Rules of Thumb:
1cup dried apples equals roughly 1¼ cups cooked apples
1pound dried apples equals 3½ to 4 pounds rehydrated apples
Sample Dried Apple Recipes
Fox Mountain Parsnips
(From An Apple Harvest by Frank Browning and Sharon Silva; Ten Speed Press, 1999)
1 slice thick-cut lean slab bacon
12 dried apple slices
About 2 cups dry hard cider
3 parsnips, each about 8 in. long and 1-1/2 in. in diameter at the stem end, peeled, halved
crosswise, and sliced lengthwise ¼ inch thick
½ cup heavy cream
Salt
Freshly ground pepper
In a frying pan, fry the bacon over medium heat for 3 to 5 minutes, or until the fat is
rendered. Add the apple slices and 1 cup of the cider and simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes, or
until the apples begin to soften.
Add the parsnips and enough of the remaining cider just to cover them, and continue to
simmer for about 15 minutes, or until the parsnips are nearly tender. Add the cream and simmer
for 5 minutes longer, or until the parsnips are tender and the cooking liquid is reduced to a
creamy consistency. Remove the bacon and discard.
Season with salt and pepper and transfer to a warmed serving dish. Serve at once.
Serves 4
Dried-Apple Pie with Cider
(From The American Cider Book by Vrest Orton; Noonday Press, 1973)
½ pound dried apples
3 cups hard cider
Dash of grated nutmeg
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ cup maple sugar
Small pieces of butter
Pie shell and crust
Add dried apples to cider and cook until apples are soft. Mix the spices into the sugar.
Add to apples and cook 10 minutes more. Put small dabs of butter on the pie shell. Pour the
mixture into pie shell. Cover with lattice-top crust. Bake at 400 degrees F until done.
Some Historical Notes on Dried Apples
Drying is probably the original form of preserving the apple harvest and transporting fruit long
distances for trade. Wild apple country lay along the main overland East-West trade route.
Eleven charred apple rings, which appear originally to have been dried, and perhaps
threaded on a long string, were found on saucers in the grave of Queen Pu-abi at Ur, near
present-day Basra in southern Iraq. The tomb dates from 2500 BC and it is thought that the fruit
had been brought some several hundred miles from the north, where the cooler climate was
better suited to apple growing.
Dried apples of course are much lighter than fresh apples (50 pounds of fresh apples will
dry to about 7 pounds), more compact, and far less perishable.
In North America, large quantities of apples were preserved by drying, pickling, cidermaking, or
boiling them down into apple butter.
Apple slices could be strung up in the kitchen to dry, put in ovens, or simply left out in the
sunshine. In Orange County, New York, where John de Crevecoeur, the French author of a
famous series of letters on rural life had settled about 1760, every October saw neighboring
women gather together in each other’s houses to hold a ‘paring bee’ – peeling, quartering, and
coring the apples. The peels and cores were dried to make a type of fermented brew and for the
barm (yeast formed during fermentation) which would be used to leaven bread.
The following morning a stage would be erected on which to lay the apples out to dry:
“Strong crotches are planted in the ground. Poles are horizontally fixed on these, and boards laid
close together . . . When the scaffold is thus erected, the apples are thinly spread over it. They are
soon covered with all the bees and wasps and sucking flies of the neighbourhood. This accelerates the operation of drying. Now and then they are turned. At night they are covered with
blankets…. By this means we are enabled to have apple-pies and apple-dumplings almost all year round.”
Drying apples and preserve-making were a particular specialty of the Pennsylvania Dutch….
They called dried apples schnitz from the German meaning ‘cut’, and there were both sweet and
sour schnitz, depending upon the apples from which they were made. The dried apple slices were plumped up with water or cider and used in the same way as fresh apples, but also gave rise to dishes in their own right, such as Schnitz-un-gnepp, in which the slices of dried apple are cooked with a piece or pieces of ham and pork and served with dumplings. Schnitz was even used as a chewing gum and was so much a part of Pennsylvania Dutch life that it is even on the map. The story goes that a farmer upset a wagon load of dried apples in a creek; the slices swelled up in the water causing it to flood the whole valley, which is known today as Schnitz Creek. [Ed. Note: No barnyard humor here, please.]
(From Morgan and Richards, The Book of Apples; Ebury Press, 1993).
In the post-Civil War South, dried apples were an important source of hard cash for farm
families, and local merchants would buy them in small lots from rural families, for cash or credit.
When the merchants accumulated enough, they would send the dried apples by wagon to
railheads for shipping to larger cities. In 1872 the USDA noted that $300,000 to $400,000 worth
of dried apples were shipped that year from High Point, North Carolina, alone. In 1877 a total of
4 million pounds of dried fruit (mostly apples) were received in Baltimore from Virginia, North
Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. In those days dried apples netted farm families about 4.5
cents a pound, but this price rose to around 8 cents a pound by 1900. Every family had its
orchard and dry house (a small shed with a woodstove in the center). Dry houses were loosely
constructed, to allow moisture to escape from the drying fruit. Apples were also dried indoors in
front of a fireplace or strung up over a woodstove.
In 1879, 7,379,836 pounds of dried apples were exported from the US, mainly to Great Britain
and Germany, and this amount increased steadily, to 45 million pounds in 1907.
Tart apples become sweeter when dried and are better for cooking. Also, summer apples ripen at
a time when conditions are hotter, sunnier, and more suitable for drying naturally.
(From Creighton Lee Calhoun, Jr., Old Southern Apples, 2 nd ed., Chelsea Green, 2010).