Monday, August 17, 2009

Preserving Food ~ Drying Fruit


I had some serious nostalgia of the little farm I grew up on while my daughter and I cut and dried fruit the other day. My mom and I would spend hours making dried bananas, apples, and cherries for our winter oatmeal. I really loved doing it with Cyan.

The cherries were first. Thank goodness for the Pampered Chef cherry pitter. Seriously, I am not a gadget person, but over the last two years, this little thing has really wormed it's way into my heart. (Pitting three pounds of cherries would have taken hours without it.)


Here is Cyan cutting the strawberries.


They dried for 10 hours and then I pulled all the ones that were done off the racks and left the others for another 5 hours.

I do need a bit of advice for drying though. How do you keep them sweet? I got them at the peek of season, I made them large pieces, and didn't over dry. And yet, every now and again, you get a REALLY bitter one. I know none of this fruit was bitter. Any ideas?

signature


1 comment:

Libby said...

I have recently started drying fruit and now I'm obsessed!I dried some native persimmons (diaspyros virginiana ) that I found growing wild. They taste great, a lot like dates, but they contained so many seeds that I wasn’t able to separate out the seeds from the flesh. There are a lot more on the trees that I hope to get when they ripen–any ideas on methods to dry them? or of easily removing the seeds?
Thanks