Crystallised oranges, pears, pineapple, angelica, melon or cherries ... How to make candied fruit at home. The recipe for half-candied syrup in a dehydrator.
Simple and infinitely faster than traditional crystallising, half-crystallising in a drier requires no special hardware. Sugar and your dehydrator are enough to get your fill of vitamins and flavours
Traditionally, confectioners work with heat. They dip the fruit into syrups that are high in sugar. But for us, hot work has a major drawback: it destroys cell membranes to allow the sugar into the fruit and it kills vitamins.
To overcome this drawback, we can dehydrate our fruit in cold or warm syrup (see the featuer on osmosis), and perfect the drying in a dehydrator. This technique both simpler and faster is especially has much more respect for the vitamins: it limits the contact with oxygen from the air is the main factor for destruction.
Initially, the fruit lose water through osmosis in syrup. The fruit is protected from air and oxygen.
In the second phase, the water moistens the fruit sugar on the surface and the drier dries the sugar. Again, the fruit is protected.
How. - Prepare a syrup: 1 litre of water for 1 to 1.2 kg of sugar. Warm to between 30 and 40° C
. - Immerse the fruit and keep the syrup at this temperature for about 5 hours. You can use your oven if the thermostat is sufficiently precise or your dehydrator tunnel without trays
. - Place your candied fruit sugar on the plates of your dehydrator set to under 40 ° C.
- Check from time to time to assess the progress of drying over 15-20 hours in the dehydrator is a good basis, but it depends on the size of candied fruit, climatic conditions and the performance of your applicance. You will need to experiment to get the desired consistency. As a guideline, a slice of pineapple can lose 50% of its water after five hours of immersion in the syrup. But to reach 17% water content to help you keep your crystallised pineapple well will require many long hours of drying. Moreover, dehydration that is too pronounced is not necessarily desirable. If you intend to use your fruit as flavour concentrate in pastries, you may prefer to keep it supple and to maintain a pleasant texture in the mouth.
How to keep your crystallised fruit? If your fruit has lost enough water, you can keep it in a closed box away from the light as you would do with dried fruit. You can also vacuum seal. There are special container that resist pressure. They will allow you to keep your crystallised fruit in the same state as when it comes out of the dehydrator. And again, with no oxygen you preserve the vitamins!
