Orchard People

[00:00:00] Introduction and Welcome
The following program does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Reality Radio 101, its advertisers and sponsors, or its listening audience. Lister discretion is advised.
Welcome to the Urban Forestry Radio Show here on Reality Radio 101. In this radio show and podcast, we learn about fruit trees, permaculture, aboriculture, and so much more. So if you love trees, and especially fruit trees, Or if you're interested in living a more sustainable life, then this is the place for you.
I'm your host, Susan Poizner of the Fruit Tree Care Training website, OrchardPeople. com. Thanks for tuning in, and enjoy the show.
Welcome to the Urban Forestry Radio Show with your host, Susan Poizner. To contact Susan live right now, send her an email. InStudio101 at gmail.com.
And now, right to your host of the Urban Forestry Radio Show, Susan Poizner.
[00:01:35] Bumper Crop in Toronto Orchard
Hi, everyone. This year we had a bumper crop in our orchard park in Toronto, Canada. Our cherry and plum trees produced enough fruit for all of our volunteers. We ate lots of the fruit fresh. Some of us made plum jelly. There was so much fruit that we were also able to share the harvest generously with park visitors and community members.
I'm just wondering, what do you do when you're blessed with a generous harvest? It's so wonderful to share it with friends, and it's also wonderful to preserve and enjoy the harvest throughout the year.
[00:02:13] Dehydrating the Harvest
Now, some people are really big on canning, others make baked goods for the freezer or jellies or jams, but dehydrating the bounty is also a terrific idea.
Dehydrated foods are easy to store and they can stay fresh for up to a year, but some foods are easier to dehydrate than others. And many people don't realize that some dehydrated foods need to be pasteurized in order to be safe to eat. dehydrating the harvest is what we are going to be talking about in today's show.
My guest is Teresa Marrone, author of The Beginner's Guide to Dehydrating Food. And she'll tell us what tools we need to dry homegrown foods. She'll also share some food safety tips and some recipes.
[00:03:05] Interview with Teresa Marrone
So on the line is Teresa Marrone.
Teresa thank you so much for joining me on the show today. thank you for having me, Susan. I'd love to find out a little bit more of when you got involved in dehydrating food. What brought you to this interesting adventure?
[00:03:24] Dehydrating Tools and Techniques
we used to, and we still do to some extent, but what started it is back in the 80s, we were doing a lot of traveling into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and other areas where we would go fishing and camping and all that sort of good stuff.
And It became necessary to lessen the load that we were carrying and also in the Boundary Waters and Quetico Provincial Park, you can't bring in cans or jars or anything like that. So you are forced to bring in dried foods. And at that time, we started purchasing the prepackaged mixes that you get at the camping store, beef stroganoff and all that stuff.
And we found that they were not only very expensive, but not very good. way too salty, didn't like the seasoning, just basically didn't like them. And so I learned how to dehydrate a lot of foods that I couldn't buy dried, and I was packing my own meal mixes. And that's been, like I said, since the mid 80s that I've been doing that.
So it sounds like it's become quite a passion for you. Yeah, I Once you start it, you just start thinking, Oh, I can dry that. Oh, that would be good. And it's gotten way beyond just packing meal mixes. Dry foods just because I enjoy the finished product. It's a great way to store things without taking up a lot of room.
And we also have a cabin in northern Minnesota, and I like to keep dried foods up there so that we're very far from a grocery store. So if I want some vegetables or fruits or something, I can bring up my home dried stuff and just rehydrate it. And I'm ready to go. So that's been, something that has really added to my options up there.
[00:05:17] Canning vs. Dehydrating
Now, were you ever a person who was into canning at all? Or is that not, like I'm looking at the, I always found canning a little bit arduous. I, don't know if you find it easier than canning or other ways of storing and, preserving foods. It's different is, what it is. Yes, I have done a fair bit of canning as well.
It's just a different way of doing it. It takes up a lot less room. Dried foods are much more, space efficient than canned foods. For example, if you want to, if you have a rhubarb crop or something, you can take, what would take four quarts, four quart jars of cut up rhubarb, if you canned it, will end up being about two cups of dried rhubarb, and you can use it the same way.
and actually, when you think about even freezing that rhubarb, that, it takes a lot less space than the fresh Yeah, exactly. It's just a, it's a very space efficient way to preserve foods. And it's not exactly the same as canning, it's not the same product, although you can use a lot of the things in the same way.
