Have you ever been in a country pantry on a farm or in a village?? What’s not there – and cheeses, and homemade sausages, and jams, pickles, and homemade wine, and, of course, dried mushrooms, cherries, apples, pears, herbs … By the way, that dried stuff the modern urban housewife can also easily afford – chiefly, to get a good dryer for products.
Remove the pips – remove the poison
We tested air grills to dry tomatoes and other foodstuffs in them.
Firstly, not every appliance has a suitable tray. The simplest models, for example, only have two racks, a low one and a high one. Placing steaks or pies on them is easy, but sliced foods just fall down, especially shrinking in size when drying.
Secondly, the amount of food that can be dried in an aerogrill at one time is several times less than in a compact dryer.
Thirdly, the drying process in aero grills is not very uniform: the moisture evaporates much faster directly under the grill in the middle , so we will have to monitor the process and we can not leave it for a long time in search of more pleasant things to do.
There’s a military trick we have to use. To mushrooms or fruit to dry more evenly, you need to equip an ordinary skewer and stick it inside the air grill so that one end of the lid is ajar. This is to keep moist air from escaping, so that the fruit can dry more intensely.
True, most aerogrills have a timer for 120 minutes, and that’s not enough time to dry some foods. It turns out that the air grill is just fine for a small cooking rush, like sundried tomatoes or crispy apples. But for systemic harvesting with a large crop, it’s better to choose a dryer.
I would like to know what are the best methods for drying fruits and mushrooms in city pantries? Are there specific techniques or tools that are recommended? And how long does the process usually take? Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated.