How to Dehydrate Citrus: Limes, Lemons, Oranges, Grapefruit and more! Drying citrus for the pantry!

how gorgeous is this it's like nature's stained glass windows want to create these yourself follow along so are you blessed with an abundance of citrus whether it's oranges lemons limes kumquats uh whatever whatever they might be even grapefruit but you cannot use them up quickly enough and you're not a canner how about dehydrating it makes the most beautiful specimens of art for uh food art that there is and so i want to show you how to do this yourself okay so i'm going to be soaking all of these citrus pieces with about 50 vinegar and 50 water using just a little bit of vinegar isn't really going to help you so why make sure i do a lot because we're going to be using the entire fruit when we do this i'm going to go ahead and do it this way for my family what you do for your family is your choice okay i'm going to bring over here we're going to talk a little bit about how i am going to cut these today now typically somebody might use a knife to try to cut them with but i find a very sharp bread knife that has these serrated edges to it if you can see those that worked better for me than using a plain knife there's something about it being able to break through the fiber of those of the skin on the citrus works better of course you can also use a mandolin we're going to work with that today it's a little it's a struggle for some people so i just prefer to go ahead and use a knife knowing i may not get the perfect 1 16 inch slice on every piece that i do but i'm happy with how it comes out for the most part and just because before you ever use a mandolin please use a good safety glove on your hands so that you do not cut yourself don't want to tell you how many times i've seen somebody come into the group or even here on youtube and say show me how they cut their finger up because i didn't use one of these kind of gloves this is the kind you should use not the cloth of course i'll leave a link down below if you need one but any kind of good cutting glove is what you need to use all right so let's talk about pith zest pith flesh okay so the zest is great if you want to um if you want to just take a microplaner or any kind of small zester zest off the zest there you go and just let it air dry a lot of people do like add this to as an essence to icing or into a cake batter or something to to flavor it up like quick breads it works really well that way or add in teas the pith however this white part is really very very bitter so when you have a piece of fruit like this that is a very thick pith when you slice this and dry it if you try to eat the whole piece you may find that it's really still very bitter but what i found is if let's pretend like this is your dried piece dry the whole thing and then just peel away the part of the pith use it however you want compost it whatever and then you'll still have this little dried piece that's good to eat if you don't like the way the pith flavors if you don't know what a blood orange is can you see that the the it's the juice is much more red than a regular orange this is what they can look like inside and that's perfectly normal now what am i going to do with all these ends in pieces i'm actually what i'm going to end up doing is take all of them out that i have just the the peelings left i'll make sure to remove any of the flesh and just have the peelings and i'm going to make a citrus cleaner which is basically just throwing this all these parts with the flesh into a jar filling up that jar with vinegar letting it letting it steep for about two weeks in the dark and then use that as an orange cleaner that i mixed in with some water as a cleaner in my kitchen and in my bathrooms so here i just want you to see that it was easy enough to use a good knife to cut this because you're still going to get if you take your time you're going to get some fairly uniform slices doing it with my knife but there we go there is your lime now i got these gigantic lemons from the grocery store um from pickup i didn't get to do these myself and it's like holy cow these are huge for us they're pretty pretty big but i am afraid that they're going to be more pith than they are actual lemon go ahead and slice another one of these through for you so you can see it gets a little better as you get into it but there you go but i'm going to use the mandolin it's just a little faster for me and there we go some really pretty lemon slices now something you might be able to use instead of a mandolin is if you happen to have a a meat slicer especially if it's electric use it it's perfect for doing citrus the last one we have here is a grapefruit it's a small grapefruit which i tend to come on let's find some fruit it's going to be really pithy it's not grapefruit season we've kind of passed that but because it's so large i am not going to run it through the mandolin this one's going to have a little bit thicker slices but i'm really okay with that it just means it just takes a little bit longer to dry this is not the best grapefruit of course that's what happens but that's okay you're still going to see the end result of how you can do it and how it works for you get one more good slice out of this before alright there we go okay the next step is to put your fruit onto your trays this part is ultimately up to you with what you want to do you can depending on your tray put it straight onto your tray or you can put on a tray mat any kind of mesh screen that goes on your machine on your trays will work to help help stop sticking you're going to want to flip these through during the time just because it's going to be helpful at the end not to have them stick so much but you can use a screen you can also use a piece of parchment or baking paper for those of you down under on in the southern hemisphere parchment paper will work just as well what so i'm going to start loading these guys up i do my grapefruit first it doesn't need i'm not going to use that one i'm going to use this one one tip that i forgot to talk about while i was cutting these is that it's really helpful if you can taste your fruit before you actually put it on your trays if it tastes bad going on it's probably going to taste bad coming off because drying these only accentuates the flavor so while you may get an increase in sweetness and as the sugars compact in this smaller piece the bitterness will also increase because if the fruit was bitter starting with now you know we're talking grapefruit here it's going to be kind of bitter anyway but you understand what i mean about a bitter a bitter orange versus a really sweet orange that's the difference i'm talking about a piece of fruit that's not ripe or is overly ripe and has lost its flavor those those flavors are just going to increase as it dries so make sure that you like