Apples, for example, You can them. You can freeze them. You can do all kinds of things and make pies or whatever you want to do. You can also dehydrate them. They take up a lot less room. They're shelf stable. You can have nice dried apples to snack on, which I just love. You can rehydrate them to make pies.
You can make applesauce out of them. You can do all kinds of things, and they take up less room. If you have a power failure or the grid goes down or something, your food isn't at the mercy of a freezer or a refrigerator, and you also don't have to have a nice canning shelf in your storage. you can still have that, but it just It takes up so much less room when it's been dehydrated.
Yeah, so, here's the thing.
[00:07:10] Choosing the Right Dehydrator
If you go online and you look and see what dehydrators, they can be very expensive. I was just, checking online the different prices and they can be, hundreds and hundreds of dollars. when you started doing the dehydrating, of the different foods, what tools did you use and do you have to get the best?
No, you really don't have to get the best, and the dehydrator that I use the most, I've had since the mid 80s. It's the exact same one. It's not just another version of the same model. It is the same machine. So I've been using that for 30 years, and it still works, and that was not an expensive dehydrator.
That was by no means a top of the line dehydrator. I think I paid 50 for it at the time, and I was looking online at it myself. Right now, you can buy that same model It's a little hard to tell if it's the exact same model because it's been 30 years, but there's one that's similar to it for about 60 U. S.,
and another one that's also similar to it, probably closer to what I have that's a little over 100 U. S. Wow, so that's very reasonable. Now I'm gonna be honest here. I tried to dehydrate some foods in the past. I got a cheap dehydrator from a local store, and I can't remember what we were trying to dry, but we put whatever it was in there, and two days later, it's still there.
Still hadn't dried the food, never quite worked, and we switched the trays around and whatever. So what happened to me? that was a real turn off. That would be. Probably, my guess is, without knowing what you had, there were a lot of dehydrators still are out there. a lot of cheap dehydrators don't have a fan.
They also don't have good thermostat control. But a fan is essential to dehydrating because it has to move the air through and out. And if you don't do that, if you have a system where you're just heating the food, at 140 degrees or whatever you're dehydrating at, that moisture just sits there. It doesn't go anywhere.
And that food could actually spoil before it dries. a fan is absolutely critical to a dehydrator. And the old style dehydrators, some of which are still available, like mine, has a fan on the bottom. It's a series of stacking trays. And there's a fan on the bottom, and it blows warm air up through the trays and then out the top.
Modern dehydrators, they figured out that they could Put the fan on top and blow the air down and those work just as well. And then there are also, this is where you get into money on dehydrators. There's dehydrators that are called box style. And they look like a box with pull out trays. And the fans on those are on the back wall.
And so you put your trays in and the air blows evenly across all of the foods. Whereas with, the type of dehydrator I have, which is the more common one, the fan is blowing from the top to the bottom or from the bottom to the top, whichever, but it's blowing through the trays. So the tray on the bottom or the tray on the top, the tray that's closest to the fan, is indeed getting better air circulation than the ones at the other end of the stack.
it has a couple different designs, but the key is to have a thermostatic control that's You can change depending on what you're drying because different foods need different temperatures, but the fan is absolutely critical. Critical, okay. we have a question from Denise and she says, Hi Susan, love the radio show.
She's from Alma, Quebec. She says, a question for your guest. Are commercial dehydrators from the big box stores, I think she said, any good to use? Thank you. So yeah, the one, the ones available in the big, shops, are they, you think they might be good? Yes, as long as you are getting one that has the things I've mentioned, if I understand the question, it's pretty easy to tell if you've got a decent one.
I'm giving numbers in U. S. dollars because that's what I'm familiar with, but if you spend 20 on a dehydrator, it's not going to be worth having. exactly, and yeah, You do have to make sure that you're getting the minimum requirements, and some of them have very low wattage. You can go anywhere from 200 watts up to 1, 000 watts, and of course, one that's 1, 000 watts can get hotter.
And it's a little bit more efficient, but really dehydrating is done at a pretty low temperature, so the wattage isn't as critical. I would say one that's four to five hundred watts would be a good starting point and up from there. Oh, good. Okay. We got another question here from Alicia from Montreal. Hi, Susan and Teresa.
I'm wondering, what is the best way to dehydrate liquids, such as eggs or milk? Eggs and milk. These should really not be dehydrated in a home dehydrator. they need a little bit more control than what we can do and I never recommend doing them. So that's a bit of bad news. I, the, you almost need professional equipment, to do that.
