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Dessert

Dried Apples or Pears

This dish dries apples or pears by layering them on straw and baking them in a cool oven.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Dried Apples or Pears

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Lay clean straw on a baking wire with short feet.

  2. Place the fruit on the straw, then add another layer of straw on top.

Dry the fruit

  1. Set the baking wire in a cool oven for 4 to 5 hours.

  2. Gently press the fruit with your hand to flatten without breaking the skins.

  3. Return the fruit to the cool oven and repeat the process 3 to 4 times over 2 to 3 days.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Large baking pears or norfolk biffins apples
Provides the fruit that dries down into a chewy, concentrated, sweet texture.

The step that matters

Gently press the fruit without breaking the skins. Pressing flattens the fruit so it dries evenly, but broken skins let moisture escape unevenly and can invite spoilage during the long drying period.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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