Dehydrating WITHOUT a Dehydrator! (and possibly without a brain)

So I've got more apricots than I can shake a stick at. Unfortunately, most of the people in my house do not actually like apricots.  Sad, I know.  They do, however, like dehydrated apricots, but I don't own a food dehydrator.  So I got to thinking, haven't people been drying fruit for thousands of years? Surely there is a way to do it on my own without a dehydrator.  So I went online and looked up various ways to dehydrate fruit without a dehydrator.  Most sites recommended drying them in the over.  It is over 100 degrees here this week, so there is no way I am turning my oven on.  So I looked up ways to dehydrate fruit specifically using the sun. There were lots of great How-To's online.  The site I used mostly was this one.

It turns out I live in the most perfect weather conditions for drying fruit. Not only is it hot (super hot!) day and night, but we have virtually no humidity and a constant breeze.  What luck!


I started out with the standard washing and pitting of the fruit.

The website recommended various methods of "pre-treating" the fruit.  I decided on boiling them for ten minutes in a pan of equal parts sugar and water.

 

Then I spread them out on a cookie sheet, insides up, and sprinkled them with sugar. 

The website suggested all types of materials to use, but honestly I didn't know what half of them were, so I just used what I had.  I used a metal cookie sheet because it helps to reflect more heat back into the fruit.  I also put tulle under and on top of the fruit to help with air circulation and to keep the bugs off.

Then I set the fruit out in the back yard sun to dry.

The website also said to bring the fruit in at night to keep it from getting moist when the temperatures cooled down over night.  I wasn't worried about that though because it is so hot here right now.

I was right about the weather.  I was wrong about not bringing the fruit in at night.

I forgot about my sprinklers.




*sigh*




My nearly dried fruit got very, very wet.  And not just wet, but soaking wet with irrigation (not culinary-safe) water.  It was a total loss.  So I started over.

That's when I remembered I had some canned apricots from years past.  We get lots of free apricots every year, and I'm always looking for things to do with them.  One year I canned them, but they turned out to be disgusting.

I have like 20 of these jars of old apricots, and I thought maybe they would be better dried.  It can't hurt to try right?  So I did a pan of fresh apricots, along with a pan from two jars of old apricots.

You can see the color differences from the different batches of fruit.

I sprinkled them with sugar, covered them in tulle, and set them outside to dry again.  This time I put them in the back of our pickup where the sprinklers won't get them.

And then my husband decided to go to the gym.... in his truck.

When he arrived home, we were both surprised to see the pans of apricots still sitting there, on the open tailgate.  Crazy!

The website said to leave them in the sun for 36 to 48 hours.  So at 30 hours I went out to check them.  They were definitely dry.  Maybe a little too dry.  Maybe a lot too dry.  They didn't really have any chewiness left in them, but were more like Apricot Chips.  And it's not that they really tasted bad, but they looked like... well... zombie scabs.  I know!  Gross, right?  But it's the truth.

I guess the weather here is a little hotter than I realized.  And I probably should have been checking on the apricots every few hours instead of every few days.  Lesson learned.

I had one bag left of fresh apricots, and I was inclined to try again.  But we were headed out of town on vacation and just didn't have time to prepare them.  So I dropped them off at my neighbor's house.  My apricot days are over for this season, but we will try again next year.


Marcia


P.S. I just had a brilliant idea!  This fall at the kids' Halloween party, we will hand out "Zombie Scabs!"  Won't all the other moms be jealous that I thought of such a creative and healthy treat! ;)