You must have quite the sweet tooth! Sounds good. Maybe i'll try that if i have an over abundance of peaches.

You can use a sulfite solution (get crystalline sulfite from a pharmacy or wine-making supplier) to dip the fruit in place of burning sulfur. Has a powerful anti-oxidant activity. But I'm allergic to sulfites, so if Fruit Fresh worked for you, that's great. How did you treat your fruit?

carolyn: The Fruit Fresh is a powder. You mix it in water and dip the fruit. About as easy as it's going to get. I don't think I'm allergic to sulfides but vit C and citric acid sound better.

I think I've solved my off season fruit needs.

The Fruitnut

Thanks fruitnut. I may be getting enough peaches this year that I can try drying some of them. This Fruit Fresh sounds like the way to go. I don't know how easy fruit can be dried outside where I live, its quite humid in the summer plus many cloudy or rainy days to avoid. In the worst case I can buy one of those home drying machines or do it in the oven.

Scott

Can you outline the entire process of drying the fruit? Are bugs a problem? Where do you get the Fruit Fresh? Is it available online?

I bought the Fruit Fresh from the local store. And our stores don't come close to having the variety of any big town grocery store. I mixed the stuff about twice as strong as the directions; ~ 1 tablespoon in 1 qt water. Then cut the fruit in fairly thin sections to allow more rapid drying, dipped them in the solution, and laid them on a drying rack. A wood slat rack would be good but mine was metal, 20 x 30 inches. I covered the metal with fiberglass window screen. So laid the fruit on that and covered it with aluminum window screen to keep the flies off. I then set it on the metal roof of a shed. The nectarines dried in two days the plums in three in 90F sunny skies, dew point about 60F. I put the resulting product in qt zip lock bags and will store them in the freezer until winter. I pressed real hard to get as much air out of the bag as possible.

I've found a new rack. This one is stainless steel. Still covering that with fiberglass window screen. The aluminum screen over the top does not touch the fruit because it is bent underneath. This holds the top off the fruit by a couple inches. The flies weren't bad but without the top screen there would have been some on the drying fruit.

The nectarines are great right now. We'll see how they are in several months.

The Fruitnut

I volunteer myself if you need sombody to corroborate your taste testing results.

Last year we found one of those round dehydrators at a garage sale for $5. What a great machine for apples. My wife slices them with one of those hand operated spinning peeler/corer/slicers, but doesn't activate the peeler. She dips the slices in bottled lemon juice, then dries them for 24 hours. Then places them in zip lock bags in the freezer. We give them as gifts, and people cannot stop eating them.

Thanks for the Fruit Fresh proportions, Fruit Nut. Sulfite treatment adds a little bit of flavor to fruits that not everyone likes. But it's effective.

Fruit Fresh is sold with the canning supplies, usually. I think it's a good product, but I'll be substituting crystalline citric acid (from Nichols nursery) and vitamin C (from Trader Joe's), as I'm also allergic to corn sweeteners. I may add a little sugar to the solution for tarter fruits. I sort of like the lemon juice idea, too.

Burgundy plums are supposed to be good dried and I have some ripe ones right now. They hang on the tree for a long time, but I think they lose quality after a while (at least in our hot climate). Maybe I'll try Flavor Queen Pluot dried, too. There's a commercial Asian plum called "October Sun" that's used for drying. Wonder if it's a freestone? Most Asian plums don't have a high enough sugar content to be dried whole like prunes, and cutting the stone out of halved or sliced fruit is a bit of a drag.

No good reason for not following the directions on the Fruit Fresh. I'm no expert here. But have finished my third batch. Found out I needed to slice the fruit pretty thin, between 1/4 and 3/8 inch is about right. In sunny weather things dry in 2-3 days when sliced that thin. I sliced a batch of Flavor Grenades in half. That was too thick and I had to throw those away.

I tried in the oven during a cloudy/rainy spell. That didn't work because my oven only goes down to 170F. Even with the door wide open the fruit was charring. I think I read 140F is max that works well.

So far my dried nectarines have been fabulous. Haven't done enough plums to know what I think there.

My best fruit so far this yr has been Arctic Star nectarine. The apricots were also great. Pluots and plums are very good but not quite up to par so far.

The Fruitnut

Thanks for the great thread!

I also learned that the fruit piece sliced off the outside edge dries slower. Said another way, if the piece of fruit has skin on one side, it dries slower and therefore needs to be sliced thinner.

Does anyone know of a treatment that will increase the drying rate thru the skin? Seems that I've read about a treatment that increases the drying rate of raisins.

The Fruitnut

Carolync,

What ration do you mix the citric acid and the Vit C? Once you get that mixture, how much do you add to a given amount of water to dip the fruit?

Not sure what ratio of ascorbic and citric acids to use. I think more citric acid than ascorbic, but I'm guessing. I think citric acid is a smaller molecule which tastes more acid in solution than vitamin C, measure for measure. Taste your vitamin C solution to make sure it doesn't have an objectionable bitter quality at the concentration you are thinking about using.

I'll start with the measurements for Fruit Fresh solution, then estimate smaller amounts of the pure acids to compensate for the sugars in fruit Fresh. Tasting is another way to estimate how much I'll need. I'll compare the sourness of my solution to lemon juice.

Concerning Fruitnut's question on drying fruit with the skin on, I believe that some fruits can be blanched or steam-treated to disrupt the skin to make drying more effective. A dilute lye solution might also work. Think I've read something about this with regard to prunes. I think some varieties of prunes require some sort of treatment to disrupt the integrity of the skin in order to dry successfully.

Here in California, Thompson Seedless grapes are dried in the sun without any treatment to make raisins. I've helped cut grapes, laid them out on paper and helped roll them after drying so they can be picked up for processing. A hot and sticky-dirty job. Larger grapes might benefit from some sort of treatment to disrupt the skin.

Thanks Carolyn,

Once you get the recipe figured out, post it, if you get time.

I've dried pluots, bananas and nectarines in my dehydrator. Tried to save them for trail mix, but the dang pieces kept being eaten by someone... :)

I definitely found that they had to be peeled and sliced VERY thinly (potato chip setting on my mandolin) in order to dry evenly. Also, no 2 pieces could be touching on the trays.

In order to deal with the browning, I just dipped the fruit pieces in a solution of lemon juice and water before placing in trays.

luvsdieter - thanks for the post! couple of questions for you. (1) what kind of dehydrator are you using? (2) Are you really running your pluots through a mandolin?
I have a 10 tray professional unit, and I can't wait to get started on the pluots I got at the market this weekend. I'm hoping to get by without peeling the fruit, though - it would be a shame to lose all those vitamins.

A quick comment for those who dry copious amounts of fruit - it's a lot cheaper to buy a big jar of 500 mg tablets of generic vitamin C and dissolve four or five of those in the dipping water. There is a bit of binder that turns the water just slightly cloudy, but nothing that affects anything. It saves quite a bit of money, particularly when you're drying bushels.

Last fall, the old 9,000 tree, overgrown orchard west of town had changed hands late in the year, and sent out a please-come-help-us-pick-take-all-you-can-carry request, and there were a lot of people drying a lot of fruit.