Let me be clear: In no universe would I mix tomato paste with strawberries. I’m simply using the can to illustrate the size of some of this year’s fruit. Aren’t they lovely?
How I wish blogs could share aromas, because our house smells marvelous right now. We are eating all the strawberries we want – and we want a lot of them – yet still have leftovers. The question was, “How can we preserve them without freezing it or turning it into jam?” The answer was, “Dehydrate them.”
Thus far we’ve dried a quart of these little beauties (see below), which means we sliced and dried about four quarts. That sounds onerous, but it really wasn’t. DF and I sit across from each other at the table, slicing and chatting, until the dehydrator is full or until we run out of berries, whichever comes first. Some people sit around watching TV or playing board games. We slice berries.
Why do this? Because we want every berry to have had a reason to ripen. I have never tasted berries like these before, either in New Jersey (where we picked them ourselves) or from Seattle farm markets. They’re as sweet and tender as the memory of first love and, as DF’s younger son marveled, “They’re red all the way through!”
(If you’re limited to supermarket strawberries, then you can understand his surprise.)
As the berries dry, they emit a wonderful fragrance that follows us into our dreams. We find ourselves nibbling the smallest pieces as we take the finished product from the dehydrator. It would be so easy to eat them all, but we’re determined to save them for winter. Each chewy shred of red will remind us of the pleasant hours spent picking and slicing.
Yes, pleasant. I love picking berries. You get a great aroma then as well, from the ripening fruit and the other fragrances of the yard: clover, freshly mown grass, charring alder drifting over from somebody’s fish smoker. The salmon are in, the berries are ripe, and it’s time to get down to the business of preserving food.
These berries are a good start:
Strawberry and rhubarb: BFFs
Our home doesn’t smell only of strawberries, however. Although the fragrance lingers delightfully, it’s currently warring with the aroma of its culinary BFF, rhubarb.
The dehydrator* has really been put to the test this year, with the berries and also a new recipe for candied rhubarb. DF has done much of the work for the rhubarb, with a little help from me here and there. You slice the stalks, bury them in sugar for 10 days and then dehydrate them until they’re dry but still chewy. He likens them to “rhubarb Twizzlers.” That’s not far off.
Because the sugar draws liquid from the stalks, we end up with loads of simple syrup that’s a beautiful pink color. DF mixes it with ginger ale or POG for a surprisingly sophisticated sip. I like the simple syrup all by itself, although I’m toying with the idea of adding tonic water or club soda.
Here’s the liquid that came off the last batch:
Doesn’t that look delectable? No wonder I can’t stop sipping the stuff. Despite the sugar content, it still has that rhubarb tartness. If you’ve never had rhubarb, the best I can describe it is as a cross between lemon and strawberry. That’s not quite it, but it’s as close as I can get.
For the first batch of rhubarb, we drained off the simple syrup and used the sugar itself to make cookies. Full disclosure: We also ate some of the sugar like candy, because it had crystallized a bit and was nicely crunchy.
For the next batch, DF saved the sugar and used it to inter the rhubarb stalks. The simple syrup from that second batch became the medium for the third batch: no sugar, just syrup. When we decide which method tastes best, we’ll use it again next year.
Fortunately I was able to harvest several three-cup portions of diced rhubarb for cake before DF fell in love with rhubarb Twizzlers. Otherwise I’d have been out of luck, because he’s laid waste to our considerable rhubarb patch. Dehydrating** is fun!
The rest of the garden
As noted in a recent post, we haven’t had a banner spring or summer. Most things are moving pretty slowly and the carrots might not make it at all (although that could be because DF used an older seed packet). However, the potatoes are doing beautifully and the apple trees are loaded with little green fruits.
The sour cherry tree is only on its second full year, so we don’t expect much. A popular saying about these trees: “The first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps and the third year it leaps.” Thus we hope for a bountiful harvest in 2025, while happy at the sight of at least some fruit this year.
The red raspberries, usually so robust (36 quarts’ worth frozen last year) are dismal. In part this is due to a neighbor’s fence rebuild taking out part of the plot, but DF also thinks he pruned them too heavily last year. My opinion is that some years just aren’t berry years. The golden raspberries, on the other hand, are blooming voluminously. Maybe they’ll make up for the lack of reds (just three cups picked so far). If they don’t, I’m going foraging; not far from here is a public right-of-way choked with raspberry bushes.
Meanwhile, in the greenhouse, we have eaten plenty tomatoes already thanks to DF’s winter tomato project. The plants he created from the wintered-over one have produced quite nicely despite the cool summer weather. The varieties were created by a greenhouse out in the Mat-Su Valley and taste like heirlooms. We’ve already enjoyed tomato sandwiches and eaten them as a side dish. I refuse to put salad dressing on tomatoes this good; just a sprinkle of salt and I’ll eat it like candy.
