If you have laden fruit trees, what are the best ways to preserve your harvest?
Angela Clifford is a North Canterbury farmer, educator, entrepreneur and foodie who lives with her husband Nick and their three children on a busy six-and-a-half hectare permaculture property, where they grow more than 60 varieties of fruit and vegetables and raise chickens, turkeys, ducks, sheep, bees, cows and pigs.
The last thing you want is shelves groaning with unopened chutney and bottled fruit, Clifford says, so decide what you love, and make lots of that.
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The amount of fruit on trees is quite overwhelming at the moment, she tells Nine to Noon.
“We are just picking hard out whether it's peaches, apples, or wine grapes, that this week we've got table grapes, it's the couple of weeks in the year where you just feel a little overwhelmed by everything that needs to come off. We're still picking strawberries. I mean, it just goes on and on.
“But it's still overwhelming this time of bounty, because we do have periods where everything is literally ripe for the picking at once.”
One of the reasons she favours using a dehydrator is that slaving over a hot, steamy stove isn’t much fun at this time of year.
The trick is to dry fruit to the point where they're still slightly soft and chewy, she says.
“There's a wee trick which is to dip them in potassium metabisulfite, which is just a natural sulphur additive, or food-safe sulphur, that they use in wine and beer making a lot and that and also in professional fruit drying.
“And that just creates a layer on the fruit that protects it from bacteria.
“So, it means that you don't have to dry the fruit quite so far. And that's how you end up with this sort of lovely soft, chewy fruit.”
Dehydrators are a pretty simple piece of kit, she says.
"It just it goes all growing season for us. So, it can dry everything from mushrooms, to seaweed to herbs, to dried fruit, they’re really simple, they're effectively just a fan and a motor that creates a constant drying temperature.”
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You can put them in your garage, set and forget, she says.
“They can be as big as you want, because the trays stack on top of each other. A single dehydrator can have up to 30 trays on top of it and still do a good job.”
The type of dried fruit she makes is a chip, rather than a leather which are fruit first pureed then dried.
She’s currently making dried plums, she says.
“You just halve the plums, take out the stone, a clever trick is to pop out the back. So, you don't have that sort of indent where the stone sat so much. So, they're a little bit flatter.
“Then you dip them in a mixture of water, potassium metabisulfite and sugar. And that's all dissolved in a 10-litre bucket.
“And you leave the plums in there for 12 to 15 hours. Then you take the plums out, you lay them in a single layer in a dehydrator tray. And you turn that on and leave it for up to 24 hours, 48 hours just keeping an eye on it over that time until you think it's dry enough for your taste.”
The freezer is also a preserving lifesaver, she says.
“With fruit you can just put it in bags or in jars and straight into the freezer, or plastic containers straight into the freezer. That works as well.”
With stewing and bottling the trick is to remember what you like eating, Clifford says.
“Often, we hear from people who have been holding on to jars of stewed fruit for five or seven years because it's just not something they eat.
“So be really clear that this is something that you like eating. And if that's the case, choose something that you love when it's fresh and in season; whether that's black peaches, or red plums, or whatever it is just make sure that you choose what you enjoy to eat.”
The same goes for jams and chutneys, she says.
“Don't just make them ad infinitum. And then you'll have them sitting on your shelf forever.
“One of our favorites, as a family, is a zucchini pickle, which is kasundi, an Indian accompaniment to curries.
It's really hot and spicy. And it's something that we absolutely love.
“So, we make the effort to make that as a chutney. I think start from that end, rather than saying, Oh my God, I've got too much fruit, I'm going to just make another chutney.”
