Re: Mystery Tree?
- Subject: Re: Mystery Tree?
- From: Tony and Moira Ryan t*@xtra.co.nz
- Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 19:33:37 +1200
Vavourakis wrote:
>
> Dear Tony,
> Correct! The spiral buds and unfurling blossoms check out, as well as the
> description in Botanica (my source spells it Cydonia which threw me off a bit.) I
> would love the recipe for the fruit leather, too!
Dear Karen,
Ah! Good! Moira and I both thought your description fitted /our/ quince
trees perfectly. I apologise about the name! Botanica does have it
correctly as Cydonia but somehow I copied it as Sidonia! Silly me!!! (I
suppose you probably /say/ it with a hard C do you? The English
pronunciation is to use a soft C - like an S.
As for the fruit leather, do you have a dehydrator? I don't know how you
would manage without one, although I suppose it /should/ be possible to
air-dry them in a hot sunny climate.
What we do is to peel and quarter the fruit, remove the core from each
quarter (the core is surrounded by some pretty strong "stone cells" such
as occur in pears, but MUCH more stone-like than the ones in pears!
We fill a casserole with chunks of fruit (usually cutting the quarters
across the middle) and cook these - with a /tiny/ dash of water - in the
microwave until soft - they do not go "mushy" like apples, they will
hold their shape, but do become soft. Our m/wave has "auto" settings,
and we do these fruits as "root vegetables" which comes out perfect.
The result is mashed - or better still, chopped up to mush in a blender
- and spread thinly on the trays of the dehydrator. Depending on the
size of the trays in your dehydrator, ours takes 1.5 cups of the mash to
fill a tray which is 32cms in diameter with a 50mm hole in the centre. A
little arithmetic should allow you to scale this to any other size of
tray, round or square! Our dryer suggests a heat setting of "Medium" (or
55°C if your machine has a setting by actual temp) for "12-14 hours".
When dry enough, the "leather" should feel quite dry to the touch and
not at all "tacky". When dry enough, you roll up the leather while it is
still warm and pliable and store them in glass jars with an air-tight
lid. We cut ours in two, so that they are short enough to fit into jars
that we buy with pasta sauces in!
The first time we did it, we felt the result would probably need a
little sweetening, and we added a couple of spoons of sugar to each
batch before drying, but we have come to the conclusion that it does not
need this, and have not added any to recent batches.
Tony
--
Tony & Moira Ryan,
Wainuiomata, North Island, NZ. Pictures of our garden at:-
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/cherie1/Garden/TonyandMoira/index.htm