You almost need a freeze dryer, for example, to work with milk or eggs. So it's not something you can really do at home. You can dry things that have, maybe some egg in them, but it's been cooked like a, food mix or something. You can dry food mixes and things like that. But to just dehydrate eggs, unfortunately, there isn't a way to do it.
You need to get the stuff from the camping store, which is freeze dried. Okay, that makes sense. Now, in your book, I love your book. It's a really wonderful resource. And you talk about other options. So let's say I don't want to go out and buy a dehydrator.
[00:13:28] Dehydrating in the Oven
So let's start with the oven. Can you use your oven to dry foods?
Yes, you can. The best ovens for drying food are ones that go pretty low. some electric ovens go down to 150, which is ideal. if you have a gas oven, you can actually dry just with the pilot light. if it's a good enough pilot light, you can turn it on and off. If your oven doesn't go to a low temperature, it's going to be pretty tough.
But whenever you dehydrate in an oven, you have to, again, keep in mind you need to keep that moisture moving off of the food. So you have to prop the door open and set up a little fan. there's the little desktop fan type thing that blows into one side of the oven. shoot it toward the back wall of the oven and then the air will come out the other side.
So you do have to prop it open. But that does work and that's the way that most people try dehydrating when they're first learning about it because they don't want to spend 200 and find out that they don't like doing this. So they'll try something simple in their oven and I always recommend that they start with apples.
That's a really good thing to try dehydrating in an oven because they go pretty quick. They're very easy to get. Everybody's got apples and the finished product is really good. They're easy to do. Okay, so let's talk about that with the apples. So let's say you're using your oven. You're doing an experiment.
And how thinly do you have to slice the apples in order for this to be effective? And what temperature would you put them in the oven on? generally, fruits are done at a target temperature of 135. And when you're working with an oven, there's something to keep in mind that all ovens turn on and off throughout their cycle, whether you're dehydrating or baking or whatever you're doing, you would notice that your oven sometimes comes on and then it goes for a little bit and then it, actually turns itself off for a while and then it comes back on when its own thermostat tells it that it needs to.
So when we say we're dehydrating at 135, It sometimes is as high as 150, possibly more, and it's sometimes as low as 120. So that 135 is an average, so that's the first thing to keep in mind if you're checking a thermometer to see how your oven's doing. Don't be alarmed if you see that it, fluctuates in temperature, that's normal.
So the way to do apples is to slice them, oh, quarter of an inch thick. you may peel them or not peel them depending on how you like it. The peels will definitely get tougher when they're dry, but that's okay. And the biggest question when you start getting into dehydrating is are you going to pre treat them because fruits like apples will turn brown and any commercially Purchased dried apples that you buy have been sulfited, unless they're from an organic store.
But you don't have to do that. You can, there's all kinds of pre treatments you can do. You can dry them untreated. And if you, at the simplest, if you want to dry untreated apples, which I do all the time, you just cut them and put them on like a, what I would call a cookie cooling rack, some sort of ventilated rack, wire rack, and you can put that in your oven and just turn it on and adjust the heat.
Get the fan blowing in there and it'll take maybe three or four hours with an oven. When you're doing something like that, you're going to have to take out and rotate because you're in a less controlled situation. you're doing it, with a It's not a cheating method, but it's not something that's designed to do dehydrating.
So you have to periodically take your tray out, rotate it front to back, and as the first hour or two passes, you might want to rearrange the apples on your It's called a, rack, because the ones at the outside of the rack will dry more quickly than the ones on the inside of the rack, because they're closer to the walls of the oven, which it will be warmer.
So you take a rack out and move the apples around so that you're bringing the ones from the center to the edges and vice versa. So you have to fiddle with it a little bit when you're doing it, but it's not bad. You do it maybe every half hour or something. You rotate the rack or move the food around.
And then, after probably three hours, what you would do is take a couple of apple slices out, let them cool to room temperature, and then test them to see if they feel dry. They should be leathery, but flexible. They shouldn't be crisp. They won't be crisp or hard. Think about a dried apple slice that you buy in the store, and they're like that.
But you always want to check the dryness at room temperature. If you take it, if you try to manipulate a piece of dried food right out of the oven, it's still warm, so it's going to be softer. So you need to cool it to room temperature and see if it feels flexible and leathery. And you can bite into it or cut into it and see if there's any moisture in the middle, which there should not be.
