Brain roll-up

One of my favorite things about brains is they way you feed questions in, let them rattle around for a bit and a solution occurs to you some point down the line. Usually when you are doing something completely different - walking, driving, singing in the shower. Recently, I had one dilemma and, much later, a thought that did not seem related to me at the time.

I like to preserve fruit through canning or freezing.

I make a lot of jam. I make an excessive amount of jam for one person. Eight to fifteen cases of jam. Granted, some of these are 4 oz. jars (about enough for 2-3 sandwiches). I make them in smaller jars because I like to make them with about half the amount of sugar required by the recipe so that I can actually taste the fruit. This is all well and good, but does not preserve the jam for as long as commercial brands. Commercial jam has such a high sugar content to extend the shelf life of their product. Higher concentrations of sugar keep the fungus that is found in and around fruit from growing.

While shelving some newly canned jam, I discovered some from two years ago. I shifted this to the top of the pile so that I would make use of the older jam first. This year there was a lot of older jam. After years of ignoring the fact that peanut oil makes my face break out, I have begun to limit my intake. Thus, few to no peanut butter & jam sandwiches, leading to cases of jam languishing in the pantry.

There are a couple of easy solutions to this problem. The first being make less jam this year. It is about eight cases too late for that. Second, make more meals that utilize jam; biscuits and jam for breakfast; jam pie; marmalade glazed chicken. I made a note to research more recipes, and then forgot about it.

I am a snacker. I cannot cook when I am hungry, so I snack to take the edge off. Sometimes when my kid is elsewhere, cooking for one seems like too much bother. So I make a meal of snacks. In an effort to shift away from chips, cookies and other fattening items, I started stocking my shelves with more nuts and the occasional dried fruit. This worked for me in that I would buy these items and devour them in two days. The trips to the specialty store for bulk items were becoming more frequent and more expensive.

I had had one of the cheaper dehydrators before - the $30 dollar oval ones that they sell just about everywhere. It was great for dried apples. But if I wanted to do anything fancy or dry fruit that was at all juicy, it was a disaster. In the oval dehydrators with stacking trays, the heating coil is in the bottom and each tray has a hole in the center. The trays need to be reshuffled every couple of hours, otherwise the one on the bottom turns to crispy, often burnt, dust while the top tray looks like it did when you started. If you are making a flavored jerky or attempting fruit leathers and the liquid drips between the trays, it often lands on the electric coil below, filling the apartment with the smell of carbon, setting off the smoke detector.

My dehydrator, the Excalibur 3900

This time I I splurged and bought an expensive commercial grade food dehydrator. It has nine trays, and electric heater AND a fan that lends to even drying throughout. For a few extra bucks I also bought reusable tray liners. No more attempting to cut wax paper into oval doughnut shapes! The new dehydrator works like a dream. It has a temperature regulator that works. I can cut up items in the late evening and let the machine run while I sleep. Dried apples, yes. But also my own banana chips, dried apricots, blueberries, and even zucchini chips. All for me to snack on, take hiking or in my lunch.

I think the thing I always love about camping, hiking and backpacking is the food. I have a great book from the late 1970s called The Well-Fed Backpacker. In it are recipe combinations that, frankly only taste good in the open air, when you’re so hungry from all of that walking that shoe leather would taste good. Fruit leather and jerky are more nutritious than shoe leather. As the good organic fruit leathers were so expensive, I wanted to make my own, so I used the recipe from the aforementioned backpacker cookbook. This led to the demise of my first food dehydrator, the oval wonder whose coils were hit with drops of sticky fruit goo that never washed off fully. The holes in the trays (for air circulation) were impossible to clean, eventually getting moldy and unsanitary.

Now, however, I had a new machine. Past mistakes led me to proceeding with caution. How to get the result I craved without destroying my investment? I read several recipes in the book that came with the machine, another I bought, and various Internet blogs. Large blenders, sieves, cheese cloth, fine mesh strainers, plain gelatin. Each process seemed to require something I did not have in the house. I stuck to apple and banana slices.

Then one morning, while standing on the platform waiting for my commuter train, it struck me. What if I used the older jam? It has the fruit already blended. And the pectin has similar chemical makeup to gelatin (or at least they achieve the same result). Would it work? I had everything I needed: jam, the dehydrator and a spatula for spreading it thinly. I had to try.

The two year old strawberry jam was no longer a bright red. It’s homemade - no added colors. I poured enough for the center of the tray leaving plenty of room at the edges. I set the temperature to the recommended 135’ and went to bed. Morning was a cross of nervous anxiety and hope.

The trays in question now housed luscious fruit leathers. Opaque where the jam was thick. The formerly runnier edges now glowing like stained glass windows. I stared at them. I made this. Wow.

I laid out a sheet of parchment paper intended for baking. Wax paper might work better, but I didn’t have any. Careful not to tear it, I overturned the tray liner onto the parchment paper and peeled it off. Grinning like an idiot, I rolled up the paper and set it aside. Now it was truly a fruit roll up. I decided to store them in a plastic storage container. Using kitchen scissors, I made perpendicular cuts across the roll. These went into the container, lid sealed, and onto the shelf waiting for the next hiking trip.

Of course, not all of the slices were full. The edge bits had to be eaten right away to make sure the whole batch was good. My overall assessment is that the fruit roll-ups I made today are a touch sweeter than I would like and maybe a little too chewy. I can make jam with even less sugar (nah!), or try drying them for a couple of hours more. Still a success. And I made them myself for a fraction of the cost of store bought. Hoorah.