Food Drying

Drying is a great way to preserve foods. You can store dry vegetables, fruits and meats in jars or bags and they will keep well for years, with no worries about power outages and expiration dates. We dry a lot of garden produce, especially tomatoes, peppers, apples and herbs. Any surplus can be dried. Even excess zucchini takes up a very small space in dried form and is a welcome addition to soups all winter long.

Dried foods are now so much a part of farm life that we wouldn't know what to do without them. We make chilies, gumbos, hearty soups, pies, sauces and pizzas all using dried produce, most of them in the off season when we actually have time to cook. And drying food means we can use more of our homegrown foods instead of having to rely on the supermarket in winter time.

Air and solar drying work for some foods. String beans can be threaded with a needle and dried in long strands. So can dry beans, soybeans and peas. Corn will dry well if hung in a well ventilated spot. We dry and cure garlic by hanging it from the porch rafters. Unfortunately, solar drying of tomatoes doesn't work well in Maine. By the time the fruits ripen, the days are already getting cold and short, and you need long, hot, dry days to successfully sun-dry tomatoes.

When air or sun drying any food, you should be careful to keep it out of direct sunlight, which will bleach out the color and nutrients. When storing dried food the same rule applies.

We first started drying food in a kitchen oven with the door slightly open, turned very low. This method works but is very wasteful of energy and the product is usually of only fair quality. Eventually, we bought an inexpensive food dryer. This one had a blower in the bottom and the food was placed in stacked plastic racks on top. You can buy them through catalogs and stores or online- a good brand is International Harvester.

For most gardeners, this type of a machine works very well. But after a while we found that we were burning ours out after a couple of years of heavy use. So we invested in a $200 Excalibur dehydrator, and have never regretted buying it. Drying times are short and the quality of the dried food is excellent, and these are both very important considerations because we sell much of what we dry. The Excalibur has a life expectancy of 20 years, and it is easier to clean than the stacking types.

The only other necessary item for drying is a good kitchen knife, since most prep work is slicing and chopping. A Chinese-style cleaver ($20 from Flagg's in Veasie) is a good choice and you can use it for a lot of other work as well.

Different foods dry at different rates and temperatures. A thick slice of tomato will dry slowly, while a sprig of oregano will take almost no time. You can dry different foods together (usually separated by rack) as long as you remember to remove the quicker drying foods as they finish drying. Fruits and vegetables with a lot of water in them will lose size and weight in drying: to get « pound of dried tomatoes weighing 2 1/4 ounces, you need 14 pounds of fresh fruit.

You should keep an eye on the dryer through the process to make sure the food is not getting too hot or overdried. There will always be some color change but you don't want your tomatoes turning black, which can happen at too high a temperature.

We like to dry apples, because we have a lot of them and they dry well and have many uses. They can be eaten as a snack or made into dried apple pies and used any other way you use cooked apples. Apple sauce can also be dried down into tasty fruit leather, a healthy treat for the kids. We use early apples like Yellow Transparents for drying. Just wash and core the apples and cut them into 1/4 inch slices, leaving the skins on. You can also use an apple peeler, which speeds up the operation. Arrange the slices on the dryer racks so they just touch each other- they will shrink a lot during drying- and dry at 135 degrees.

Dipping the slices in orange or pineapple juice makes them sweeter and prevents oxidation, so the varieties that brown easily will stay lighter. You can also cut the apples in a continuous curly slice (most apple peelers do this automatically).

Melons also dry well. They don't compare in flavor with ripe fresh melons, but are great to have in mid-winter when the sweet cantaloupes of summer are only a memory. Cut the flesh into « inch wedges and dry at 130 degrees until leathery.

Tomatoes all by themselves are a reason to own a food dryer. Even a small garden can produce more fruits than a family can use at one time, and drying is a good alternative to canning or freezing. Dried tomatoes are also expensive, so a food dryer can pay for itself quickly if you dry a lot of tomatoes.

Wash the tomatoes and remove stems. Cut large tomatoes into 1/4 inch slices and cut cherry tomatoes in half. Dry at 145 degrees until leathery or brittle, depending how you like them. Dried tomatoes will keep indefinitely and are useful in all kinds of cooking, or you can eat them plain as tomato chips. They have a very intense flavor when eaten this way. We like to add them to chili and pasta sauces, and they can be soaked in water and used as a pizza topping.

Our sweet pepper crop is usally pretty small, but like most people who grow hot peppers we get an enormous crop. Using up all of those peppers can be a challenge, and here the food dryer comes in very handy. Hot peppers can be dried whole at 135 degrees until crisp, and then stored in jars or strung on threads as ristas. They make a nice edible decoration. We also make paprika by grinding dry hot peppers in a spare coffee mill. The cooked pepper pieces left over from making hot sauce can be dried for hot pepper flakes.

We also dry potatoes, onions, spinach, tomatilloes, squash, herbs and celery leaves for our dry soup mixes. Drying herbs is the best way to preserve their colors and aromas. Most leafy herbs should be dried slowly at a low temperature of about 95 degrees. Seeds can be dried at 105 degrees, and roots like horseradish and ginger at 130 degrees.

 

The Belfast Farmer's Market will reopen in May at our summer location in Reny's Plaza, under the big green sign.