Day 43 of 365 Days Of Low Carbon Living – an easy way to sun dry fruit the easy way.

Summer in my garden usually means a bounty of fruit. Particularly reliable are my plum trees. The question then becomes how to use – or preserve – all the fruit all so none goes to waste.

In early February I wrote a post about 3 lower carbon, energy-efficient ways to cook fruit.

Then I received a comment suggesting other creative ways for using plums. (Thanks, Vivian!)

That reminded me of another, very easy and free way I preserve some of my fruit for later use.

Why sun-dry fruit?

Drying is a time-honoured method of preserving food that doesn’t require any cooking nor a refrigerator or freezer.

I have tried drying fruit the old-fashioned way in the sun out in the open air. But it takes a long time, and there is always the problem of insects and birds, dust, wind, and having to bring it in at night so it doesn’t get eaten by bigger creatures or become moist in the night air. Yes, I could have made a flywire (flyscreen) enclosure – but that would have been more work!

I have tried drying fruit by leaving it in an extremely slow oven and an oven that is hot but turned off.  But who wants to have a oven on in the heat of summer? Then there is the issue of the energy source for heating the oven: unless it is electric and your electricity is made with clean, renewable energy, heating your oven involves damaging our climate and local environments.

I thought of using a dehydrator – but I didn’t want to spend the money or the energy to run it.

Then I discovered another, much simpler, pretty quick, and completely free way to dry fruit.

All it requires is a small enclosed space in the sun.

Why

Growing and preserving our own food means:

• we know where it comes from, and can be sure it is grown naturally and free from chemicals.  Artificial fertilisers are usually made from fossil gas (which is methane and leaks into the atmosphere during extraction and transport, damaging our climate).
• less energy to grow, transport and store it. Because most of this energy currently comes from sources that damage our climate (i.e. fossil oil, gas and coal), reducing use of that energy reduces the increasing damage to our climate and thus slows the unfolding consequences of that damage. This is a big reason why people seek food with low ‘food miles’.
• more resilient food systems, particularly as food production is increasingly affected by climate change. Relying on transport, storage and supply systems for our food means that any disruption to those systems disrupts food supply. As our changing climate brings more extreme weather, this is increasingly likely. In contrast, growing food locally can make better use of fertile soil (because most settlements start where there is good soil) and local water and recycled nutrients (especially compost).
• not having to pay money or travel to obtain food.  This can mean big savings in money and time (depending on how you go about it).

How I sun-dry fruit

I find my car to be the perfect spot for drying fruit:

• it gets hot during the day – particularly in the sun – for free
• it is enclosed – so no problems with insects or other animals, dust, wind or night-time moisture
• I can easily keep an eye on progress
• it makes the car’s interior smell delicious!

If I didn’t have a car, I would just use a big shallow box, covered in glass, perspex, a plastic bag – perhaps with flywire as well, to keep out any small ‘friends’. (Of course, all the materials would be re-used!)

I simply put the fruit on foil trays, then put the trays on the car’s dashboard or hat shelf. (The hat shelf is the shelf under the back window of the car.)

I use foil trays so that sunlight can be reflected onto the fruit to speed up the drying.  I don’t think this is crucial because the air gets hot enough to do the drying, even on cloudy days in summer.  Other baking trays, sheets or pans would probably work very well too. (Of course, to reduce my footprint on our earth, my foil trays have had a prior life – so long ago I can’t remember how they originally came into my kitchen – and they are very clean.)

• If using the dashboard, in front of the driver is a particularly good place, because the dashboard there tilts the tray towards the window (and sun) and so the fruit heats up faster. Remember to remove the tray(s) from the dashboard before driving!
• If using the hat shelf, you can leave the foil trays there because the back of the back seat will keep them in place.
• For safety, take out any non-foil baking trays, sheets or pans from the car – that way they won’t become lethal flying objects if the car is involved in a crash.

In past years, I made sultanas by drying grapes in the car.  Even though the grapes were small, they took a couple of weeks to dry.

This year I didn’t have enough grapes (thanks, feathered friends!) but I did have masses of plums. Because I didn’t want to have the stones in the dried fruit, I cut the flesh off first.

The result was very swift: even though the plum pieces were much bigger than the grapes, I had sun-dried plum pieces in less than 2 days!  I figured out that this is because cutting the fruit directly exposes the moist flesh to the hot air. This means that the moisture can evaporate straight into the air instead of having to pass through skin (which is what needs to happen with whole fruit).

As you can see, the dried pieces of fruit are much smaller than when they were fresh:

After 1-2 days, the sun-dried pieces are sufficiently dry to store yet moist enough to be chewy. And, even without any other treatment, they still retain some colour:

With my last batch I learned a couple of hard lessons:

• Yes, it really is important to leave some space between the fresh pieces of cut fruit. Too much crowding (e.g. pieces touching each other) means that the fruit doesn’t dry quickly enough and can go mouldy. On this basis, I would think that large fruit (e.g. very large stone fruit, apples, pears, quinces, bananas, pawpaws, mangoes, pumpkin etc) would need to be chopped into smaller pieces for drying – just like you see with commercially-dried fruit.
• Yes, you can over-dry the fruit. It is still edible but it becomes very dark (even looks burnt) and crisp. No doubt soaking in water would restore some of its chewiness.

When each batch of sun-dried plum pieces was ready, I put them into a glass jar for storage:

All in all, I have found this method of preserving to be the cheapest and least work of all. The final dried product also takes less storage space than other methods. (Note to self:  remember to start drying fruit earlier in the season next summer!)

The challenge

If you have any summer fruit (including tomatoes and capsicums), try sun-drying them using the method I have described.

Join me!

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