We’ve been posting Georgina’s memories on our Friday posts and the last few have been about food preparation. (You can read them here and here.) It made me think about some of the times I have had a bunch of fruit to prepare to preserve. This post is about getting a lot of pears ready to dehydrate.

Cousin Chuck gave us several pounds of pears, and I wanted to dry them (Thanks, Chuck!). We set up an assembly line to get them ready.

Step one was peeling them. Walt did that over the sink. We put a paper plate in the sink and them just dumped the scraps in the trash when we were done.

Working on the peels.

Once he peeled them, I cut them in half and laid it cut side down on a cutting board. I sliced each half into about 1/4 inch slices. To remove the core, Walt had the bright idea of using the center of my donut cutter. It worked great! I was able to simple cut out the core from several slices at a time, much faster than using a paring knife.

I have a donut cutter that lets me separate the center ring from the outer ring, like this one (no affiliation, not even sure what brand mine is). Probably a melon baller would be even faster, as you could do that before you sliced the pears, but I don’t have one.

The center of the donut cutter quickly cut the core out of the slices.

Time to Dehydrate

I dropped the cut slices in some lemon juice (to reduce browning) before arranging them on the drying rack. I dried them for several hours until they were leathery. We stored them in the freezer and used them as snacks.

You can also make any easy dessert while backpacking with dried fruit like this. Add the fruit and some cinnamon sugar to hot water and let it stand until the fruit is mostly rehydrated. Top with granola and you have a quick fruit crumble. We have done this with the pears and with peaches we dried.