A Couple of Ways We Put Up Figs

A good friend of ours has some fig trees and he picked a big 5 gallon bucket of figs for us and dropped them off at the house.  Wow!  What a blessing!  We ate a few raw, but we can't eat 5 gallons of figs.  So we have to figure out a way to preserve the harvest so that we can enjoy figs all throughout the year.  We do this in a couple of ways.  First thing we do is wash the figs.  They were very clean to start with, so this didn't take long.

Fresh Figs

We then take a sharp knife and, one by one, cut the stems off of the figs.  Once they are de-stemmed, we arrange them whole on baking sheets and trays.

We pop them into the deep freeze and leave them in there for a day or two.

When they are fully frozen, we take them out and use a spatula to scrape the frozen figs off of the trays and put them into gallon-sized freezer bags and place the bags full of figs back into the freezer. This way we can pull out frozen figs individually for making healthy and delicious breakfast smoothies.

The other thing we like to do is dry them.  Instead of drying them whole, we use a sharp knife to slice them in half.  Then we arrange them onto the dehydrator trays with the sliced side facing down.

We put them on the fruit setting on the dehydrator and turn it on, allowing them to dry for a day and a half.  Then we turn it off, remove the top and find that they have reduced a lot in size as you can tell by comparing the picture above and the one below.  Lots of moisture has been removed, leaving the sweet flavor packed in.

We sometimes have to pry the dried figs off of the trays as they tend to stick.

Here is an up-close picture of the dried figs.  These dried figs are great for snacking.

We'll put a bunch of these in zip loc bags that we put in our snack drawer and fridge and then put some in sealed quart jars that we'll store in our pantry.

Saved for later

Figs are a delicious snack and we always enjoy eating them.  Frozen and dried figs are two ways that we stretch them out to last until next summer.