#fruit drying

Today I made spiced dried lemon and orange slices with some of the gifted fruit from a friend 🥰

Now the house smells of toasty citrus with cinnamon and ginger~🍋🍊

no problem! oven drying is an option!

cut the fruit of your choice to a little less then an inch. try to keep them all even but if theyre not thats okay, youll just have to do size specific batches.

if youve got skewers, stick em on the skewers. this is so you can hang the fruit between the ovens bars or on a tall cooking pan, which helps with drying evenly.

put oven on keep warm and carefully put them in. with my oven i havent burned myself on the keep warm setting (for me its 170 f), but that could be different for others. the point of using the keep warm setting is so that its at a low enough heat that the fruit dries out but is not baked.

ones the fruits in, its mostly just waiting and checking every couple hours. depending on the size of the fruit, itll usually take more than an hour. and its okay to leave them in there over night or when you leave the house for work/school/whatever with the oven off, since the same process is still happening but slower. still gonna get tasty dried fruit!

FRUIT DRYING EXPERIMENTS

Well, we finally got around to building a fruit drying box and experimenting with drying mango and Moringa leaves this week. I am so excited about this and hope we can gather up some more mango, even though it's the end of the season to dry and share with people in some upcoming community nutrition lessons. Hopefully we can get some more examples of the box to use that are a bit more budget friendly as well.

For this first drying box, here were some costs and materials:

estacas (wooden sticks; 14 needed--12 for frame/2 for support of drying racks)---got them for free

plastic wrap to use on top and protect fruit from gross flies and critters while still being exposed to sun---got this for free

black plastic, 4 sheets to insulate box---used black plastic bags, which I had in my house, so it was free

6 pieces of chapa or tin in order to serve as sturdy walls and help to insulate and retain heat and 2 of which serve as drying racks.---1 giant sheet is 275 meticais, roughly 8-9 dollars

15- 20 long nails ... I think they are 3-4 nails----1/2 kilo 35 mets, a little over 1 dollar

hammer ---used my own

saw---borrowed from neighbor

scissors...the big ones used to cut metal----borrowed from a store for 30 meticais, 1 dollar

eramis, metal cord--- can't remember, but for this project it was free because I just had some lying around my house

We dried our first batch of mango, which took 3 days to dry and came out pretty well, people are really digging this dried fruit and seem to be excited to experiment with it on their own. The Moringa leaves will take longer to dry, usually about 5-7 days.

We decide to make our box 2 shelves, 1 for drying fruit on top and the second in the bottom for drying leaves. Usually you dry leaves, such as Moringa in the shade in order to retain more nutrients. Fruit need more sun in order to dry quicker and better, especially if you want a nice crisp, chip-like texture.