And if that's, if that apple is done, You can start taking the apples off the tray and they might not all be done that are on the tray. It's very common to have to remove part of your load. And let the rest continue to dehydrate because things might dehydrate unevenly, especially in an oven. I think that's a good example because it empowers you to do a little experiment, and like you say, the Apple experiment could increase your confidence, at least for somebody like me.
Yeah. It's the first thing, . It's the first thing to try, and like I say, apples are very common. They're very easy to dehydrate. And if you do no pretreatment, when those apples come out, they'll be tawny colored is what I always call it. And they will stay that way at room temperature for months, probably.
They really don't brown up that fast. They will gradually turn brown. And if you leave them in a jar for a year, they'll get brown. Not real brown, but they'll get brown. Some varieties brown more than others. as I'm sure anybody who's ever made a salad with apples in it will notice. Some kind of turn brown in the salad before you eat it, and some don't.
And the same as True for dehydrating them too. So we have a question from George from Springdale, Newfoundland.
[00:20:29] Temperature Guidelines for Dehydrating
Now, he asks, and you answered this for apples, but he asks, What temperature should I use to dehydrate? And I guess, he says, thank you. I guess my question here is, it always the same temperature no matter what you're doing?
Whether it's apples or cherries or apricots. How do we know about the temperatures we should be using to dehydrate? Generally 135 is the temperature you would dehydrate fruits at because they are high moisture, but they're also very high sugar. And so they tend to, the sugar keeps the surface from drying out before the inside has a chance to dry.
Whereas if you try to dry vegetables You have to use a lower temperature because they have, they may have the same amount of moisture, but they have less sugar. And so what happens with them, if you have sliced green peppers or cucumbers or something like that or eggplant, it's not as sweet and the outside dries before the inside has had a chance to start drying and it's called case hardening.
And so what that means is that you've got a skin on the outside of that slice. And the moisture can't get out from the inside of the slice anymore. Now fruit doesn't do that because of the sugar. So vegetables are dehydrated at a lower temperature, 125. And some people follow what's called a living or a raw foods diet, where they basically don't eat any cooked foods, but they do use some dried foods.
And those food should be dried at 105 to 110, basically. So it's going to take a long time, but the stuff will still dry, and it has never been heated beyond 110, and so for the raw foods, living foods thing, that apparently is the cutoff point. I don't do that, but I'm aware of it, Now we got an email as well from Perry.
[00:22:24] Advantages of Home Dehydrating
Hi, what is the advantage of drying food yourself over buying in dried foods? Thank you. Over buying them? Yeah, buying them. He's from Andover, by the way. we've certainly got the option to dry things that we can't buy. for example, rhubarb that I mentioned earlier. there's a lot of things that are, you may, pick serviceberries and dry them, or Saskatoons or whatever you want to call them.
You can't buy those dried. I've never seen it. You can dry things like apples without using any sulfites, and virtually, or raisins without sulfites. And virtually all of those things, if you buy them, unless you get them at a health food store, organic store, or co op, if you buy normal grocery store dried apples or dried apricots or anything, they've been sulfited.
And some people have, Basically an allergic response to sulfite. Some people just don't like it because it's a chemical. So when you dry your own, you don't have to use sulfite. You don't have to pre treat at all if you don't want to. There's certain pre treatments you can do which will prevent browning and help them to retain their softness when dry.
But it's up to you. You don't have to use that. We've got a better variety. You can control what's in there. And you can Just make things that are different than what you can buy. For example, dried plums. You can dry plums that have red skins or yellow skins or whatever. And the dried plum, which is what we would call a prune, isn't black.
It's reddish or greenish or purplish, whatever color that the fruit was. And those are really interesting. Plums are one of my favorite things to dry because they are unlike The prunes that you buy, the prunes that you buy are a variety called prune plums and they're bluish black and so they dry into that blackish thing that we think of a prune being.
Those are also highly sulfited and usually sugared. So they're very soft and almost sticky gummy and if you dry your own plums they can be all different colors of the rainbow. They're really, plums are really fun to dry. They're really great. Especially if you grow them yourself, that would be fantastic and then you know it's all your own product.
Yeah. We've got, yeah, we've got an email from Anthony from Baltimore. Good question. Can you dehydrate in the open dry air on racks with a fan? In the open, meaning just outside if it's a, yeah, you can if you're in a good climate zone for it. so Anthony's in Baltimore, which is where I live.
[00:25:15] Challenges of Air Drying in Humid Climates
I'm in Minnesota and we have a tremendous amount of humidity in the summer. Very hard to air dry. You can do it, but it's going to take a long time. You need to be in an area. And do it at a time when you're assured of three to four days of sunny weather without rain and as minimal humidity as possible.
