The quality of my Brown Turkeys has been a mixed bag this year, with only a handful of really good figs (most have been watery and not fully flavored). I noticed today that the tiny dried fruit beetles are starting to appear, which means the end of any useable fruit from the BT for the next several weeks because once the beetles arrive in force, they turn every fig sour before they can ripen. So, I picked all the ripe figs and sliced them open to find any that were sour or moldy (about 25% were spoiled), and I put the rest into the dehydrator. The flavor seemed much better in today's batch--in fact my 18-year old son stood next to me while I worked, eating figs as fast as he could tear them open to see if they were okay.

When I was deciding which dehydrator to buy, I determined this type would best suit my needs--and then was fortunate enough to get a used one. It has 9 trays (about 15" x 15"), and for thick items, like these figs, you can remove every other tray to allow more "headroom".

Hi Ken
read this in Gustav Eisen book

beetles.

Small Coleopterous insects or beetles attack the figs in the vicinity

of Paris. These insects of two species bore the figs while they are

yet rudimentary, and cause great damage to the crop. As a remedy

damp moss is placed in the vicinity of the stems of the fig. The

beetles collect under the moss and may be removed early everj" morning.

Another remedy consists in sifting ashes over the branches in

Thanks Martin--I think this may be a different kind of beetle. These little guys don't mess with the fruit until it's starting to ripen, and then they fly right to the fig and walk in through that big open eye. I won't speculate about what they do once they get inside, but it sure ruins the fruit. The only effective remedies seem to be to move somewhere that doesn't have the beetles, or plant closed-eye varieties. I'm opting for the latter, and will probably retire the BT once my little orchard of cuttings is big enough to take over.

Excalibur is the Cadillac of food dehydrators.  The quality far outpaces any other dehydrator I've found on the market.  All of the "raw food" folks love them.  I have one myself used for jerky regularly, but have had fun drying out other things like mango, apple and strawberry.

I'm very interested to see how you like the taste after drying - is it better?  Worse?  same?

Jason--I'll let you know how they turn out. One thing's for sure; they won't taste "watery" any more!

heh

i picked some Celeste from a tree on the side of the road 2 blocks from my house about 12 days ago and posted pictures here.  i brought them to work and put them on my desk at the office (whole).  because of the lack of humidity at the office, i often dry pepper seed pods at work...i figured i would try with figs.  this is the result of the fastest moving one.  i haven't cut it open yet to make sure the insides are ok, but at the time of this photo (5 mins ago), it had the texture of a prune and is somewhere close to the firmness of a dried prune or dried raisin (a little squishy inside)

here is the original fig:  http://figs4funforum.websitetoolbox.com/post/show_single_post?pid=41063491&postcount=12

Here are figs i dried outdoors uncheese cloth and had a few left in winter time . Some with skin on and some naked.
The packaged one from store i did not like very inconsistent some hard as rock and some very bland.
Some may have seen this picture before.

Jason, as you say, you haven't seen the inside yet, but I see no reason that it shouldn't be just great if you weren't already dealing with spoilage issues. I think the main reason to cut figs before drying them is to hasten the process, but on smaller figs it shouldn't be an issue. Of course, with mine, one out of four were sour, or moldy, or both, so I had to have a look (and a sniff) inside to make sure it was worth drying--and as big as the BTs are, they would likely all have rotted if I tried to dry them whole.

Martin, a few years ago I had some commercial figs that looked similar to what you show, and I wasn't wild about them either--but when I was a kid, my dad would buy bags of dried figs from some bulk food supplier in Loma Linda, California, and they were great. I would gobble them till I could hardly waddle. The cheesecloth would be ideal if your fig harvest corresponds with dry weather--free, and no limits on the amount of figs you can fit under the "dryer"!

Whether it's under the sun or in the electric dehydrator, I think the real key to success is starting with a high quality fig, and I'm sure hoping to end up with more of those in the coming years. I'd love to get a steady supply of dried figs anywhere near as good as the ones Dad brought home.

I had to rush them a little, but as with the fresh ones, the dehydrated figs ended up a mixed bag. I'm assuming that the ones with good flavor were the ones that would have been good as fresh figs, and the others were a lost cause from the start. Some had evidently already started to sour when I put them in the dehydrator and continued a little farther in that direction before getting too dry to be really nasty--but those ones aren't worth eating. So--still looking forward to more of those dependable, closed-eye varieties, like my black mission (it's still too small to produce an excess for drying). Fresh or dried, I'm sure some of the other kinds will be a big improvement.

I figure I should report back on the one I posted above.

After about 20 days at the office, in a 67º, low-humidty office on a veneer desk, here is the end result - it actually tasted magnificent, and it was the perfect texture.  Much better than the other Celeste I picked from the tree alongside this one.

ps- i didn't use that dirty razor to cut it open before eating, i used another blade ;)