Drying Figs for a Healthy Snack

Russ' new home has a big fig tree in the back yard.  They have been ripening and he picks well over a gallon of figs every single day.  He's been sharing the wealth with us.  After freezing several gallons for making smoothies later, we began to dry a bunch of them, too.  Once dried, they are shelf-stable and can be placed in a jar or zip loc bag for snacking on. 

Here is a batch of fresh-picked figs all washed up and ready for processing.  You can see that they are ripened to a state of perfection!  They are literally bursting with sweetness.

After washing, we slice off any remaining hard stems and slice in half.  It usually works best if one person slices and the next places the figs on drying trays.

We try to place the figs on the tray to use every square inch of space.  Once dried, they'll shrink up some.

With a little help, it doesn't take long to have all the figs washed, sliced, and placed on drying trays and all ready to be dehydrated.

We pop them in the dehydrator and put them on the fruit setting and leave them drying for approximately 36 hours.  All of the water will be eliminated (or most of it, anyway), leaving nothing but concentrated sweetness and flavor of figs.

They are perfect for snacking on.  The farmer that Benjamin works for dehydrates them like this and sells them at the Farmer's Market.  He markets them as "Fig Candy." 



We place them in a jar for snacking and have two additional batches completed now, so we are filling gallon-sized zip loc bags with "fig candy."

Let's hope this satisfies my sweet tooth!

Good Neighbors Share Their Figs With You

"Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man."  - Benjamin Franklin

"All will concede that in order to have good neighbors, we must also be good neighbors. That applies in every field of human endeavor."  - Harry S. Truman

"A good neighbor shares his figs with you" - Ernest Hemingway 

Okay, I jest.  I just made that up.  Hemingway did not say that.  It seems like something that he might say, but not that I know of.  Our neighbors have three fig trees.  They had a fourth tree, but it died last year.  The other day, the neighbors asked if we'd like some figs.  "Of course," we replied.  In two shakes of a billy goat's tail, Tricia, Benjamin and I were circling the three fig trees, picking the ripest ones.

The figs were plump and sticky sweet.  We sampled a few right off the tree.  They were real good!

An interesting fact about figs is that it is an inverted flower.  The fig itself is not technically a fruit, but is a flower.  Odd.  What's not odd is what we are going to do with the figs we gathered from the neighbor's tree.  We ate a bunch of them raw and fresh.  The rest we have frozen - about two gallons of figs are now individually frozen and stored in zip loc bags in the freezer.

We'll add the sweet frozen figs, peaches and local honey to goat kefir smoothies for breakfast.  Thank God for good neighbors who share their figs with us.

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.

Making Fig "Raisins"

Last night we talked about how to know when figs are ripe and then showed you how we freeze them individually and store in gallon sized freezer bags for use later. Tonight we'll show you how we make fig raisins.  They're not really raisins, of course, but that's what I call them.  They're just really dried figs.  We dry them in our dehydrator.

After washing the fat figs and cutting the stems off, we cut them in half.

Figs on the half-shell

Then we start loading the figs in the trays in the dehydrator, face down.  They are plump and heavy.

Loading figs in the dehydrator

We load tray after tray, stacking them layer upon layer...

Finally, we have all the trays filled with fat figs and it is ready to put the top on, plug in the dehydrator and get things going.  We set the temperature to the 140 degree setting and turn it on.  The smell coming out of the hole on the top is a warm, moist, sweet fragrance.

Ready to start it up

After 12 hours I pulled the top off and checked them.  Most of the moisture is gone. To ensure that I had them dried enough, I dried them for two more hours.

Looking pretty dry

After allowing them to sit for a bit, I pulled them off of the racks of the dehydrator and loaded them up in bags for snacking on later.  I think we got four or five quart bags and we stored some in the pantry and some in the fridge.

Snack Bags

Here is a handful of chewy, fig raisins.  They are delicious.  All of the moisture is gone and what you are left with is concentrated sweetness.

Dried Figs

The flavorful dried figs are shelf stable and we'll be able to enjoy the flavor for a while, stretching out the harvest.  Fig Raisins are a great, healthy snack that we all enjoy.

Ready to pop in my mouth

I found an interesting recipe that uses dried figs and if it turns out good, I'll share it and review it in a future post.  Fig raisins, or dried figs are an all-natural that are easy to prepare and easier to eat!

Picking Figs

A good friend of mine asked if we would like to go pick figs at his house.  He has a couple of trees that were loaded with fruit and said that we were welcome to go to his house and pick them.  Our inventory of figs is very low right now.  We only have one jar of fig preserves in the pantry, so we gratefully took him up on the offer and made the short drive over to his house.

Figs are an interesting fruit, and they have been cultivated since ancient times, being prominently mentioned in the Bible from the third chapter of Genesis when Adam and Eve used fig leaves to cover their nakedness.  Figs are also mentioned in the New Testament when Jesus saw the fig tree and wanted fruit, but it had only leaves.  Jesus cursed the tree and it withered.

