Drying figs without a dehydrator

This is the thing we are asked about most, so here it is in full. It is not complicated and it does not need any equipment you cannot make in an afternoon. What it needs is August in a hot dry climate, which is the part that does not travel.

Picking at the right point

A fig for drying should be riper than a fig you would put in a bowl. The neck bends so the fruit hangs down rather than sticking out, the skin has gone dull rather than shiny, and there is often a bead of syrup at the eye. On a Pingo de Mel the skin goes from green to a yellowish green and softens noticeably.

Pick in the early morning while the fruit is cool. A fig picked at four in the afternoon at 36 degrees is already halfway to fermenting by the time it reaches the tray. Take the stalk with a twist rather than pulling it out, and put them in a shallow crate one or two layers deep. Deeper than that and the ones at the bottom are pulp.

Wear long sleeves. Fig latex irritates skin and in strong sunlight it causes a burn like reaction that can blister properly. This is a real problem, not a theoretical one, and we say the same thing to everyone who comes on the fig afternoon.

The trays

Wooden frames with a mesh base so air moves underneath, which matters more than anything else about the tray. Ours are about 60 by 90 centimetres, made from batten with plastic garden mesh stapled across. Over the top goes fly mesh on a simple frame, held a few centimetres clear of the fruit. Wasps in August are not a minor nuisance, they are the main reason a batch fails.

The trays go on trestles, not on the ground. Air under the tray is the whole point and a tray on a wall or on paving dries the bottom of every fig much more slowly than the top.

Splitting, and why

We split most figs from the eye down to about three quarters of the way through, and open them out flat with the cut side up. Whole figs dry too, and it is the traditional way for some varieties, but they take twice as long and the middle can spoil while the skin looks fine. A split fig dries evenly, you can see what is happening inside it, and it dries in three days instead of six.

Cut side up in the morning. Some people turn them halfway through and we do not bother. What we do bother with is spacing: figs should not touch each other. A tray that is too full is a tray that dries unevenly.

The three to five days

Out in full sun after the dew has burned off, in by evening before it falls again. Bringing them in at night is not optional. Dew rehydrates the surface, and a fig that goes damp overnight for three nights running will grow mould on day four.

In a good week here, 34 degrees and single figure humidity, split figs are done in three days. In a duller or more humid week it can be five. They are ready when the flesh is tacky rather than wet, the skin is leathery, and you can squeeze one without juice coming out. If you squeeze it and it stays squashed rather than springing back a little, it needs another day.

The step people skip

When the figs come off the trays they go into a sealed container for a week, shaken every day or two. Some figs will be drier than others no matter how carefully you laid them out, and this week lets the moisture equalise across the batch. Skip it and the wetter ones will spoil the box two months later.

If you see condensation on the inside of the container during that week, they were not dry enough. Back on the trays for a day.

What goes wrong

Wasps. They will find a tray within an hour of it going out and they will keep coming back. Mesh over the top, held clear of the fruit, is the only thing that works.
Rain. A wet day mid batch is recoverable if you bring the trays in and get them back out quickly. Two wet days is usually a lost batch, and you will smell the fermentation before you see anything.
Overdrying. It is easy to leave them a day too long and end up with something hard. They are still edible and they are fine chopped into a stew, but they are not what you wanted.
Underdrying, which is worse, because it does not show for weeks and then the whole box goes.
Ants, if the trestle legs are touching anything. Stand the legs in shallow dishes of water and the problem disappears.

The white bloom

After a few weeks in storage, dried figs often develop a fine white powder on the surface. That is sugar coming out of the fruit and crystallising. It is harmless, it rubs off between your fingers, and it tastes sweet. Mould looks different: it is fuzzy, it sits in patches rather than evenly, and it smells. When in doubt, smell it, because your nose is better at this than your eyes.

Storage

Sealed container, cool and dark, and they will do twelve months. In a warm kitchen they sweat and go sticky, which is not dangerous but shortens their life. We do not vacuum pack and we do not use sulphur, which is why ours are brown rather than the golden colour you get in a supermarket packet.

Why we do not use a dehydrator

Because August here does the job for nothing. Six weeks of 34 degree days and dry air is exactly a dehydrator, at a scale we could not afford to buy and running on sunlight. In a damp climate a dehydrator is the sensible answer and there is nothing wrong with it. Here it would be an expensive way of doing what the weather is already doing outside the window.