this first before you dry it now let's do some limes i'm just going to put these straight on because i'm that way sorry about the cat she's just begging to get into my son's room he she hears him in there so that's what's happening all right so there we go there's our lime and just to make it pretty we're going to spread these out just a little bit because i have enough trays to do everything maybe what i'll do is actually do it this way here we go three across does it really matter darcy it does not but there we go all right there are our lines now i'm not one who's going to do enough citrus to last me an entire i'll have to do this once or twice through the year because i'm not going to use them quickly enough and i want to make sure that i don't have them stored for too long and they start going bad all right there is our large blood orange maybe what i'll do is do we have space to stick the little ones in here let's do that how about this putting some of the small ones in just like this all right there we go blood oranges how you like them oranges next let's do some regular oranges so there's our oranges and our lemons now i don't know if you can see this but there are still seeds within my lemon i did not deseed these first i'm just gonna let it dry and then i can pop those seeds out when i'm ready i'm going to do this there are our lemons what we're going to do is these go in at 1 25 or lower okay you heard me right 125 or lower we'll get to that in just a second let me go load it up all right here we go we're putting these in at temperature of 125 or lower and for the time honestly the time i'm just going to let it run because it's going to take between 18 to 24 or more hours depending on your local weather your machine how thick you cut your slices how moisture absorbing how much moisture they have on the inside there are so many variables to this you're just going to have a window of about 18 to 24 up to 36 hours for most citrus what you don't want to happen is to let these dry too hot or they'll turn brown hold on okay i have some that i dry purposely a little too hot so that you could see what happens to them this there is no way to make sure that this never happens no matter what temperature that you have but this tends to happen when your fruit sugars brown the hotter that you dry your fruit so in order to try to help stop this you won't you don't want to use the 135 degrees fahrenheit or the 57 degrees celsius or 60 however your machine is you want to drop the temperature down some and what happens is that it allows this to dry before it allows the sugars to brown and these aren't burned i mean they're not like if you put them in the oven and burn them it's just the way the sugars react to heat so these are still good to eat they're still going to put your teas they're still good to use but if you want to save the brownie effect put it in at 125 or lower i mean i know a lot of people who do these for display will do them really low just know that the lower you drop the temperature the longer it's going to take for these to finish dehydrating okay so i'll see you in about 24 hours okay officially these have been in my dehydrator for 48 hours however part of this time was done at a low temperature overnight so that they could dry without getting brown without me seeing them and because we've had so much rain the last few days the humidity in the house was higher so these were taking longer to dry so normally you probably won't take two days to do this but because i was trying to manage when they were drying and when i could check on them i kept the overnight temperatures at the lowest it could go and then let them dry during the day and then knowing yesterday with just so much rain i was just introducing more moisture into it taking longer so here we go these are what they look like after 48 hours dry during the day at about 125 and overnight at 95. these are super dry now you can see this particular lemon did brown up a little bit but that's okay i you know i'm not worried about it but for the most part these have kept their color they've kept their shapes they have not gotten overly dark for what they're supposed to because remember these are blood oranges and they're going to be darker my lemons have mostly stayed the further back by the fan they were or the closer the fan they were the the browner they got but still i should have rotated these trays probably once yesterday to help that but still the color on this is just amazing compared to what it might have been like had i dried at 135 for a day and a half okay so now we're ready for testing right so we have our slices what we want to do is take one slice let it come to a complete cool this was the super thick slice we don't want to do that one all right because when i'm touching this one i'm still feeling a lot of pillowing here that i think it might not be ready to go yet but that was a super thick slice compared to everything else so i'm going to take this slice and i'm going to let it come to room temperature completely i don't want to test it now because it may still have some softness in some of these pillows here because they're warm and they're they're expanded so we'll let it cool off and then we're going to give it a test and i'll show you at the end what this is like now while we're waiting for that lemon slice to cool off i'm going to give you a couple tips on doing some other things with citrus that you want now if you're wanting to just dehydrate the zest you want to zest a lot of your fruit before you dry the insides but you want to keep that zest you can take a microplaner which is something like this where you can have little tiny pieces of zest that are like little shavings i wouldn't suggest drying these in a dehydrator because they're going to blow all over the place you can just put them in a bowl cover them with something and allow them to dry on their own now i should have put a piece of plastic over this is what i usually do to help try to clean this up but you can see all these little pieces of just pure orange zest that left out will dry on its own and you can store it you also can take any peeler that you have and just go through and just peel the top part of that zest it has zest strips if this is what you'd like that's another way to have it happen you can take a grater any kind of box grater that you would normally grate cheese or anything like that you can also take the zest off that way the thing you want to be careful of is not getting too far in to get the pith on your zest because the pith is the part that is tremendously bitter so those are some ways you can do that also and sorry going through these this last batch of oranges that i was going to do are actually a little over ripe so i was having trouble peeling them so you're going to see this some people actually like to dehydrate the