Reap the Garden & Market Bounty: How to Dry Food
(Page 2 of 5)
August/September 2008
By Barbara Pleasant
Back to the money. Organic convenience foods have their place in busy lives, but you pay for the time and energy involved in their creation. You subsidize the growing, drying, packaging, shipping and marketing, and it all adds up to some hefty retail prices. A dried organic vegetable soup kit costs $2 to $3, and a frozen entrée can push $5. The organic “skillet dinner” category runs somewhere in between, and it’s a great example of a situation where you could make your own for 50 cents using dried foods.
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Drying peppers and herbs can save you big bucks at the spice rack, too. When you make your own smoky sweet paprika or hot pepper blend, your cooking improves as you discover new ways to use your blends to punch up your favorite dishes.
Drying with Attitude
In Lanesboro, Minn., organic gardener and food drying expert Mary Bell thinks people should look at food drying with a creative eye. Bell has invented what can only be called new foods, like succulent “half-dried tomatoes” seasoned with basil and thyme or “Can’t A Loupe Candy” — chunks of cantaloupe seasoned with ginger and powdered sugar before being dried. To deal with bountiful crops of hard-to-preserve eggplant, she figured out how to cut eggplant into strips, soak them in a salt/lemon juice solution and dry them into pastalike strands. For overripe zucchini, she marinates thin slices before drying them into chips.
According to Bell, the attitude behind her newest book, Food Drying with An Attitude, is sustainability. “I want everybody to have food they can supply for themselves year round,” Bell says. “Drying can provide a way to use things you already have instead of buying from some other place.” Bell removes ribs from big kale leaves, dries them raw, and crushes them into a jar to use as all-purpose potherbs, and to sell at her farmers market booth alongside her locally famous fruit leathers and dried tomatoes — a springtime treat that satisfies customers’ appetites for fresh flavors.
“If people are given permission to try new things, they are often surprised at what they can dry — like marked-down bananas at the store,” Bell says, adding that drying food is a simple skill to master.
Food Drying is 1-2-3 Easy
Slice or dice food into small, uniform pieces.
Dip the pieces in an acidic solution or blanch them to enhance the quality of the final product.
Place the pieces in single layers to dry, and turn as needed to help them dry more quickly.
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