I intend to do a series of posts on fruit and vegetable drying given that this is one of the simplest, safest and cheapest processing technologies. However, as I am always promoting that we need to start at the market side. We also need to define the sector we are working in.
But first a photo to get us thinking away from the shriveled dark brown piece of “banana” that we are used to see.
photo by ccarlstead
(Creative Commons License)
This attractive and tasty looking of fruit is on sale in bulk, in a market in Istanbul. While I have seen many markets selling bags of cereals in Sub Saharan African few seem to sell dried fruit which is essentially just as well preserved.
Also of interest in this photo is that the fruit is not simply dried but glazed, dusted and prepared in different ways.
These large quantities of dried fruit could represent fruit that was in excess of the demand for fresh fruit that could have been wasted if not dried and was possibly purchased at a low price. Otherwise it could have been fruit that was purposefully grown to be dried to provide food for use during the winter or even as a supplier to a dried fruit producer.
So there’s lots to think about! which we will be doing over the next while in this series of posts.
I am looking for a conpany with the ability to design a turn-key vegetable drying plant. Please mail me on nex@telkomsa.net
Thanks,
Cobus
I dried some native persimmons (diaspyros virginiana ) that I found growing wild. They taste great, a lot like dates, but they contained so many seeds that I wasn’t able to separate out the seeds from the flesh. There are a lot more on the trees that I hope to get when they ripen–any ideas on methods to dry them? or of easily removing the seeds?
Thanks
I guess you’ve had a look online and seen the variety of stories and processes on drying persimmons. I suspect the differences in responses is because of the difference in the variaties especially in the native American one you dried. Wikipedia says it has 0 to 8 pips?
This from http://www.eatingalabama.org/2008/10/persnickety-persimmons.html agrees with what you found and seems to indicate there is no point in trying to remove before drying.
This extract from a forum (http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00BZYy) gives two answers but doesn’t seem to agree with your problems with seeds in the dried fruit – could it be that it wasn’t dried far enough?
If you want to see beautiful photos of this method of drying try this flickr page
Not sure how much this helps – anyone else with other ideas?
Good Luck
Dave
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