Drying Kiwi

With three days left in the year of 2011, I am trying to make use of the kiwi that I harvested in late November.  I purchased a food dehydrator online for the purpose of saving some of the kiwi.  Some experimentation had to take place and sure enough I had to pitch out the first batch.

The instructions did not say to pre treat the kiwi, but I did with "fruit fresh" and that may be why the first batch had such a tart taste.  Some days went by before I tried again.  This time I thought a strawberry flavor might be tasty.  I had some powdered strawberry jello on hand so I sprinkled that on the peeled slices of kiwi.  I put in three trays of the kiwi and one tray of sliced persimmon.  Both the persimmon and the strawberry  kiwi was pleasant to taste.  I did the moisture test on them and they passed.  The moisture test is simply to place the product in a glass jar and put the lid on.  Watch and see if it fogs up, if not then the proper amount of dryness  is correct.

My next part of the experiment was to try different flavors.  My daughter gave me some sugar free jello in lemon and raspberry.  I put in one tray of lemon flavor sliced kiwi, in about 1/8 inch slices.  One tray had the kiwi sprinkled with the raspberry jello powder.  One tray had the kiwi with Splenda sprinkled on them.  Part of this experiment was to add another fruit so I used two small bananas for the fourth tray.  I did not pretreat them with ascorbic powder and I learned that the color would have been lighter if I had, and perhaps the taste better.  But, all in all, I like the flavor of the raspberry and the kiwi with splenda best.  The lemon sugar free jello powder did not enhance the taste of the kiwi on that tray.

My daughter has hinted that she will be looking for boxes of persimmon on sale for me to dry.  I do think that the persimmon had the prettiest appearance and a very pleasant taste.  The nice thing about the dried fruit is that I can put it in the freezer chest and pull out for making trail mix all during the time that the kiwi vines are sleeping the winter away.