Annual Pear Harvest - Drying

[Nifty]

When I was little my family would pick / dry pears from our trees.

I didn't do a great job keeping up the tradition with my kids, but we did a small batch last year in our tiny food dehydrator. They enjoyed the process, loved the results, and everyone we shared them with loved them too.

So, this year I decided it would be nice to make it an official tradition, so I committed to buying this nice stainless-steel 10-tray dehydrator to dry a TON of pears this year! (I also bought this silicone mat that made removing / cleaning SO MUCH EASIER!!!)

We setup an assembly (de-assembly) line where one kid core'd the pears, the 2nd kid cleaned out all the worms/holes (every pear comes with at least one free moth larva), and then I'd use the Cuisinart to slice them, then I'd dunk them in a sugar/lemon-juice mix, drain them, and then we'd work as a team laying them out on the trays. It goes pretty quick once we get in a groove!

Here's the tree (even after losing about 1/2 of it's pears)

... and here's our setup:

1/4 of our harvest so far:

... and a bunch of pears waiting to ripen to do another batch:

 

[Branching Out]

I am looking out the window at the neighbours pear tree, and thinking that this would be fun to try. Do you treat the pear slices with lemon juice before drying them?

 

[Nifty]

Do you treat the pear slices with lemon juice before drying them?

I fill a large glass bowl with a mix of water, sugar, lemon juice. Then I put a strainer that fits just perfect inside of it.

Immediately after the pears are sliced, they go into the strainer inside the bowl and get swished around a lot in the mix. Then I pull up/out the strainer, shake it a bit, and let it stand over another empty bowl for a bit to let more water drain out. Then start spreading the slices onto the trays

I don't think it's a necessary process... it's just what my mom did growing up. Sugar for a little more sweetness (almost def. not needed) and lemon juice to help with keeping them from turning too brown?

I really should do a test next time without any of this part of the process and see how they turn out!

 

[flowerbug]

they sure look good.