Last night and today I practiced on some store bought food. I dried some bananas. They are tasty and I've eaten quite a few of these slices. I think I had something around three and a half bananas on the tray. Bananas need to be on a meshy liner on the tray and we've got only one of those so we can dry only one tray of bananas at a time. Here's a before/after picture of them.
At the same time I dried some apples. They go directly on the drying trays so I loaded up the other three trays with apple slices. I used our Good Grips Mandoline Slicer to slice the apples. I sliced them too thin and the dried apples are a bit too dry. (By the way, the slicer claims that I can slice tomatoes with it. I've tried and have only managed to mash tomatoes. Does anybody know the trick to slicing tomatoes with the thing? Oh, their online manual gives a suggestion. I think I'll stick with a knife.) Another before/after picture (more before than after).
Then I decided I wanted to try drying a vegetable. We got some carrots for my experiment. A book we got had a recipe for carrot chips. You slice the carrots, fry them, salt them and dehydrate them. It was way more work than it was worth. After I fried them I had to separate them, slice by slice, to sop up the oil. Then I had to place them slice by slice on the drying tray. The finished product tasted mostly like salty oil and had only a little carrot flavor. I don't think I'll try that one again. Yet another before/after composite picture.
I sliced the carrots with the Cuisinart food processor. But I loaded the carrots on the wrong side of the hopper and when I turned it on they were all pushed onto their sides on other side of the hopper and I ended up with strips rather than slices. It's just as well...that meant larger and fewer pieces to deal with (but there were a lot of tiny bits in there, too).I'm looking forward to produce of our own to dry.
5 comments:
I've never had very good luck slicing tomatoes. I did find out the other day that using a serrated knife works the best. It doesn't mash and cause a lot of the juice to come out. Try that...
How do you make before/after pictures? Can it be done with Photoshop Elements 6?
I don't know Photoshop Elements. I use Paint Shop Pro 6. It's old but does what I seem to want it to do.
I took before pictures and after pictures and loaded them into Paint Shop. I selected part of the after picture, copied the selection to the clipboard and pasted it into the before picture as a second layer of the composition. I then scaled the pasted layer to kind of match the before picture and dragged it into position to kind of line up. I then saved the composition.
I imagine that your program would let you do that sort of process.
One of my former patients, RIP, would make jerky for the infusion team. Everyone who ate meat said it was good, except for one of the doc's wife who said he could not come near her after eating the garlic and chile infused dried flesh...but I digress.
He then started making us dried apples, which were devine! his little addition of cinnamon-no sugar-before putting them in the drier caused us to gobble up the 5# bag by noon. Thanks, Dale.
So far, I've dried plain apples. I'll try the cinnamon next time. And I'll try to slice them thicker yet. My second batch was thicker than the first but they ended up a bit too skinny (but still tasty).
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