Eric Rochow: Hey everyone. Today at Gardenfork we are going to talk about dehydrating food or drying food, specifically how to dry apples. We -- up in the country we have our neighbors who have a giant orchard of apples and every fall they are like, hey come on over and get apples. So we picked a bunch of apples and we brought them home, we’ve actually – we’ve been to this orchard on the show when we made hard cider and I think we were talked about how to prune apple trees as well. They are super nice people. Neiley and John are their names and they always invite us over and the dogs run around and play with their dog. And we pick a bunch of apples and it’s also making apples sauce but we want to talk about making, oh I am drawing a blank here see you at the end of the day. Anyway, drying apples is really fun, we got some stuff from a tag sale to do it and I am going to show you how, alright, so let’s go to the kitchen in up state and here we go.
Okay so we picked up all our apples, we got this giant, we like over picked on apples but a ton of apples here and you know these are not beautiful apples they’ve got some marks on it but that’s what -- that’s how apples look, if they are too clean, that basically means they have been sprayed a ton of chemicals so, but I wanted to show you a simple way to preserve apples, because they are all, they are ripe all the time and what you know, you know, there’s always much apple sauce you can make, right. So we are going to dry the apples today.
Jane: Can you freeze applesauce?
Eric Rochow: Yeah, you can freeze applesauce. Put them in ziploc bags and you could freeze it on those plastic containers. But we got this – there’s a couple of cool things we have here, first of all we have, this is the raw and popular invention of the 18th century, 19th century, but it’s a slicer core peeler thing, which is very cool. At a yard sale, a couple of years ago, we got a food dehydrator and this is just an electric one and it was cracked that had a crack in it, so I just glued the crack again.
Jane: What did you glue with?
Eric Rochow: I used just super glue to glue it. But this is great because these come apart, it’s just a simple rack.
Jane: Look, he is angry.
Eric Rochow: Yes, he is hungry. Okay, we haven’t fed the pups yet but I just want to show you how to dehydrate this with an air dehydrator, it’s very cool. So let’s go, alright. You take an apple, and unlike this gizmo, you press, ideally you are on a surface where the suction cup grabs but this wood doesn’t grab it really well but that’ll be alright. And you take, press this lever, pull this all the way back, then you take your apple.
Jane: What kind of apple is that?
Eric Rochow: I think it’s a mackintosh or a Winesap, but anyway –
Jane: Winesap? That wasn’t at the orchard?
Eric Rochow: No. And that goes on there, and then we turn this, I just put my hand here.
Jane: Oh, this seems to fun, this seems to be cool, that is so cool.
Eric Rochow: And that cores or peels it, it cores it and this is the best part.
Jane: It is corny inside, that is so cool.
Eric Rochow: Yeah, it does this a corny and thing as well. So I need to just take this and cut it, you just cut through like that.
Jane: Wings.
Eric Rochow: Apple slices.
Jane: My god, that’s awesome, who doesn’t want that.
Eric Rochow: We all love this.
Jane: Nobody doesn’t want that. And there’s any matter the peelings on some of them.
Eric Rochow: No I think it’s fine with some, you know, it’s going to dry and preserves it, you know, it’s not going to big preserve for ten years but it will last a couple of months, you can eat them in the winter, this is great. So once this is done, put these apples here.
Jane: We fill it up.
Eric Rochow: Jane, whose voice you hear made this hot pepper jelly and it’s really cool jar so I thought that that was kind to me so thanks Jane for bringing that.
Jane: Okay, I need that later.
Eric Rochow: Yeah, you can try them later.
Jane: You’re welcome.
Eric Rochow: You don’t want them to overlap but they can be touching a little bit, so here we go, we got this whole thing here, they are all ready so these stack really nicely, like this,
Jane: Oh I think I see that.
Eric Rochow: I did all the work and the ladies were --
Jane: These were on Youtube.
Eric Rochow: Obviously things are in Youtube.
Jane: It’s arresting.
Eric Rochow: But anyway, so the lid goes on, so there you go, there is a fan in the bottom of this thing and it’s boiling up fruit and it has little air slots here so it smells like apple and we’ll just run this – we’ll just run this whole night and then tomorrow morning we’ll take a look at this, alright. It’s pretty cool, I love that. Just put somewhat out of the way. Alright, so it’s the next morning, we were in this, I think about probably a total of six, eight hours, what do you say Jane?
Jane: Yes.
Eric Rochow: And now look at this, this looks -- this looks great, it’s been toasted already but I put the prettier ones upon top here, but again a very simple thing you can do, oh it’s good, it tastes like dried apple.
Jane: Actually depending on the way you take it, whether you take top or the bottom, it taste different.
Eric Rochow: Were we used different apples? And what I did do, was I changed the layers halfway through, just even up the air distributions, I kind of switched the layers around in here, but these are great, they still – they have a sweetness tone, you can put these in a bank, most of they are white. Also you could string these with string, you don’t need to have this fancy machine, you could cut these and then just one white thread through them, or black thread I don’t care but just some cotton thread and hang them up somewhere where the flies can’t get in, basically when there is some air exchange it’ll take longer to dry but I’ll do sometime. Alright, so thank you Jane for helping.
Jane: You are welcome.
Eric Rochow: And helping pick the apples. And come into green house, green-house-tv and tell us about your dried apples stories, alright. I’ll see you later. Bye.
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