Our family especially enjoys fruits. It was hard to imagine giving them up (Y2K), or limiting ourselves to the apples and strawberries found within walking distance of our house. Yes, we could purchase fresh fruit and can it but that presents quite a storage problem. Last summer we set a goal of storing a reasonable-sized serving of fruit (one-half cup) per day for each of 10 people for one year. Doesn't that come to something like 456 quart jars?
Forget it! Forget it on the basis of dedicating that many jars to fruit - on the hours spent doing the canning - on the amount of fuel used - or on the basis of several other things that I can't even think of right now. Foremost on my feeble mind, though, was storage space. Four-hundred fifty-six quart jars of fruit? Nope! No room! No way!
Out of necessity and out of curiosity, we tried drying fruits for long-term preservation. Drying out the moisture shrinks fruit down to one-half or one-quarter its original size. No more storage space problems! We knew nothing about drying foods. But since when does "not knowing what we're doing" stop a homesteader?
I believe that if a thing can be done, then I can probably turn out some semi-adequate version of it. That attitude, an armful of how-to books, and helpful daughters, worked us through a summer, fall and winter of learning to dry food.
We found that resource books are helpful but, in the end, if you want to learn to dry food, you just have to dry food. The two important factors in preserving food by drying are temperature and ventilation. There are numerous variables, though. How thick is the slice of food? How high is the heat? How often is the food turned? How high is the room's humidity? How dry do you want the finished product? And there are personal preferences. When do you want to do the drying? What method suits you? How long at one time can you devote to drying a rack of food?
We learned that drying food is a creative method of preservation. Food can be dried in a regular oven; outside in the sun; in a commercial dryer; in a home-made dryer; even in the back window of a car!
Last summer, so much money had gone to other Y2K preparations that we just did not want to spend any on this project. We also didn't want to spend any time on devising a home-made dryer. The alternative we chose was to use our regular oven. And it worked out well.
We learned to slice food 1/8 to 1/4-inch thick; place it on cookie sheets one layer deep - no piece touching any other piece - and dry it in an oven which was turned on anyway.
Several resource books taught that food should be dried to 10-20% moisture content. We had no way to measure that, so we decided to over-dry (and lose some quality) rather than to under-dry and risk spoilage. We dried fruits and vegetables to something between leather-tough and crisp.
We tried to keep the heat at about 140ºF. We propped the oven door open to provide ventilation and air-flow to let the moisture out. We learned to open the door every two- to-four hours to let accumulated moisture escape. (It would fog up my glasses!)
Drying food was simple and easy once we trained ourselves to turn fruit over two or three times. If left unturned, it sticks badly to the cookie sheet. We ruined two pans before we "learned to turn."
The resource books taught us that drying food is a forgiving method of preservation. Dry the food. Cool it. Store the food in air-tight, moisture-proof containers.
Check it regularly for condensation inside the container. If there is condensation but no mold, re-dry the food and re-pack it. If there is mold, throw out the food.
Simple. Easy. Space-efficient.
