You want Dry strawberries and preserve them for as long as possible? Many of us would love to eat strawberries all year round, myself included. Unfortunately, the strawberry season is quite short, especially if you prefer regional produce.
However, as the jam is not quite as healthy due to the high sugar content, today I will show you another idea for preserving strawberries for longer - drying or dehydrating strawberries. Have fun!
Strawberries are very healthy
Berries are generally very healthy and strawberries are no exception. What's in strawberries? Strawberries contain more vitamin C than oranges and are also high in folic acid and iron. Strawberries are also rich in the trace elements potassium, calcium and magnesium. Strawberries not only lose their freshness during transportation, but also their vitamins and aroma. It is therefore a good idea to eat more regional strawberries.
As strawberries are healthy, you should eat your fill of them during the strawberry season. And if you're still craving strawberries after the strawberry season, drying strawberries helps to preserve them.
Extending the strawberry season and preserving strawberries
Have you ever eaten dried strawberries? The dried fruit tastes intensely sweet and sour, almost like candy. Drying strawberries is ideal to get an even more intense taste. You can replace sweets with dried strawberries, ideal for a healthy diet. Nutrition. Dried strawberries are ideal as a homemade muesli topping, in soy yogurt, as a decoration for desserts or salads and of course simply as a snack between meals.
Especially if you have your own garden (article recommendation: Bee friendly garden), drying strawberries is just the thing for you. When so many strawberries are ripe at once, you can harvest them all. You can eat some of them and dry the rest. This is an easy way to preserve strawberries. (Article recommendation: Preserving food for longer)
Instead of resorting to fruit with long transportation routes, you can simply eat seasonally and regionally when you dry strawberries. For me, dehydrating strawberries is a great way to extend the strawberry season.
Tip: In the contributions "Vegetarianism Statistics." and "Veganism Statistics" you will find facts and figures about vegan-vegetarian nutrition and its effects.
Drying strawberries - here's how
First, of course, you should wash the strawberries. Then remove the stalk and cut the strawberries into slices approx. 5 mm wide. Then place the strawberries on the tray of the dehydrator. Set the dehydrator to 60 degrees and dehydrate the strawberries for approx. 5-6 hours. The strawberries should then be nice and crispy.
Alternatively, drying strawberries in the oven should also work. To do this, set your oven to 60 degrees, spread the strawberries on the baking tray and place them in the oven. To allow the moisture to escape, make sure you leave the oven door ajar, e.g. with a wooden spoon stuck in the door. However, I have only tried dehydrating strawberries with my dehydrator and cannot tell you exactly how long it takes to dry strawberries in the oven.
Is it worthwhile for me to buy a dehydrator?
Personally, I really enjoy it, Making things yourself and I like to try out new recipes. If you also value healthy food, then gentle processing with a dehydrator is a good alternative. Here are some alternative uses for a food dehydrator.
Just take a look at my contributions to
I can really recommend the BioChef Arizona. I've had the appliance for about a year now. So far I've had no problems with the dehydrator and everything I've tried has worked. I have the version with eight drawers. The BioChef Arizona you can get here*.
Tip: eat the larger pieces first
It sometimes happens to me that some pieces are not yet fully dried. Either you leave these pieces in the dehydrator a little longer or you simply eat them first.
Tip: Cooking jam with dried strawberries
If you are making jam, try using dried strawberries. As dried strawberries have a more intense flavor than normal strawberries, you should need fewer strawberries for the same amount of jam. Or you can use the same amount of strawberries and the jam could taste even more intense.
However, I have been working as a cocktail mixer for a while now and it is often recommended to make homemade syrups with dried fruit to reduce the amount of ingredients used. If any of you have tried this, please leave me a comment!
Drying strawberries is great!
Preserving strawberries is very easy if you want to dry and dehydrate strawberries. The loss of water during drying gives the strawberries an even more intense flavor, making the sweet and sour notes even stronger. Due to its sustainability, I think that dehydrating strawberries is an ingenious alternative to preserving your own strawberries. ecological footprint to reduce the size and Reduce food waste. So you can easily eat seasonal and regional strawberries.
The dried strawberries are also really versatile. I particularly like to eat the dried strawberries as a homemade muesli topping with my Buckwheat muesli recipe.
And now have fun trying it out! If you have any questions, suggestions or experiences of your own to share, I look forward to your comments below this article.
All the best,
PS.: In the article Vegan lifestyle I'll tell you my best tips for starting a vegan lifestyle. Have fun!
Hey. That you can make more jam from dried fruit than from fresh unfortunately makes no sense at all. Home-cooked jam consists of fresh fruit with a little (really disappearing little) sugar and lemon juice. If one would mix dried fruits with sugar and lemon juice one would have a rather firm mass. Which would not have anything to do with jam. If you add water, you could possibly create something similar to jam. I think but that would not really taste like jam. The whole procedure doesn't really make sense ecologically. Then I would first dry the water from the fruit in the Dörautomat out (and spend energy for it) to add it later when cooking jam again.
This may well work for syrup, because liquid is added anyway and you also want to have a liquid end product. This is not the case with jam, which should be spreadable and that should not work with added water.
Greetings Christine
Hi Christine,
thanks for your comment 🙂
I have the jam cooking - as said / written - not yet tried myself, so that was just an idea. Of course, for a jam-like consistency, you would then have to add a small amount of water to the dried fruit again. That's how it works with syrups, too. Because of the more intense flavor of the dried fruit, you can effectively minimize the use of goods when making syrups this way, and I could imagine that this could also work when cooking jam.
At the end of the day, of course, I can only speculate whether the process works until I or someone else tries it for themselves and reports back. In principle, it would be similar to syrup production, but with less water. Ecologically, the process could make sense (emphasis on could) if you use fewer strawberries, since making strawberries is more energy intensive than drying them. Here it would depend on how large the saving would be. Of course, this is all speculative.
However, since I have never tried the whole thing myself, I have explicitly written that I have no experience with it and know the procedure only from the field of syrup production.
Maybe I'll manage next year times to try the whole thing and then I report times and will update the post here. So I leave it at my idea, which of course should not be a tutorial.
Love and all the best,
Julian
Hey Julian, have read with interest your gedörte strawberries, will try it i.d. season in the oven times.,have a question, in what it is stored and how long is it durable??? mfg Inge
Hello Inge,
thank you for your interest! Personally, I always store the dried strawberries in open(!) preserving jars, so that - if there is still residual moisture in the strawberries, no mold sets in. The shelf life is significantly influenced by the residual moisture in the strawberries. If you dry them in the oven, the strawberries are easily 2-3 weeks durable (but probably you - like me - have already eaten the strawberries before:). ). If you don't get them really dry, I would use them up within a week, though that shouldn't be a problem either 🙂 .
Love, Julian