dehydrator

Dry as a bone?

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

Following on from the apparent triumph and success of my ‘sun’ dried tomato effort last week, I decided that I would have a little experiment with the dehydrator and see what other magic could be made in the kitchen with a little hot air piff paff poof.

I’m a great one for fresh herbs, I have a herb garden just outside my kitchen and I grow mint, parsley, thyme, chives, sage & rosemary. I have coriander and basil indoors. And I use one or other of these cheeky little flavour enhancers on a daily basis in everything I cook. At the moment, they are in abundance (not quite the abundance of the courgettes thank goodness) and so fresh and flavourful, I wondered if I could capture it somehow for the winter. But there’s nothing much on tinterweb about herbs in a dehydrator so it was a little game of trial and error. Mostly, I won.

Here is my journey!

I decided to try all of the herbs in turn, my idea is to have them all in little pots to replace the ones from Mr Ocado for my own, and then make a one size fits all ‘dried mixed herbs’ blend of them all – because sometimes (and I’m thinking pasta sauces when I say this) a little bit of everything really does work. Well I say all, I fibbed a bit there as I am not bothering with the rosemary on account of it being so hardy it’s available from the garden all year round, come hell or high water.

I’ve already listed the herbs I have, so I picked handfuls of each, washed them well, and patted dry with kitchen paper. They all had a shelf each in the dehydrator, and I put them in at 70 degrees and had the machine whirring in the background of a busy kitchen afternoon.


  

The sage was the first to dry, which really surprised me. It only took around two hours. I tried numerous methods of crushing and getting it into a little pot but the best one was to crush by hand in the fingers into a bowl and then use a teaspoon to spoon into the little jar. They kept blocking up my mini funnel so that was a bit of a fail.

Next was the basil, at around 3 hours, I used the same method for this to crush and jar. It went down to almost nothing.
The parsley and mint came in at around the same time. Same methods employed as above.

The chives were around 4 hours and for these, I lined them up and snipped into a bowl then used the teaspoon into the jar method.

The thyme I felt was a bit woody and ended up a bit like a birds nest of twigs and wotnot so I’d probably avoid that one next time and stick to the others noted.

So that was it, literally nothing to it. No sorcery whatsoever. What is magic though is the way that the flavours are so strong and intense, and the colours so vivid.

I’ve already tried the chives in a potato salad (super good) and the rest in a spaghetti bolognese.

I’ve bought some gorgeous little jars so everyone will be getting a dried mixed herbs pot in the Christmas hampers this year.

Right, I’m off to have a go at drying bananas. Follow our blog to see how that turns out! 

Yum-tiddly-umptious. x

Preserving the harvest…

~ hannahmontana1978 ~ Leave a comment

Preserving nature’s harvest is one of my very most favourite phrases at this time of year and encapsulates everything that I think we should be doing. It actually gives me a case of the warm fuzzies. I absolutely love to grow things but when it all comes at once, it can be a bit overwhelming.

I’ve grown up with my mother always making odd chutney combinations of what ever she had a glut of and I think that this has perfused it’s way into my very being.

My chutney recipes now are only very loosely based on things I have done in the past, I very much make it up as I go along depending on what I have in front of me. Most weeks the hubster walks in from work on a Friday to find my pans hubbling and bubbling on the stove with jars in the sink and in the oven. Only in the last year or so have I actually started writing down what I do each time as we can be tucking into a chutney which everybody raves about, asks me for the recipe and I have to confess I have absolutely no idea what I did at the time because it was six months or a year ago! I’ve a few of my favourites listed on my recipes page.

But last year, someone threw me a curveball in and gave me the most spectacular gift. ‘Sun-dried’ tomatoes from her allotment. I was bowled over. Teeny, tiny little pockets of exploding tomato flavour like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. I knew it wouldn’t be long before I had to try to make them for myself!

So, a short discussion with my friend Mr Amazon later, and one food dehydrator was duly purchased.

My first foray I saw very much as a trial run so before committing hordes of my own homegrown tomato people, I bought some beautiful little baby plum tomatoes which were on special at the local shop. I bought eight punnets.

So this is what you do. All very straight forward. I followed the advice of said friend who had gifted me the originals as I like to call them.

Slice your tomatoes in half and lay them in the dehydrator cut side up. Sprinkle with Italian seasoning and salt and pepper. Turn on dehydrator and walk away. Do something else, go out, read a book, knit. Don’t stand and watch it and expect to see something happen as the magic takes hours my friends!

These went in at 65 degrees for eight hours. Then I removed the smaller ones that were leathery and left the bigger ones in for another hour.

Then they all had a sixty second dunk in red wine vinegar and got packed into jars. Now I believe from my research that these will keep quite happily in jars for some months. However, I wanted to replicate the jars stored in oil and so they got topped up with good quality extra virgin olive oil. I figure that once you’ve used the tomatoes, the oil will be fantastic. Whenever I make ciabatta, I always use the oil out of my sun-dried tomato jars in the fridge and not just plain stuff, gives a great extra little bit of flavour.
That’s it then!

They’ve come out brilliantly so I’ll be doing lots more to go into my Christmas hampers for the famalam. The way things are going this year, the hampers will be so big that I will need to provide a donkey to carry them too.

I’ve started experimenting with dehydrating my fresh herbs so check back for progress!

TTFN x