From the crush of our fig harvest sprung Necessity, invention’s mom.
The crush is real. I could probably pull three or four colanders of ripe figs from the Brown Turkey-type tree in our back yard right now, and another two or three collanders of giant yellow-green figs from the tree in front. The birds no longer curse me when I come out to harvest; they’ve already eaten their fill by that time. Good, plump figs have literally dropped into my bucket. The ground below the tree is littered with fruit. As much damage as this year’s extreme heat and drought has done to the blackberries and some of the vegetables, it would seem the figs have welcomed the extra solar energy and converted it into our mightiest crop ever.
Too mighty, almost. With a day job, I simply don’t have an extra six hours to spare for processing figs. Oh, there’ll be preserves and jam – but I’m still trying to finish the last couple of jars of preserves from last year’s harvest. We’ve given big bowls of fresh figs away, eaten big bowls of fresh figs to our individual digestive tracts’ capacities. We are adding fresh figs to our salads; they have become our appetizers.
Still, new figs appear, grow and ripen, until we feel like Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice dealing with those multiplying brooms.
Thus I thought it was time to build a solar dryer. You can can and even freeze figs whole in syrup, but they get mushy and certainly lose a lot of their figginess in the transition. However, I’d always heard that the Mission-type figs dry well, and decided to see for myself whether the same could hold true for our Brown Turkeys.
The dryer is a real marvel of technological wonder, thanks to my, um, unique carpentry skills. I searched through the garage and found two nice oak picture frames given to me decades ago, which I sacrificed for conversion. I also found a roll of unused deer netting, which I usually use to keep birds out of our fruit trees.
I screwed eight 6-inch screws into the back of one of the frames, two per side, and eight 2-inch screws at intervals into the back of the other frame. I then folded pieces of the deer netting in half and cut double-layer squares to fit over the picture frames, pulling them tight over the screws.
The frame with the 6-inch screws is the bottom drying shelf, and the other fits nicely on top, with plenty of room in between for air circulation. Then, just to be extra high-tech, I sat both frames on top of four inverted never-before-used 8-inch black plastic plant pots, hoisting the dryer off the ground and providing yet more air circulation.
To try it out, I sorted a heaping colander of brown figs, setting aside the firmest and plumpest for fresh eating, and keeping the more wrinkled in reserve for drying, since they already were part way there.
I rinsed the figs and set them on a board to dry, then cut each one in half and placed the halves skin-side down on the netting stretched across the dryer shelves.
Then I set the dryer up inside a car parked in the blazing 101-degree sun. Never, ever leave your children or pets unattended in a motor vehicle in the South Texas summer sun. But for figs, all such abuse is forgiven. It sounds wacky, but the fruit dried significantly faster in that car – just over two days – than it would have out in the open under the sun. Plus (and it was a big plus) there were no insects in the car, so I didn’t have to provide bug covers, and was able to obtain a cleaner final product.
Once dried, you still need to take steps to kill any possible contaminants on the dried fruit. They may be baked for 10 or 15 minutes in an oven, but I opted to freeze them for four days, which I think will allow them to retain vitamins and texture.
The result is a tasty, extremely sweet and long-lasting snack that, so the kitchen experts say, will last up to two years in the fridge and much longer back in the freezer.
Now if I only had about four more picture frames for a bigger dryer…