We’ll preserve what we’re able to get, and hope that next year’s garden will be better. As I’ve written before, gardening is the definition of hope. It’s also a way to take summer into winter: Every time we unwrap one of those rhubarb Twizzlers, we’ll remember days of sun.
Readers: How is your summer going?
*In case you’re in the market: We use a Nesco American Harvest dehydrator (model FD-80A) and it’s been great for us. (As an Amazon affiliate, I receive a small fee for products bought through my link.)
**If you’re new to the notion, I urge you to check out a site called The Purposeful Pantry. The friendly and encouraging author will help you realize that anybody can dehydrate, and that everyone should. She also does great YouTube videos and, I just learned, a live chat.
Related reading:
I am in awe of your strawberries! I stopped growing them, so miserable were the results. (I dehydrate watermelon but have never tried it with strawberries)
However, I have an overflow of raspberries. As you may know, Fairbanks has had some really hot days lately that came after a lot of rain, so the berries are huge and very flavorful. I have frozen quarts, after eating myself sick while picking them! I am going to try the rhubarb twizzler method. Is it really as simple as bury them in sugar for 10 days, pull them out and dehydrate? Do you keep the sugaring process in the fridge or someplace else—I worry about ants. Thanks in advance for any more advice about making them. The other crop that has done extraordinarily well this year is peas and I am off to pick more after I write this. Also onions, huge and not a root worm to be seen.
I envy you your onions! That’s one crop DF has not had luck with so far.
We keep the sugared rhubarb in the fridge for 10 days, then dehydrate. The second half of the last batch is now drying, along with four cups of sliced strawberries.
Now that the last batch is out, we have more than three quarts of rhubarb simple syrup in the fridge. Just discovered a new way to deal with them: Rhubarb sweet tea.
Thanks for the additional info on rhubarb twizzlers.
Here, the birds get them if you do not cover the plants with netting.
The birds get them here, too. Last year we used netting; this year, DF fashioned hoops out of chicken wire and wire fencing to keep the robins and others away. Now he has the idea of building more permanent hoops out of PVC pipe and wire.
A couple of strokes of frugal luck: He found some (although not enough) PVC pipe at the Habitat ReStore and I found a bunch of wire and some five-foot metal stakes on Buy Nothing. The stakes aren’t needed for this particular job, but they will be helpful as we reorganize the raspberry beds. The rest of the PVC pipe will be covered at least in part by some free gift cards from rewards programs.
For newcomers, here are a couple of explanatory links:
https://donnafreedman.com/rewards-programs-ftw/
https://donnafreedman.com/need-something-buy-nothing/
Gosh that looks and sounds good! I might have to get a dehydrator Each of our 2 sons in law asked for us to give them dehydrators for gifts in the last few years If they have bounty they haven’t shared LOL
Get yourself one, too!
Summer here in Central NY: As in Alaska, it’s win a few, lose a few. My two tomato plants in pots (“Sungold” and “Supersweet 100”) behind an 8-foot chain-link fence at my next-door neighbor’s are producing like gangbusters, as is the little “Sweetheart of the Patio” pot I’ve got on my deck (well away from critters).
But something came along and ate all of my Tuscan kale plants; I’m not sure whether the deer leaned over the dill “fence” around them, or whether a rabbit got in through the dill. (It’s been a bad year for rabbits here, in part because their predators seem to be suffering. Every fox I’ve seen this year has had a bad case of mange, and I haven’t seen a coyote in ages.) And a neighbor who put in first a high fence around the veg garden he’s still trying to grow, and then chicken wire around the bottom of said fence, STILL had a baby bunny get in through the chicken wire and eat all of his lettuce.
And then, of course, (a) everything has been happening 2 weeks ahead of schedule (hellooo, climate change!), and (b) it’s been a very hot, dry summer (hellooo, climate change!). But I’ve been trying to roll with all this, as you and others have.
On Friday evening we had a HUGE moose eating the mountain ash tree and the rosebushes in the front yard. We’re just glad he wasn’t motivated enough to jump DF’s homemade moose fence and lay waste to the peas, which are finally covered with blossoms and pods.
Certain neighborhoods in town are having a bunny problem because some numbskulls who get tired of caring for their pets just release them into the wild. No sign of them here thus far.
I am DROOLING at the thought of rhubarb twizzlers! Sadly, here in South Georgia 6 miles from Florida, rhubarb can’t be grown. Maybe my SIL in Michigan will take pity and send me some stalks . . .
After reading about your dehydrated strawberries, I went out and bought a bunch to try it for myself. Delicious! I forced myself to put the jar of them away for the winter, but if I run across more strawberries in the next few weeks I shall make more. I also passed your suggestion and your comment about the joys of eating them in winter onto readers of another blog. However, now that I say that, I realize I did not put you down as a reference so I will do that in a future post. Thanks for the idea of dehydrating them.
We have put our jars away, too. Out of sight, (almost) out of mind.