Just Dehydrate it!

I had a summer long desire to try my hand at food preservation and subsequently, opportunities are coming out of my ears! You know the saying, “be careful what you wish for”!

I have so many wonderful neighbors who have offered up their lovely produce and I am very grateful to them. We have canned peaches and applesauce, frozen peach cocktail, are getting ready to bottle our own grape juice, so when my neighbor next door told me I was welcome to ALL of the Italian Plums that were hanging from their tree onto our side of the fence, I thought…”what am I going to do with those?”

Good thing I asked my neighbor…she said “dehydrate them.” Sweet! I even have a dehydrator! So I picked about 50 lbs of plums and went to work!

The great thing about dehydrating it that it is SO easy! The prep is minimal and the dehydrator does all of the work. You just get to sit back and watch!

For plums, we just washed them all well and cut them in half (make sure and remove the pit). They say you can squash them flat with your hand before putting them on the tray, but I didn’t see much advantage…just more mess.

So I just laid them out.

When they are done, they shrink up…a ton! And they are surprisingly very good, nothing like the dried plums/prunes you buy in the store.

I was so excited about dehydrated fruit that when my local grocery store had a deal on pears…I bought a box! And they are DELICIOUS! (and I don’t even like pears!) My kids think these taste like candy and they are healthy to boot. A win/win!

The dehydrator I use is a Nesco and it is easy to use and quite compact. I looked on Ebay to see how much someone could get one for and there were prices as low as $16 for a lightly used one to $24 for a brand new one. Pretty inexpensive and a very worthwhile investment.

My next dehydrating project…fruit leather!