Today I decided I would try my hand at drying fruit. Last year our friend Daša had given us some dried and we both really enjoyed it (apples were my favorite and plums were Jeremy´s). Anyway, it seemed easy enough and I had a bag of pears and I bought some apples. Anna let me borrow her drying machine and told me the temperature settings for each kind of fruit. So I was set.
Well, it turns our that Jeremy is right when he said that I can burn just about anything. The pears must have been cut into too small of pieces, because they turned out rather hard and my first batch of apples were ranging from dark brown and crispy to almost raw. (Today I also bunrt our pea soup at lunch...maybe today is just a bad cooking day...) This is my first time drying fruit. I have made jerky before, but I never really cared if it got a little too hard, however, "too hard" dryed fruit is slightly less pleasing than crumbly jerky.
Even with my bad luck I have become extremely curious to which fruits would be good to dry. I would love to try pineapple, but saddly they are hard to find (and I'm not sure if you can use the canned pineapple rings...). It seems like the most popular things to dry here are apples, pears, plums, mushrooms, oranges for christmas, and herbs/plants/flowers for tea. I'm not sure if people dry meat, but I know that is something I would like to do. I think our neighbor Ivan dried some meat last fall because the hall has a very familiar smell one weekend.
2 comments:
jamie,is the drying machine like the our dehydrator?? don't give up on it..maybe we'll have to sent a pkg of the jerky spices!
have fun with it
love, mom
I am sure you will figure out just how to do it. Glad to hear you are doing more traveling. I can't imagine the things you have seen.
We are getting ready to start school here soon. I can't believe the summer is almost gone. Each year it goes faster and faster. Sean heads back to Penn State Saturday to start his senior year. Hard to believe. Love, Sallie
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