You can do it. it's best in, for people that live in very dry, hot climates such as the deserts southwest in America. New Mexico and Arizona, that kind of stuff. That's, they have great climates for that. if you're in a humid area, it's pretty tough. On the west coast, it's pretty tough because it's very humid, for example.
[00:26:05] Setting Up Drying Racks and Pasteurizing Dried Foods
But you can set up drying racks with, window screens, for example, old window screens. Or you can make frames like that and put plastic screens on them. There's all kinds of things you can do. What you have to do is set it up with a covering over it. Cheesecloth or some kind of plastic mesh to keep birds and bugs off of it because they are going to be all over that stuff.
And then once food has been, it takes a long time to air dry food, or sun dry as we call it, can be done. you have to bring it in at night and it should be pretty partially dried by then, but it's not going to be ready. And then you put it out again the next morning, start drying some more. And when it's dry, those foods should be pasteurized by either freezing for a certain amount of time at below zero or heating in an oven because it is possible that insects have come and laid eggs on them and you wouldn't know about this.
And so your food would be highly compromised during storage. So those are the foods that have to be pasteurized. So when you say heating them in the oven, so they're already dried and then you pop them in the oven at what temperature for how long in order to ensure that the foods are pasteurized? it's pretty, it's about 300 degrees for 20 minutes or something like that.
It's not a real long time. It's just a matter of making sure that you've killed off any bugs. Okay, that's good.
[00:27:42] Storing Dehydrated Foods: Short Term vs Long Term
Teresa, we've talked about so many good things so far today about dehydrating tools, what tools you should be using. We've got a question here from Joyce. And Joyce says, Hi Susan, great show today.
A different type of question for your guest. How do I store my food for long term versus short term after dehydrating? Thank you. So what do you think, Teresa, about Joyce's question here? Okay, I missed a little bit of that. Are we talking about storing foods? Exactly. Okay, great. Yeah. There's a couple of options that you can do.
at the simplest, you can just keep your dried foods in a canning jar or a plastic, bag if you want to have a little snack by your desk or whatever. For longer term storage. More than a couple of weeks or something on the countertop. You can put them in a dark, cool area like a closet. A root cellar is perfect.
And again, in canning jars or something that's airtight is the best. What you want to do is make sure that there's no moisture in there.
[00:28:55] Conditioning and Vacuum Sealing for Long-Term Storage
So before you try to store food for long term, you want to do what's called conditioning. Which is important to do if you're going to be keeping your food for more than a couple of days, which is generally the case.
So you put it into, after it comes out of the dehydrator and is cool, you put it into, a quart canning jar, a glass jar, seal it, put it on the counter for three or four days, and watch it. And if there's any moisture that starts to appear inside the glass, then you open the jar, put the stuff back into the dehydrator, and dehydrate it some more because there's still moisture in it.
So once it's been conditioned, you can keep it in your glass jar, which is really ideal. If you have a, vacuum system, you can seal it in vacuum bags, and some, vacuum systems have a little, hose mechanism that you can attach to special canning jar lids, and it will take the air out of the canning jar.
And this does help for long term storage. Another thing you can do, if you don't have a vacuum preserver like that, you can get, vacuum packing oxygen absorbers, is what they're called. They're little packets of iron oxide, and you get those at, that's a specialty item. It's places that, that deal in emergency preparedness and stuff.
They spell these for people that want to Stockpile a lot of dried foods, and it's a little packet. You put your dried food in a glass jar, you put one of these little packets in, you immediately seal the jar, and the oxygen absorber actually sucks the air out of the jar and seals the jar lid.
You have to use a new jar lid. And it'll actually pop down as though you've canned it. And that stuff will keep forever. Wow. so that's one way to do it, but those are a little bit hard to come by. You can if you have freezer space, you can freeze your dehydrated foods in bags or jars, and it takes up room, but it will help preserve it.
And if you have made something, that's prone to spoilage, like dehydrated jerky, it is best to store that in the freezer, or refrigerator, but, fruits and vegetables can also be kept in the freezer.
[00:31:18] Using Silica Gel and Freezing for Preservation
The other thing you can do To preserve your food a little longer is go to a florist or a hobby shop and get what's called silica gel, which is a It's a crystalline substance It's very cheap or easy to come by and you can put a couple tablespoons into a paper coffee filter and tie it shut You can put a half cup into a little cloth bag or a clean Like a child a baby sock a cotton baby sock tie that shut with string And put that in your jar, and that will absorb any moisture that does come out.
