Care Not About Seasons With Food Preservation

People have been preserving foods even before they discovered bacteria and oxidation. (But of course, that doesn't go as far as the Flintstones era.) Thus, they were able to eat fruits even in the dead of winter. Now, huge thanks to technology, we can eat even more kinds of fruits at almost any month of the year because of food preservation.

What are some of the ways of preserving fruits? For one, there's drying. It rids the fruit of moisture on which bacteria, mold and yeast grow. Because moisture is removed, the enzymes that cause the fruit to ripen are somehow slowed down. When dried, the fruit becomes smaller and lighter. Its taste may be a bit different from when it's still freshly picked, but it sure is still tasty. Some of the fruits that are most commonly dried are plums (prunes), pears, peaches, apples, and bananas.

Drying methods include sun drying, solar drying, oven drying, and drying using a dehydrator. The first two are the "outdoor" modes of drying. Don't confuse them with each other: in sun drying, the fruit is placed on trays directly under the sun; while in solar drying, the fruit is placed in an outdoor dehydrator that uses foils and transparent plastic sheets that hasten the drying process.

Another way of preserving fruits is jellying or the cooking of fruit with sugar until it, well, gels. Through jellying, you can make fruit butters, jams, jellies, preserves, marmalades, and conserves. Jellies have the firmest shape hold and are made from fruit juice. Preserves and conserves are just like jams and marmalade--they all contain small pieces of fruits. It's just that the last two are more spreadable, and conserves may contain other ingredients such as coconut meat, nuts and raisins. Of them all, however, fruit butters are the least gel-like. Apple butter, for instance, is apple pulp and spices cooked to a thick sauce-like form.

And finally, there's the canning or bottling of fruit juice. In this process, the whole fruit or its pulp is squeezed so the juice would come out. When done at home or in small scale, flour sack cloth is often used so the pulp bits would be strained out easily. The juice would then be pasteurized and added sugar or citrus extract, before being packed into sterilized and airtight containers.

These aren't all food preservation methods you can do with fruits. These are definitely some of the easiest if you want to preserve fruits at home.
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