Return of the fruit-drying experiments
May. 25th, 2010 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterAlthough we managed to make around 30 jars of peach and apricot jam over the weekend, we still had some apricots left over. Amazing, yes. Well, when I originally sent around the proposal to make jam at the bike co-op, another co-op member wrote back with a suggestion for how to preserve the fruit: make fruit leather by simply cooking down the fruit and then spreading it across something flat to dry.
By Sunday, I was motivated to set up the drying rack I created last summer, as pictured here:
And so we made up a batch of fruit leather and also blanched some of the apricots in boiling water for 30 seconds to try straight-up drying them.
The final verdict, two days later, is that the fruit leather is delicious. It has the added advantage of not containing any added sugar whatsoever. It's also much more portable for the sake of our crazy bicycling expeditions. I think if I make more for bicycling/hiking purposes I will add honey to the mix, to make it just a bit sweeter and more full of energy. The dried apricots were equally delicious as the leather, too.
These successes are encouraging me to explore food-drying options again. After reading through an article in Mother Earth News about dehydrators, I'm thinking they're still out of my price range, and most likely unnecessary in my climate. [The author notes that in the presence of abundant California sunshine, he/she previously found dehydrators to be unnecessary]. At the same time, I don't know if I really want to go to the trouble of constructing a full-on solar food dryer, although a sun oven would probably be worthwhile. So I think I'll keep experimenting with my rack system to see if I can work out the (literal) bugs so that by the time the figs are ripe I'll have better success with them.
Hum de dum.
By Sunday, I was motivated to set up the drying rack I created last summer, as pictured here:
And so we made up a batch of fruit leather and also blanched some of the apricots in boiling water for 30 seconds to try straight-up drying them.
The final verdict, two days later, is that the fruit leather is delicious. It has the added advantage of not containing any added sugar whatsoever. It's also much more portable for the sake of our crazy bicycling expeditions. I think if I make more for bicycling/hiking purposes I will add honey to the mix, to make it just a bit sweeter and more full of energy. The dried apricots were equally delicious as the leather, too.
These successes are encouraging me to explore food-drying options again. After reading through an article in Mother Earth News about dehydrators, I'm thinking they're still out of my price range, and most likely unnecessary in my climate. [The author notes that in the presence of abundant California sunshine, he/she previously found dehydrators to be unnecessary]. At the same time, I don't know if I really want to go to the trouble of constructing a full-on solar food dryer, although a sun oven would probably be worthwhile. So I think I'll keep experimenting with my rack system to see if I can work out the (literal) bugs so that by the time the figs are ripe I'll have better success with them.
Hum de dum.
