Prunes are one of the main ingredients for making a fragrant compote of dried fruits and can be a useful snack for all those who are very fond of sweets, but trying to curb their habits during the fight against excess weight. In addition, the dried plum is an excellent company for any meat when stuffing and stewing.
It should be prepared for the fact that prunes, prepared with your own hands at home, do not look like your store counterpart: the fruits themselves will be noticeably drier and duller, and sweetness will be replaced by sourness.
Dried prunes at home - recipe
If at the end of the summer you realized that one jam and sauces with the whole plum crop can not cope, try to use an alternative method of harvesting fruits - drying. Drying plums by own hand is incredibly simple, but since this process takes a lot of time, harvesting a couple of kilograms in this way simply does not make sense.
Before you can cook prunes at home, check the collected fruits, get rid of the pedicels, leaves and other debris, rinse the plums and proceed to blanching. Blanching the plums is necessary in order to shorten the drying time. For this purpose, the fruits fall into a boiling soda solution for literally half a minute. The solution is prepared from the calculation: 10 g of soda per liter of water, the volume of the liquid is determined based on the number of available fruits - the water must completely cover them.
After a short blanching plums will be covered with a fine whitish net. Rinse them again, let them dry and spread on a baking sheet. The first 3-4 hours of plums are dried at a temperature of 55-60 degrees, after which they are mixed, cooled and then returned to the oven, now heated to 70 degrees. Another couple of hours, and half-finished prunes are re-mixed, cooled and placed on the final drying at 90 degrees for 5 hours. At this cooking prunes at home ends. Fruits are already ready, they can be cooled and stored. If you want the home piece to have a shiny surface, then soak prunes at 120 degrees for no more than 15-20 minutes. Sugar from the plum will come to the surface and, caramelized, will make the surface lacquered.
The result is a dense, sour prune, ideally suited for making beverages, sauces and adding to meat dishes. It is almost impossible to cook all your favorite smoked prunes at home. The fact is that the secret of this soft, fleshy and fragrant dainty is lurking in abundant processing with chemical solutions in production. At home, the required smoked meat can be added with the help of liquid smoke, if there is an urgent need, but consider that the composition of liquid smoke is also hazardous to health.
How to store prunes at home?
Prunes made at home on land are bought, and therefore stored longer. Dried up
In damp and warm rooms prunes start to mold quickly, but you can keep it fresh if you place the fruit in a container or zip-lock bag and then put it in the fridge. Weekly check the moisture in the container and, if necessary, prune the prunes.