And periodically, this sounds crazy, but this is all true. Periodically, you pull that little thing out, you open up the, the coffee filter or the sock or the bag or whatever you've got this silica gel in. And if it starts to turn pink, that's a sign that it is, it has got moisture in it now. And so you take that silica gel itself and you spread it in your dehydrator and you dry it.
Until it's white again, then you put it back in the jar. Huh. So that's incredible because, especially because when I think about dehydrated foods, like the stuff that you get from the health food store, dried apples, dried plums, whatever, you think it's just gonna last forever. I would never think of putting that stuff in the freezer.
And I might leave it in the cupboard for a month or two. Oh, that's no problem.
[00:32:43] Pre-Treating Fruits Before Dehydration
Now, how is that different than my home grown or my home dehydrated foods, because you're talking about lots of different methods. You mentioned that if you can leave stuff on the counter and or eat it in a few days or here are some other options, like when do I know when I need to really use those other options?
I think some of it depends on what you've dehydrated and how well you've done it. If you get the moisture down to, we're trying to get the moisture down to 10 to 20 percent and most fruits and vegetables that we'd be dehydrating started at 80 or 90 percent moisture. So you're really taking a lot of moisture out.
And if you've done a good job and you can put that, your dehydrated apples into a Canning jar and put a lid on it and stick it in your cupboard so that it's out of the light That'll keep for a year if it's not hot it may start to darken if you haven't pre treated it, but it'll be fine So that's not a problem to leave things for a long time.
They will retain their color better If they're in a freezer or a dark area if you think about herbs in your dried herbs in your kitchen cabinet If you know that if you leave those out on the cupboard, or excuse me, on the countertop for a month or so that those herbs will start to fade in color.
I'm sure you've seen this. And that's the same kind of thing that's going on with all dried foods. herbs are just another dried food and they tend to discolor. They either darken or they get, herbs will get dull looking instead of nice green, whatever they were. This is all just a matter of, enzymes at work that are working to, they make the food look, darker, or a funny color, or they get harder, they get less soft.
So, basically when, unless it's jerky or something like that, which you suggest we should freeze, we, if we've done a good job at dehydrating the food, we should be able to maybe vacuum pack it or something and leave it for quite a long time. so that's, but these are other options if you want to keep things a very long time or if you want to keep them looking a little bit prettier.
That's exactly right. And, when you buy dried foods from the store, as I say, most have been sulfited and some have been treated with sugars and things, and we can do these things at home ourselves when we're dehydrating. We can use sulfites if we want. We can sugar them. We can do all kinds of things.
And they will keep better. A fruit that has been blanched in syrup before it's been dehydrated will keep better. And stay softer, longer than a, fruit that has had no pre treatment. So that's interesting. So we can, we can sulfite it and all that stuff and then that stuff will keep just as long as something that you bought at the store.
So it's, you've really got a lot of control over how you handle that food before you dehydrate it. If you pre treat it, you are knocking back some of the enzymes that cause spoilage or deterioration. Same as a commercial processor does. So you can do these things at home. If you don't pre treat, I've kept apples that I've dried with no pre treatment.
I've kept them in a jar in the cupboard for probably close to a year. And they get, instead of looking tawny, they look a little more tan. But they're still okay. They're still fine. Fantastic. And by the way, for the listeners, in Therese's book, she talks about all these different pre treatments. we'll try and talk about it later in the show, but, yeah, there's just so much great information.
We have an email from Brian. This is lovely. Hi, Susan. New listener here from Fairbanks, Alaska. Love the tips and tricks from your guest today. I have been dehydrating foods for over 10 years and never knew some of the advice that your guest has spoken about. Thank you. Again, love your radio show, Brian.
Thank you, Brian. That's great. And isn't, I think, Teresa, that's what I felt when I read your book and when we first chatted on the phone in our little pre interview, it's wow. I didn't know that there was so much potential in dehydrating foods. And some of the recipes that you offer in your book are very interesting as well.
Yeah, there, there's more to it than people think. It's not just throwing some onions in the dehydrator and saying, that's what I did. you can make fruit leathers and you can dehydrate, there's all kinds of things you can dehydrate that you wouldn't have thought of. For example, You open up a can of tomato paste because the recipe calls for two tablespoons of tomato paste.
now you've got probably four tablespoons left in that can. What are you going to do with that? you can stick it in your fridge, you can freeze it, you can do whatever. Or next time you're running your dehydrator, you take a little, what are called, dryer sheet, which is a solid sheet that you use to dry leathers, fruit leathers, and things that get too small and they'll fall through, And you can take your tomato paste and make a little blob of it, spread it out, and dry it, and it becomes a little tomato paste leather, which you can store in the cupboard, you can store it in the freezer, you can do anything you want with it.
