By Gordon Lee
If you constantly live out of town or have your own house or summer cottage, then you probably know and appreciate the advantages of a basement for winter storage of canned foods and pickles. In the basement, you can install racks and shelves for canned food in jars, put boxes for storing cabbage, potatoes, and vegetables, buy oak barrels for pickles, cabbage, tomatoes, or mushrooms.
There should be a slight positive temperature in the basement to store food for a long time. If the basement has dry walls, good ventilation, and maintained 2-4 degrees Celcius of heat, these conditions are ideal for storing pickles in barrels.
Nowadays there are no difficulties in buying oak barrels online. Difficulties are with the choice of a suitable barrel for the preparation of pickles. For food purposes, it is preferable to use wooden barrels. Now on sale, there is a large assortment of these products. You can buy barrels of capacity from 5 to 200 liters.
Usually, oak barrels are suitable (and recommended) for most purposes, including pickling. Wooden casks are long-lasting and the products in them are more delicious. Released by this tree tannin substance in small quantities is very useful for health and has good preservative properties. Oak has long been considered the most natural antiseptic that can reduce several times the development of putrefactive microorganisms.
To produce barrels high-quality oak wood, that undergoes natural treatment, is used: the surface is covered with linseed oil, which prevents any kind of deformation, color change, and desiccation. You can choose and buy wooden barrels of any volume – from 3 to 200 liters, it all depends on your needs and available space. Any housewife will be glad to receive such a gift and will always find a use for them, and their original look will decorate the kitchen interior.
