend it all together in a food processor/mixer into a white paste. It will never be completely smooth, but the roots should be shredded as small as possible.

That is the end of the original recipe, which was meant for immediate consumption and eventually for storage in the refrigerator for a few days, weeks at the outside. I added one additional step to the recipe for long-term preserving: sterilizing.

Since horseradish is a root vegetable, botulism is a real concern. Even with added salt and vinegar, I wanted to leave nothing to chance, and I sterilized tightly closed jars in a pressure cooker at ca 120°C. Once they cooled, I heated them up again to 80-100°C, and opened-closed them while hot so they form a vacuum seal. It changes the color from pure white to creamy white, but it retains the flavor. Last year’s batch was still perfectly edible after nine months in the cellar, so I think I am safely set up for a year – with all the ingredients added up, I ended up with almost 2 kg of preserved horseradish paste.