How, When & Why to Dry Fruit

I promised we would be exploring tips from a  long-held resource for farmers living off the land, The Farmer’s Almanac, and today is my first installment.

According to the Almanac, today (October 3rd, 2009)  is a “best day” to dry fruit.  Is there any accuracy in this?  Is there a good, better, best strategy in determining when to dry fruit ?  I explored a few sites on the subject and found one that answers the question “Why doesn’t fruit rot when it is sun-dried?”.  The answer, very much summarized here, is that they contain a great deal of sugar and a few other reasons.  One point in the article leaps out at me and that is a further explanation that the fruit needs to be dried before mildew can form.  Could this explain why October 3rd might make a good day to dry fruit?

Even here in Alabama, a typically humid climate, the air is usually a bit more dry this time of year compared to the summer months.  I feel good going with the Almanac as a valid source of guidance on this subject.  What about you?  So we’ll give  the first point to  the Farmer’s Almanac as a credible guide for for telling us when the best day is to dry our fruit.

Now that we’ve covered the “when” to dry fruit lets explore why.  If you’ve gone to the grocery store and explored the prices on dried fruit you will see immediately there is an advantage in drying it yourself.  You will also quickly learn once you tackle the project why the prices are so high – it’s quite a lot of work and requires a substantial amount of time to yield a respectable quantity of dried fruit.

I found a very nice, simple set of directions at Seasonal Chef for drying fruit. This site gives a very clear set of seven steps telling you exactly how to dry fruit from start to finish.  It looks so simple but as you start reviewing the steps you understand a little bit more about how much work will be needed, it isn’t hard work, just time consuming.

In this economy getting back to some self-sufficient principles is not a bad idea.  A great way to save money is to invest of yourself – your time and energy.  Over recent years of abundance most of us have been fortunate enough to exchange money in return for saving time.  As things go, many of us are facing catastrophic hard times with lost jobs and lengthy periods of either reduced wages or unemployment.  The rest of us are just concerned enough that we are holding resources just in case those bad times land at our door too.

Drying fruit offers a sweet, healthy snack alternative to the store bought sticky sweets.  We can win on a number of fronts by giving this little project a try.  Any of you willing to try this out and share your experiences here in the comments field or on the Facebook wall of White Oak Attic? Anyone?

Well, anyhow, what is appealing about this to me is it brings us back in touch with our roots, living off the abundance of the land and learning to be a little more self sufficient.  We’re lucky to have plenty of gadgets that make these kinds of projects much easier and we can turn these activities into opportunities to spend quality time with our kids or other family members and maybe even get a laugh or two since we’re moving a little out of our element of prepackaged, processed everything.

See what’s next from the Almanac by subscribing to the RSS feed, following White Oak Attic on Twitter or as I mentioned above at our Facebook Fanpage.  There is a lot more to come since the Farmer’s Almanac never runs out of day to day advice for us to examine.