Drying dried apricots for the winter at home. How to properly prepare and store dried apricots.

Selecting the best fruits for making dried apricots

In order to end up with tasty, sweet and meaty dried apricots, you first need to choose the right apricots. Small wild fruits are not suitable for harvesting for the winter; all that will be left of them is the skin, and besides, they can taste bitter and contain hard veins. It is best to use “cultivated” apricot varieties. The fruits should be large, fleshy, not overripe and easily separated from the stone.

Preparing apricots for drying

First of all, you need to thoroughly wash the apricot fruits, divide them into halves and dry them on a towel. You need to use only perfectly clean fruits without traces of pests. If there are dark spots or spots on the skin, it is better to eat them immediately; in the finished dried apricots, these spots will be hard and can ruin the taste.

The finished dried apricots turn out to be quite dark; to preserve their amber color, there are several pre-treatment methods:

• Dip the apricot halves into boiling, well-sugared water for 3-5 minutes. This will add extra sweetness to the finished product and help maintain color. Only very dense fruits can be processed in this way; soft ones will simply fall apart or dry out to a thin skin.
• Dip the halves for 5-10 minutes in water with citric acid (1 tsp per liter of water).

After all these manipulations, the apricots must be dried well on a towel again.

Different ways to dry dried apricots at home

On open air

You need to place the mesh on which the fruit will dry in the center of a large piece of gauze, spread the fruit evenly on the mesh and tie all the edges of the gauze into a knot. The size of the gauze should be chosen so that the distance from the apricot to the node is 20-25 cm, this is necessary for better ventilation and prevention of souring of the fruit. Next, the entire structure is hung by the knot and dried for 10-15 days, depending on the air temperature.

If there is no net or the ability to hang it somewhere, you can simply lay out the future dried apricots on a tray or plate and cover with gauze, but this increases the likelihood of souring.

Every evening, trays and nets should be brought into a dry, warm room so that dew does not settle on them.

In the oven

It is easy to dry apricots in an ordinary home oven. This method has its advantages:

• there is no access to the workpieces for flies, wasps and ants;
• Drying time is only 9-10 hours.

The apricot halves are laid out on a baking sheet and placed in an oven preheated to 65 degrees for the required time.After 8 hours, you can start checking the readiness of the dried apricots; when they reach a suitable state, you must turn off the oven and do not remove the dried fruits until they have cooled completely.

In an electric dryer

The easiest and most logical way to dry dried apricots is an electric dryer. The fruit halves need to be laid out on a dryer grid, turned on for a couple of hours at a temperature of 50-60 degrees, and then increased to 70-80 degrees. The entire drying process takes about 40 hours.

How to properly store dried apricots at home

In order to eat a sweet and healthy delicacy in winter, it must not only be prepared correctly, but also stored correctly. To prevent dried apricots from turning sour and spoiling, it is best to store them in tied linen bags in a dry, dark place. You should not use plastic bags and plastic containers for this, as it can become moldy and spoiled in them.

Video about how else you can dry dried apricots at home