And then next time you have a recipe that needs a tablespoon of tomato paste, you just take out one of your little leathers, because you've done it in a tablespoon at a time, and you just mix it with a little hot water, and boom, tomato paste. Oh, that's fantastic. That's so handy. okay, let's talk.
There's so much more I want to talk about. I want to talk about some recipes. I want to talk about different fruits. Something I was thinking about was cranberries. Teresa, we have talked about so much, we've talked about the equipment for dehydrating food, we've talked about doing your first experiment on apples and drying apples.
When I was flipping through your book, you go through all the different foods you can dehydrate and I noticed that some of them are trickier than others. One that jumped into my mind just now was cranberries. I guess some types of foods need to be, boiled before you can dehydrate them? Can you talk to me a little bit about, how we would dehydrate cranberries?
[00:39:06] Dehydrating Berries and Plums
Okay, our connection is getting actually a little bit worse than it was, but I believe you were asking about boiling fruits to check them before we dehydrate. Yes, exactly. Okay, some fruits, cranberries, blueberries, serviceberries, you can do this with grapes too. They require, they have tough outer skins or they have a waxy bloom on the outside like a blueberry does.
If you think about it, it's whitish on the outside. And that is, that bloom as it's called, is resistant to air and moisture. And so what we need to do is put tiny breaks in the surfaces of the skin in order to let the moisture come out of the center of the fruit. And with cranberries, the best way to do that, because they're pretty hard, you just dip them in boiling water for a little bit and then you dump them into cold water and it causes little what are called checks or breaks in the skin.
You can do that with blueberries. And it does work, but they tend to get soft because they're already pretty soft. What I find works best for checking blueberries and serviceberries is to actually freeze them first, flat on a baking sheet so that they're in a single layer. And then when I'm ready to dehydrate them, I put them into, maybe a cup or two at a time, into a colander or a strainer of some kind, and I run very hot tap water over them.
for about 30 seconds, and I shake that off, and then I put them onto the dehydrating trays. And because they've been frozen, the skins, when they hit, get hit by the hot water, they break open a little bit. And so that's the checking, and that's the easiest way to do that with, blueberries or soft berries.
And the berry itself is still frozen, but the outside The skin has broken, and so when the berry starts, when you put it into the dehydrator, the interior will thaw, and the moisture can get out through the little breaks in the skin. So that's the easiest way to deal with those. That makes a lot of sense, but what about with plums?
Because, with apples, you're slicing them very thinly. But with plums, aren't you putting in the whole fruit with the seed inside and everything? How does it actually Completely dry with an apple or with a plum, would Oh, a plum? No, I'm sorry. With plums, you do want, you have to pit them.
Oh, you do have to pit them. Do you have to slice them? Yes. You do have to pit them. So you can, if you've got a free stone, you can cut it in half until you hit the pit and then twist it in your hands. And the. The pit will pop out. If you've got clingstone varieties, those are a little tougher to do, but plums are, if you think about prunes, they don't have pits in them, at least I don't think I've ever seen a purchased prune that had a pit in it, so that's the same thing as a plum.
if you want to, with cherries, for example, if you want to dry some cherries and you want to dry them whole, you can do that, but you need to use a cherry pitter, which is, the one I have is like a little I don't know, it's a little plunger sort of device. And I put the cherry in it, and then I push down this lid.
It's got like a hole, a donut on the bottom. And I push a little plunger, and it pops the pit out. And then I can dry my cherries whole if I want to, but they will dry more quickly if I cut them in half, because they're going to be more exposed to the heat of the dehydrator. So with plums, yeah, you want to get the pit out, and you can dry.
a half of a plum. you want to, if you're going to do that, you want to take your, once you get the pit out and you've got your plum half, you want to push from the skin toward the inside to pop the fruit inside out. So that you're exposing more flesh to the air. And so you can slice them or whatever you want to do or dice them.
So with the plum, you don't have to worry about boiling it to break the skin, as you do with the cranberry. I guess the skin is That's correct. And yeah, that's absolutely correct. so Yeah, those were, those are, you're going to be handling enough to get some, air into them.
