Drying Fruits and Vegetables | Live Free or Die: How to Homestead

[Music] What I want to do today is show you how I dry my fruit when I have extra. Then I'll show you some other things that I also like to [Music] dry.

So, the thinner you slice the apples, the faster they're going to dry. If you don't slice them thin enough, they'll take so long to dry that they could spoil before they actually dry out. Once I get to the core here, I just turn the apple and I just start slicing the other side.

Drying is a really nice way to preserve fruit. You can dry a lot of things: blueberries, we dry raspberries, pears, mushrooms. We also dry herbs, herbs and flowers. The flavor, um, of dried fruit is just, it's amazing because when you dry the fruit, it concentrates the flavor. When you want something sweet, dried apple is perfect.

So now that I have these sliced, um, I'm going to lay them out on this towel in the sun, drying in a really sunny spot. I usually tend to just eat them as a snack. You know, if I'm wanting something sweet and I'm hungry, I might just grab a few pieces as a snack.

There's some dried apples and just leave these here for a few hours, and then I'll turn them [Music] over. As you can see, they are um, kind of crispy. They're really good. So next time you have some fruit on your counter that is about to go bad, instead of throwing it away, go uh, cut it up and put it in the sun and make yourself some dried fruit snacks.