Simeon Brody
A good way to eat at least your 'five a day' portions of fruit and vegetables is to have some of them dried... it's also an excellent way to preserve certain vegetables and fruit if you have a glut or manage to get a job-lot of cheap items or 'buy one get one free' deals. Dried food doesn't have as much 'goodness' as fresh, as some vitamins are lost, so I am not suggesting substituting dried fruit for fresh, but having some can be an enjoyable change or an addition. I mainly eat my dried fruit in my home-made muesli, but my children, who haven't graduated to muesli, have dried fruit instead of sweets (they have some sweeties too!)
I make my dried fruit mainly from unsold produce from the greengrocers, which I buy at a penny per sack in order to make compost (it would otherwise go to landfill) and often there are usable items, to eat fresh or to dry on my woodstoves. It is important to have the drying fruit not too close to the very hot top surface of the stove, so I place cake racks and wok-stands some way above the stove to dry the fruit. Apple rings are made from halved apples, cut across the core so it has the star-shape, the stalk/flower bit cut out and then the core (usually 10 cuts!), then peeled and cut into two again, making four rings per apple. These rings can be threaded onto a (knotted) string and hung up above the source of heat instead of laid flat on trays. I also make pear slices, melon strips, kiwi, plums into half-prunes (stone removed), grapes into raisins, pineapple and whole bananas. Once these items are dry, they can be kept in a screw-top glass jar for a long time until needed. I also create 'fruit leather' which is a mixed fruit puree pushed through a fine sieve and dried in a non-stick pan.... this when dry is cut into strips similar to the commercially available 'fruit winders'.
There are various fruit drying set-ups available, mainly using electricity, or things may be dried in an oven on the lowest heat with the door ajar, but I dont reccommend these methods as I think they are a waste of energy. A friend of mine has experimented with the warmth available above her central heating boiler, and she made raisins in just four days. If you can speed-dry things there is no risk of them going mouldy, and if I dry peeled fruit, it will dry off in 48 hours if cut thin enough. With grapes, I briefly blanch them for a couple of minutes in boiling water, which kills most of the mould spores on their surface and they dry much better than 'raw' unblanched ones. Be aware that seedless ones are best.... if you dry seeded grapes they have a bit of a crunch to them which I'm not keen on!
I make lots of dried fruit but also sometimes paprika from waste sweet peppers (red or yellow mainly) by cutting out the bad bits of unsaleable peppers, slicing and drying the sound flesh, then putting the dried slices in a blender and sieving the dust to get two grades of paprika, a wonderful addition to soups and stews. I occasionally dry halved cherry tomatoes, which I then pop in a jar and pour extra virgin olive oil over.... not 'sundried tomatoes' but 'stovedried'!
Drying fruit is just one way to preserve gluts, and if a woodstove is used (or a solar dryer, of which I have no experience), this is a low-carbon preservation method. I also pickle some things (onions, garlic, nasturtium seeds), make chutneys and jams, and freeze fresh blackberries and raspberries. I may revisit this subject in a future blog... and will include any readers' tips if you care to send them in!
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