2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
Hawthorn is surprisingly tasty and incredibly healthy - it has an extremely beneficial effect on the heart and blood vessels, helps to normalize blood pressure and is even suitable for diabetics. You can harvest miraculous fruits in a variety of ways: they are frozen, dried, and also wonderful homemade preparations are made from them (tinctures with juices, as well as tender jam or fragrant jam). The most popular storage options are freezing and drying. How to freeze or dry these extraordinary bright fruits in order to get the maximum benefit from them for as long as possible?
What is important to consider?
Before you start harvesting fruits, it is important to make sure that the hawthorn bushes are absolutely healthy - there should be no rust or mold on the branches with leaves, as well as various pests or their larvae. Sepals with stalks should not be covered with cobwebs.
When to collect?
It is recommended to pick fruits in dry and warm enough weather, best of all closer to lunch - by this time all the dew has time to evaporate from the leaves and fruits. And berries intended for drying are harvested only after they are finally ripe - usually they begin to do this from mid-September until the very first frosts.
It is not at all difficult to understand whether the fruits are ripe - a ripe hawthorn will give out a rich bright red, juicy orange or a spectacular yellow color. By the way, some summer residents also harvest leaves.
Freeze hawthorn
Hawthorn fruits do not lose their beneficial properties when frozen, so many summer residents love to freeze them. Medicinal infusions, delicious compotes and teas are prepared from frozen berries, and they are also added to a wide variety of dishes, from sweet to meat.
The hawthorn should be frozen very quickly - the berries laid in plastic containers are sent to the deep-freeze chamber with a temperature of up to minus eighteen degrees. Basically, you can freeze the berries on a tray, and then transfer them to plastic bags.
There is another option for freezing hawthorn - fresh berries are chopped in a mortar with a pestle or scrolled in a meat grinder, and then the resulting puree pulp is distributed in bags or jars and frozen. It is best to freeze small portions - they store much more vitamins, as they freeze much faster. Frozen puree is usually used by analogy with dried or fresh fruit.
How to dry?
The fruits are washed with running water, blotted with excess moisture with a towel and spread the hawthorn in a thin layer on parchment or on a clean cloth. In this form, the berries are dried for several days, systematically turning them over.
If you plan to dry the hawthorn in a dryer, set the temperature in it from forty to sixty degrees. It is quite acceptable to dry it in the oven, however, the temperature in it should be rather low (in the range from thirty to forty degrees), and the door should be slightly ajar (this is necessary for the unimpeded release of moisture).
To determine if the fruits are completely dry, they are collected in a handful and squeezed. When the hands are unclenched, the finally dried berries are immediately separated, and the half-dried berries will remain glued together. Such fruits must be dried completely.
If a drying machine is not available, then the fruits are scattered in the attic or under a canopy (certainly in the open air) - drying berries need excellent ventilation. And at night, the rooms in which they are dried should be closed - they are characterized by high hygroscopicity. As soon as the fruits are dry, they are immediately freed from the stalks. By the way, dried fruits lose weight and volume almost four times! Dried hawthorn has a rather peculiar smell, and its taste has a pleasant bitterness.
Dried hawthorn is most often stored in sturdy canvas bags or small glass jars. It is allowed to store it in paper-lined and tightly closed plywood boxes. Despite the fact that the recommended shelf life for dried fruits is considered to be two years, experts assure that in fact, their beneficial properties are not lost for as long as eight years!
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