segments by themselves so what you can do is like i said earlier is slice your the slices then just take off the rind and just eat the insides when it's dry or you can do the segments like they are but what i suggest is before you dry these you need to take care of this membrane which is this this piece over here that kind of holds it all together so if you're doing this you can just go through and put some slices in the membrane just like this because what you're going to do is open up that membrane to allow moisture to escape to make this dry more efficiently you can also go through here and just remove the membrane by hand if you don't have too many to do that's an excellent way to do it just it's it's a little time consuming and a little nitpicky but you can remove that membrane just like that and you have a segment that's completely open and it will dry there's another way to do this which i don't have any at the moment it's a pectic enzyme it's p e c t i tic enzyme that what you do is you soak these in a solution of the enzyme in water and it will eat away that membrane so that all you're left with is just this segment sort of like the way that the canned mandarin oranges come those segments have been soaked in pectin enzymes to remove that membrane so you can do that as well and then you just dehydrate this segment just like you would do anything else at 135 to 125 depending on if that's where you want to have it or even lower and just let it dry you can also cut this segment in half if you want if you've got a really good knife it's going to it's going to create a little bit of a moisture for you when you're cutting but you can go to even smaller ones if you like to have a thinner piece to dry a little faster and this will reduce a lot and become like a little tiny piece of fruit compared to this but it may be what you want to do because you don't want to have it so thick you want to dry faster so those are some other ways to dry your citrus whichever ones you choose to use you can use these ways to help you get the part that you want to do now let's say if you have this you've taken all the zest off of it you want and you're ready to dehydrate just go ahead without the zest on it and what you're going to have is just a slice with just the pith around the edge instead of any of the zest it still will work the same way you can still dehydrate this just as if you were doing it whole just have one with only the pith on the outside all right are you ready to test our slices that we dehydrated look how gorgeous that is we have lemons wait lemons oranges blood oranges more oranges lime grapefruit and big blood oranges those are so pretty but let's test shall we so here's a lime we're going to test the lemon sorry lemon test crack it clear totally dry perfect crisp for this now for storage first off folks tell me what we do next all of each comment down below what is the next step so make sure they're not sticking to each other to make sure that they're not sticking into the sides of the jars we were looking at conditioning this food for a week before we put it for storage now storage can be in any airtight container that will fit your product closely enough in volume that you don't have a ton of space and it's really helpful especially for citrus that you don't have this huge jar with only a small amount of citrus in it so let's get to storing some citrus but you can use any airtight container that you need to make any of these things fit it doesn't have to be just a regular canning jar so that one's not gonna work either there's a little too big so i'm gonna go with this and i'm gonna put as many of my smaller pieces in here as i can and i'm going to store them up so i've got all of my food in a jar this is where i'm going to store it yeah there's some space in there that's okay i can either just repack it or whatever it's fine what i'm going to also do if i want is stick a moisture absorber on the inside to help with moisture in the food so that we don't have to worry about excess moisture and it will help take care of whatever might be in the jar as we store airtight lid for that it's all we have to do there you go what you don't want to do is leave this out for too long because these slices will go bad we'll start to regain moisture pretty quickly so get them bagged up as soon as they have been allowed to come to air temperature don't put them in a jar before they have come to room temperature because you need to make sure that they they don't use any of the condensation that happens when you put something warm inside of a closed space so here we go there are those we will put on our jar lid and we are ready to go so i hope you enjoy that it's a really quick method of preserving your oranges or lemons or limes or any kind of citrus that you have it doesn't take long to get ready it just takes a little while to go ahead and dry now how do you use these let's say you want to put some in your tea you can use it to flavor any kind of drink that you have tea hot tea works really well because the warmth of the water will help release some of that flavor but you can put it in cold water you can put it in cold tea and it gives an essence of that flavor into your teas you can put them into chicken when you're going to roast it instead of doing fresh if you don't happen to have fresh at the moment you can make a bed of them when you're putting fish chicken or anything like that down you can put them on top of fish when you're cooking it you can add them to a cocktail as garnish or even just as a way to help create more flavor into your garnish there are so many ways to use dried citrus you can also powder it to even add more flavor to things like breads and icings and things like that i'm going to drop a couple links down below in the description box and up here in the icards on ways that you can use a citrus powder and on ways that you can use fruit powder and the fruit powder suggestions will cover a lot of things that you could probably use your citrus on as well so you can get tons of ideas from that so make sure you check that description box below for that information again thank you for stopping by i hope this was helpful please ask any questions that you have in the comments and i will see you again next time happy dehydrating

Channel: The Purposeful Pantry

Views: 6,571

Rating: 4.9748425 out of 5

Keywords: the purposeful pantry, dehydrating citrus, drying citrus, drying lemons, drying oranges, drying grapefruit, drying fruit, drying limes, dehydrating fruit, dehydrating lemons, dehydraitng limes, dehydrating grapefruit, dehydrating ornages, dehydrating blood oranges, dehydrating tips, cosori dehydrator, dehydrating orange slices, how to dehydrate lemons, how to get the longest shelf life of citrus, dehydrated lemons

Id: PhOeJZeWEZQ

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021