To ensure that there are dishes on your table complemented with a spicy note of prunes , you do not need to buy this dried fruit in a retail chain, especially since it costs a lot. You can easily prepare a prune yourself at home. And if you consider that now, as a rule, to find a quality product that has not been treated with various hazards for long-term storage and presentable appearance, it is almost impossible, then the motivation for self-preparation is greatly increased.
If you are ready to start harvesting, our next recommendations will help you to cope with the task perfectly, and as a result you will get a very tasty and without a doubt useful product.
Preparation of prunes at home
To get a really delicious and quality home-made prunes, we choose for this purpose the ripe plum fruit, which is very easy to part with bones without damaging the inner flesh.
Selected fruits carefully and remove the bones. Then we prepare the solution for blanching. To do this, in ten liters of water, dissolve a hundred grams of baking soda and heat it to a temperature of ninety degrees.
Prepared plums are immersed in the resulting soda mixture and aged for twenty to thirty seconds. Immediately rinse the fruit with hot water, give a good drain, and lay out on a baking sheet, which is pre-covered with parchment.
The whole process of drying prunes involves three stages. Initially put the plums in a preheated to fifty degree oven and stand three to four hours. Then let the fruits cool completely, after mixing them, and again we determine in the oven, now heated up to seventy degrees. After five hours of drying, take out the baking sheet, mix it and also cool it. In the final third stage, place the cream in a heated to ninety degree oven and dry for four more hours. At each of the drying stages, the oven door must be slightly ajar.
If you did everything right, then in the end of all the actions as a result should get a delicious homemade prune. If desired, you can give the dried fruit a natural shine. To do this, at the end of the last stage, we increase the temperature regime to one hundred and twenty degrees and hold it for several minutes. In this case, the sugar contained in the fruit, appears on the surface and caramelizes, thereby giving a glossy shine.
Owners of the electric dryer can easily make a domestic prune with it.
How to make prunes from a plum in an electric dryer?
You can dry fruits, both with bones, and without them. For drying and drying, it is better to choose the fruits of the variety "Hungarian". They are rather fleshy, and perfectly suited for this purpose to taste.
So, the plums are washed, if desired, rid of the stone. Now we need, as in the traditional version, to blanch the fruit. For this, let's drop them for twenty seconds into the soda solution heated to ninety degrees, prepared at the rate of one hundred grams of soda per ten liters of water. Then we wash the plums well, let them drain off, and we place them on the pallets of the dryer not very tightly to each other.
The temperature regime of the dryer should be about the same as when drying in the oven and also include several stages. Initially, we dry at fifty degrees approximately four hours. Then raise the temperature to sixty degrees and hold for five hours. Just as much or a little more time will be needed for drying at seventy degrees. After each drying phase, it is necessary to remove the pallets with drains for about five hours for cooling and airing.
Probably, your plums will be more or less succulent and time for drying will be needed accordingly more or less. We check periodically the availability of prunes and determine the time of its preparation at home by yourself.
How to store prunes at home?
The finished prunes are best kept in paper bags or wooden boxes. But you can also fold it into glass containers, tie it with paper and place it in a cool place.