[00:43:44] Health Benefits of Dehydrated Foods
So we've got a question here from Chase.
Hi. The question of the day for your guest, is dehydrated food healthier than non dehydrated foods? Thank you. . . I wouldn't say it's any different. It, because you might have a slight nutrient loss just because it is exposed to some heat. And some air. So I suppose it is losing a little bit, but I think it's pretty minimal.
And when it's dehydrated, it's a more concentrated food source. So you probably are going to eat a little bit more of it than you would have if it was a fresh fruit or vegetable. so you probably do lose a little bit, but this isn't, at high heat. It's, you're not going to have a lot of nutrient loss From heat, unlike boiling.
I don't know if that answered the question. I think that's a good answer. I think that's a very good answer.
[00:44:45] Making Candied Fruits with a Dehydrator
I wanted to ask you, about one of your favourite, you had told me, one of your favourite recipes is candied fruit. And that you give it as a gift, like for Christmas or whatever. Can you tell us briefly, what is candied fruit, how do you make it with your dehydrator?
Oh boy. Candied fruit is wonderful, if you, if you can handle a lot of sugar, because that's, there's a lot of sugar involved in candying. a lot of fruits can be candied. For example, candied apples are, again, probably a really good thing to start with. And what you do is you make a syrup that is, it's got, let's see, you put a cup, it's got a cup of honey, and it's got a half cup water, and a cup of white sugar.
And you cook that until it reaches 235 degrees, which is, That's a soft boil, almost. And so then you take your fruit and you've cut it up. In the case of apples, the way I like to do them for holiday is I peel them and then I use an apple corer to push out the core and I slice the apples so that I've got rings.
And then you simmer that in the syrup for, it's 15 minutes. And then what you're doing is you're exchanging some of the water with sugar. So that's exactly what's happening. So then you take them out of the syrup and you put them into your dehydrator and you dry them. And the apple slices become translucent when they're candied.
They look almost like stained glass. And so I like to partially dip them in melted chocolate, like half chocolate and half not chocolate. Or to drizzle some ribbons of chocolate over them or something like that. I'll also candy things like pineapple or plums or cherries or strawberries or all kinds of things.
And again, for gift giving, you can partially dip those into chocolate if you want to dress them up. I like to give boxes, little gift boxes of mixed candied fruits. Some are partially dipped in chocolate and some aren't. And they become very jewel like. like a, candied strawberry looks like a little Ruby.
They're, shiny, they're glossy, they're deep red, they're really pretty. And they're very, tasty and they also make the best fruitcake in the world. I bet you are very popular with your friends. Not very many friends get my candy. Oh, I was wondering if I could put myself on the list, but I guess not.
That's okay. We can talk about that. We can talk, we can negotiate. Yeah.
[00:47:26] Conclusion and Farewell
Thank you, Teresa, for spending this wonderful time with us on the show and sharing all your knowledge.
And, if anybody wants a copy of your book, where do you think they could get hold of it? any bookstore can get any book that you want, as long as you know the name. I always encourage people to go to a local, independent bookstore. That's just the way that I am. But That said, you can get that book at Amazon or any kind, Barnes and Noble, any of the online booksellers also have it okay, I hope people will check it out, get it out of the library at least because it's an awesome book and I really enjoyed it and thank you so much for coming on the show. Okay. thank you so much for having me. It was fun. Okay. Take care. Goodbye for now. Bye bye. That was Teresa Marrone, author of the book, The Beginner's Guide to Dehydrating Foods.
that's it for today's episode of the Urban Forestry Radio show. I hope you enjoyed the show. And if you did like it, I have lots more information on my website at orchardpeople. com. Now, if you're ready to up your fruit tree care game, why don't you check out my online fruit tree care training course.
My students include arborists, master gardeners, urban agriculturalists, and home growers. You can learn about it at orchardpeople. com slash workshops. So you've been listening to the Urban Forestry Radio Show on Reality Radio 101. And I'm Susan Poizner from OrchardPeople. com. Thanks for tuning in, and I look forward to digging into a new fruit tree care topic with you next month.
You've been listening to the Urban Forestry Radio Show on Reality Radio 101. To learn more about the show and to download the podcast where I cover lots more great topics, you can visit orchardpeople. com slash podcast. This show is broadcast live on the last Tuesday of every month, and each time I have great new guests talking to me about fruit trees, food forests, and arboriculture.
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Thank you for listening to the Urban Forestry Radio Show with your host, Susan Poizner, right here on Reality Radio 101.