Brielle's Avalon

Last week my roommate brought home apricots because they were on sale. I love apricots but we just couldn’t eat them fast enough! They were good just nomming out of hand, in cereal and even in salads. About 1/2 of them ended up going out to the chickens as they, one by one, got bad spots. *Heavy sigh* Well, today at the store there was a basket of apricots calling to me! I put it in my basket and continued shopping. At checkout I noticed 2 of them were pretty weepy but it was the last basket so the cashier gave me a discount (yay!). I brought them home, ran through all my chores, made dinner and finally got around to prepping the apricots for drying. At least they won’t all go weepy now and I love dried apricots.

Find the cleavage.

Cut longitudinally around the pit.

Bend the apricot open and finish cutting it in 2.

Pop out the pit.

If an apricot has a blemish just cut it out.

Squeeze a lemon into a small bowl and dip the cut parts in the lemon juice.

Arrange the apricot halves on a screen or something open but not so open that they fall through when they dry and shrink.

Put in the oven and turn it on to 170 degrees for about an hour, then turn it off and let them dry overnight. Check on them in the morning.

I’d heard that apricot pits could be used like bitter almonds. I’m not overly fond of almonds and don’t expect to really like bitter almonds but I figured I’d save the pits and see how hard it is to get to the kernel later when I have time. Now I have to catch up with the doings in Discworld. *stretch, yawn…*

When I checked them in the morning I realized that I’d forgotten to turn off the oven! The ones in the back were drier around the edges than I liked and a couple had fallen through the grates but they were dry and not horribly discoloured. Even the more dry ones were good to eat, kind of like apricot chips.

Good to try for breakfast and, when they cool, good to put away in a container to use in baking and general cooking. I’ll play with the seed kernels after work.

A week later and I haven’t played with the pits but I did get more apricots.

This time I put them on a spatter screen

and cut out the slightly tough small areas where the stem was

and the small bit of matrix that was almost imperceptible before they dried but was also a little chewier after they dried. I only turned the oven on to 170 for an hour before leaving them all night. We’ll see how they do this time.

There were 6 apricots left over so 2 of them went into our salads tonight. They’re good in cereal, too, and parfaits and fruit salads and compotes. Anything you’d use peaches in you can use apricots.

First thing in the morning, after feeding the chickens, I checked on the apricots. They weren’t dried yet so I turned the oven back on to 170

and turned the screen around so the ones that are more dry are at the front. The oven is hotter at the back. I’ll check on them again when I come back from the gym in about an hour.

After I got back from the gym and errands they were still soft and somewhat juicy, I’m thinking still prime for mold so I took them out while I baked the quiche and brownies. I put them over the burner that gets hot while the oven’s on until everything was out, then put them back in the oven while it cooled. When I checked on them some were still a bit sticky and not leathery enough, so still likely to mold so back they go into the oven overnight. Any sticky parts will mold, so netter safe than sorry, don’t want to lose a whole batch because one or 2 go technicolor fuzzy.

Finally dry with no sticky spots.

I put them away in a sandwich container. Happy snacking and cooking and stuff in general.

7/1/24 Update

I had heard that apricot kernels could be a nice stand-in for almonds, if used occasionally, so I thought I’d see how hard it was to get at them. First I pulled out my nutcracker. Here’s another of my occasional ‘you should have one of these’ advisories. Don’t have a nutcracker!? You need to get one! If you can’t find one right now (it’s summer), wait for fall and holiday season, they’re all over for the nut bowls people want to display for company. Nutcrackers usually come with nut pics and both are useful beyond cracking nuts and digging nutmeat out of shells. You could also use a hammer (since anything worth doing is worth over-doing) but then you risk crushing not only the shell but also the kernel.

Then I tried cracking them. Some worked this way.

If it doesn’t work one way, try another. This way had a more explosive distribution of shell fragments.

Either way, I’m not overly fond of almonds so it was a fun diversion but I’ll skip this step next time and save myself the concern of extra micro-doses of cyanide. Apparently they’re assumed to be fine for healthy people in small doses. I prefer hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans and cashews.