With traffic in L.A. being the way it is, can your car really be said to get you anywhere? And with temperatures in L.A. way high, isn’t it time you learned to put your almost-never-driven car to better uses — like dehydrating local, organic fruit?
Because if you’ve mastered the art of baking in your car, it’s time to move your vehicle-culinary skills beyond desserts and into the more healthy realms that take advantage of farmers’ market bounty or your backyard fruit tree — while avoiding any late-night TV infomercials to buy yet another gizmo your kitchen doesn’t have room for.
Thanks to Lyanda Lynn Haupt at Tangled Nest, you’ve got photo-illustrated directions to help you dry fruit in the dehydrator you already own — your car. (via lifehacker) “I found a simple idea that made immediate, intuitive sense: why not use the fine German-engineered solar collector we already had sitting in our driveway?” Lyanda writes.
Apparently, Seattle weather in the high 70s made for perfect dehydrating temperatures in-car — though Lyanda does add a caveat: “I confess this experiment was not entirely carbon-neutral: when our driveway shaded over at about 3 PM, I backed the car onto the street to get four more hours of direct sun!”
Considering the rather high prices of organic dried fruit — at least at my local co-op — this trick could save you a lot of money — as well as keep you from driving your car too much. Dry, don’t drive!
Earlier: Jam with Fallen Fruit
Photo courtesy of The Tangled Nest
I think this has become a movement! I read about using parked cars to enhance fruit drying, in an Australian blog somewhere. Handily enough, the advice came just in time to take advantage of a really incredible fig harvest this year at what we jokingly call our One-Acre Ranch down in semi-South Texas.
Instructions for rigging up a really cheap, silly, but totally functional food dehydrator:
http://www.bobdunn.com/Article/260/drying-figs
Putting the contraption into a company news van parked in the sun was, well, the best use I ever got out of that news van.
Comment by Bob — September 6, 2009 @ 1:20 pm
Interesting info, but isn’t just putting stuff in the car easier than installing a dehydrator that requires screwing stuff that then needs to be put in the car? I love the reuse idea for the frames, but I’m having a hard time figuring out what benefits your extra steps add — Please explain so we can all learn :)
Comment by Siel — September 7, 2009 @ 10:00 pm
I guess it depends on what you’re trying to dehydrate. If you’re drying figs, they tend to be pretty juicy when you slice them up. The netting stretched across the frames keeps the messy, sticky stuff up off the car seats, for one (LOL). Having the fruit slices exposed to the air on all sides, suspended on the netting, also allows it to dry more evenly and more quickly than if it were sitting on a cookie sheet or some hard surface. You don’t have to turn the slices over be hand to make sure they’re drying evenly.
The best thing about using a car, I think, is that it pretty much keeps the insects off of your food while it’s drying. Still, to be sure the final product is free from pathogens, it’s a good idea to bag it up and put it in the freezer for at least four days.
Comment by Bob — September 8, 2009 @ 3:24 am
I should’ve mentioned – if we just had a few figs or tomatoes to dry, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with the “drying frames.” But we had *a lot* of fruit all coming ripe at once. Being able to stack several frames allowed us to dry quite a bit in a small space (the back of a Chevy HHR van).
Comment by Bob — September 8, 2009 @ 3:29 am
I now wish I had a fig tree! We do have one growing in the sidewalk nearby though — I should check how it’s doing later today –
Comment by Siel — September 8, 2009 @ 2:17 pm