But alas, our friend's fig tree was not withered.  In fact as we walked to the trees, we could smell the sticky sweetness before we got there.  It was loaded with ripened figs that require picking everyday. There are a few ways to tell if a fig is ripe. Depending on the variety, the color of the fig is a good sign. When they turn from green to a reddish-brown tinge, they may be ready.  Also they will droop. You'll notice in the photo below right in the center the reddish fig has drooped over.  It is ready to pick, as opposed to the green one to its left that has not begun to droop.

The Droop!

Another telltale sign is that the ripened figs will get cracks on them.  It is hard to see in the picture below, but cracks have appeared in the skin of the fig.  I don't know for sure what causes this, but I would imagine that the expanding, softening, sugar-filled fig is just too much for the skin to contain - stretch marks on a fig.

Cracks in the fig

You can also tell from feeling the fig.  A ripened fig will be soft to the touch and will be easily pulled from the tree.  Hardly any effort at all is required to pull it off the tree. An unripened fig is hard to the touch and doesn't easily come off.  If they are ripened, you must act fast, for there are competitors in fig-picking.  Birds love them!  Below you can see damage to one ripened fig in which a bird sat in the tree and feasted on one before being chased away.  I can remember people dangling empty pie tins from fig trees to scare off the birds.  A shotgun is also very effective in this effort!

Bird Damage

We get them home and wash them up real good.  They are sticky and leaves and bugs need to be cleaned off of them.  Once they are cleaned, we cut the stems off and arrange them on a cookie sheet.

De-stemming the figs

We stack the stemmed figs in orderly fashion on the cookie sheet, like fat little soldiers.  They'll be placed into the freezer overnight, so that they are frozen solid. We don't have time right now to make preserves, bake with them, or process them further, so freezing them allows us to do that on our time frame and avoids spoilage.   

Figs ready for the Freezer

The very next day we pull them out of the freezer and use a spatula to un-stick the figs from the tray. They are frozen rock solid and because they are frozen in a single layer, they break apart easily.

We load the individually frozen figs into gallon sized freezer bags and place back into the freezer.

This process allows us to pick out exactly the amount of figs to use for recipes. Mostly, we'll grab out a handful of frozen figs and put them into a blender with some kefir, local honey, and a dash of cinnamon for a delicious breakfast smoothie.

I remember when I was young, one of my favorite books was a big book of Aesop's Fables.  It was illustrated nicely and had stories that had a good moral.  One of them, and I found it here, as I recall was about the fig tree:

THE OLIVE-TREE AND THE FIG-TREE

An Olive-tree taunted a Fig-tree with the loss of her leaves at a certain season of the year. "You," she said, "lose your leaves every autumn, and are bare till the spring: whereas I, as you see, remain green and flourishing all the year round." Soon afterwards there came a heavy fall of snow, which settled on the leaves of the Olive so that she bent and broke under the weight; but the flakes fell harmlessly through the bare branches of the Fig, which survived to bear many another crop.

That has a pretty good lesson to it.  We shouldn't boast about appearance or wealth. Anything we have is a blessing that has been given to us and can be taken away with a moment's notice.  We should be grateful for what we have.  I'm grateful for a friend that let us pick figs off of his tree!

Tomorrow we'll show you another thing we do with figs.

Drying Figs

A good friend gave us a big bag of figs he had picked off of his tree.  We always enjoy good homegrown fruit.  Figs have to be one of the most sweetest fruits in the world.  I looked around on the Internet and saw that figs are third sweetest, right after the mango and the date.  We've had fig preserves and we've eaten plenty raw and frozen, but we never tried drying them.  We decided today would be a good day to try.

Tricia washed up the figs first in a colander in the vegetable sink.

Beautiful figs all washed up

We put some in a bowl and just started snacking.  After eating a few, you instantly see why you have to fight the birds to get them first.  Our neighbor, Tony, has been patrolling his trees with his shotgun and there are random blackbird, mockingbird, and blue jay carcasses littering the landscape.

A bowl of figs for snacking

For some of them, we snip the stems off leaving the heavy sugary sweet fig for freezing.

Removing the stems

We individually freeze some and then pack them into ZipLoc bags.  Frozen whole figs put in a blender with a little honey, some goat kefir and a splash of cinnamon makes a fantastic fig smoothie that is perfect for a breakfast on the go.

Freezing some of the figs

Now for drying the rest of the figs.  Although you can dry them whole, we opted to cut them in half to have dried fig halves.  We think these are going to be a great dried fruit snack.

Cutting the figs in half

We then position the halved figs on the drying racks in the dehydrator.

Loading the dehydrator

Once we have all the trays loaded, we set it for 140 degrees and turn it on.  We aim to shoot for 12 -18 hours of drying.

All loaded up with fig halves

After the allotted time has passed, we turn off the dehydrator and allow them to cool. You can compare the picture above and below to see how much they have shrunk.

Figs have finished drying

Time to try one.  After they have cooled, the dried figs should feel like leather.  It should be dry to the touch and from a texture standpoint, they should be chewy.

Dried Fig!

The dried figs were a resounding success!  The flavor seems to be heightened, with a sweet, chewy consistency that will keep me going back to the snack drawer again and again.