Drying is a good way to preserve berries and fruits harvested in summer for the winter without losing their valuable and useful qualities. Dried berries and fruits can be eaten like that, or you can cook delicious compotes with them, add to cereals, meat and fish dishes. But in order for them to remain useful in dried form, they should be stored correctly.
Features of storage of dried fruits
If you manage to ensure the correct storage conditions in your home warehouse, the stock of dried fruits will retain all its useful properties for 2-3 years. For this, it is necessary that the humidity in the room does not exceed 70%, and the temperature is constant and does not exceed 0-10 ° C.
And during the harvesting harvest, and then, in winter, it is necessary to process and store different types of fruits and berries separately. This is due to the fact that each fruit or berry has its own optimal moisture threshold, separate storage will allow you to maintain it and preserve products without loss of quality.
Large fruits: peaches, apricots, prunes, so that they dry faster, you can cut in half and remove the seeds.
Once dried, fruits and berries remain sensitive to changes in humidity in the room where they are stored. Therefore, it is necessary to prevent this and use dishes with tight-fitting lids as containers. In the event that stocks are large, you can use wooden crates, but they should be lined from the inside with wax or special wrapping paper.
After stacking dried fruits, tamp them well and carefully cover with the remaining pieces of paper. In the event that they start to rot or mold appears on them, go over the box, remove the spoiled pieces, dry the rest and put them back into storage, changing the paper packaging. But food grade plastic containers or glass jars will be preferred over cloth bags or wooden crates. You can also save any exotic fruit or berry in this way.
Dried fruits that are stored in an unsealed container should be placed separately from other products, since they absorb all extraneous odors very well.
How to protect dried fruits from insects
Tin or glass jars with ground-in lids will protect dried fruits from the appetite of insects that are also not averse to feasting on them in winter. Therefore, you should not leave your stocks unattended for a long time, at least once a month the contents of cans or containers will need to be sorted out and, if necessary, dried a little.
If one piece of fruit or berry starts to rot or deteriorate, it can "infect" all other inhabitants of the jar. In addition, this way you can detect living creatures in time if they start. In this case, the spoiled pieces must be found and thrown away, and the rest of the contents of the can should be sent to the oven heated to 55-60 ° C. It is not necessary to keep dried fruits there for a long time - 20-30 minutes will be enough. You can drive out insects by putting a tray of dried fruits out in the cold.
