Drying Apples
I quite frequently manage to get bags of eating apples and/or cooking apples from my local veg shop at a reduced rate of 50 pence a bag. There is nothing wrong with them, perhaps just been too long on the stall and they don't like to leave things unnecessarily as they lose profit on them. My dehydrator went pop a few months ago and since then I have been researching ways to actually preserve the apples by drying without having to heat up something beforehand. Ideally one day I would like one of the posh Excalibur driers but that is a little way off yet. So needing to do something in the interim I have sort of made do with what's around me like the airing cupboard, bamboo canes, citric acid a little time and patience and have managed to process about 4lb of apples which is nicely esconced in the airing cupboard. For the pre-treatment of the apples so that they do not go brown I soaked them in an ascorbic acid and water mixture. I used 3 teaspoons of crystalline ascorbic acid to ...