In case I haven’t quite mentioned this in my blog yet, between our house and MIL’s house we have a lot of fruit trees that need to be dealt with. There are six apple/crap apple trees, one Nanking cherry tree, a Saskatoon (?) berry bush (still developing though), and two large trees yielding berries yet to be identified, maybe chokecherries.
As a starter tool for something to use for this fruit we bought a dehydrator. It took us a while to give it a go, but finally have tried it. First round we made some strawberries, apples, and pears. We need to tweak our strawberry process; they aren’t quite like the Special K Red berry version yet, but still taste nice on cereal. The dried apples were good. We left the peal on and they turned out nice. Next time I think we will try and make apple chips and see what happens. The surprise was the pears. They were fantastic. I can’t wait to make a LOT more of those. Each food processor tray holds about two apples or pears or about one pound of strawberries.
To help picking the nanking cherries we picked a cherry picker from Lee Valley Tools, as seen below.
This is a fantastic tool. I highly recommend it if you have berries en mass to pick and process. In the process of learning to pit these lovely cherries my wife came up with the best method. She would slightly crush the berries between two bowls of slightly different size, kind of like a pestle and mortar action on a larger scale. She would then put them into another bowl for my MIL to take the pit out. By crushing them first, this saved breaking the skin by hand and squirting juice across the table.
On the first bunch of cherries we just boiled them down a bit and froze half of the portion and made the other half into a version of pudding that we usually make with rhubarb. It was very good.
On a more recent use of the food dehydrator, we made fruit leathers. This was a good experience. On the second batch of cherries, which we weighed this time to be around 10 pounds, we boiled again as above. In one pot, though, we added pineapple, and some strawberries to the cherry mix. Once both pots had cooled we put the mixed bunch into our blender and crushed it up. It was still very sour due to the Nanking cherries, so we added some corn syrup, and blended some more. For some reason part way through this exercise our blender started leaking out the bottom. It had slightly come unscrewed.
Once we got the flavour tamed a bit, we poured onto the sheets of the dehydrator. I am very glad the dehydrator we got had a fruit leather liner for each tray. On some of the trays we sprinkled coconut, and some shaved almonds, and one plain. Originally we were going to freeze the other pot of just cherries, but ended up whipping that in the blender, adding corn syrup and making just a couple trays of just cherry flavour. Then we still had some blended smoosh left. My wife wanted to try and add some bananas. (I can’t eat bananas, as they cause my stomach a lot of pain.) So for the last two trays it was a banana/cherry mix with coconut or almonds.
What did we learn from this experience?
1. Mixing a small amount of the cherries with some of the apple sauce I’m sure we will be making, in order to create the fruit leathers will be a good way to utilize the cherry flavor. These leathers were very strong flavor so we can cut them down quite a bit with apples and or maybe trying melons, but the apples are free.
2. We need to watch the amount of corn syrup we put into the trying to be healthy snack.
3. Putting a small nut under the fruit sauce to create a peal spot is probably a good idea, but yet to be tested
4. Don’t put too much sauce on the liners. Put it in the middle then shake to even out, but if it is too much, or too close to the edges, it will leak over and make a mess.
5. Make sure the bottom of the blender is screwed on tightly, along with the top is on before you hit go.
The next tool we purchased for handling the mass amount of apples is a food mill. From what we have looked up the best way to process crab apples is to boil them whole until they are very soft. Then put them through the food mill. In theory the food mill will push the sauce through the mill, and keep the seeds and such in the mill to be cleared away.
I think before we have MASS quantity ready, we will do a test bunch and see what happens. If we wait, I have visions of I Love Lucy in the factory and things getting out of control and food getting everywhere. The test will have to be before we head out on the Alaska Cruise at the beginning of September. Stay tuned for Experiments in the Kitchen: Testing Crab Apples.
There is still more cherries to be picked though, trying the food mill on them might be the easiest way to get the pits out. We’ll see.
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