HOW TO DRY LEMON FOR HOME DECOR

Now it is very popular to decorate a room using only environmentally friendly materials.

Dried citrus fruits, including lemons, may well serve as such decoration material.

We learn how to dry them properly, what ways for this are invented.

Selection of suitable lemons

Before you proceed directly to the process, you need to understand what lemons are suitable for this. The fruit must be firm and ripe. It is necessary to carefully examine the skin, so that there are no flaws on it. The shape of the fruit should be correct, without humps and bulges. Small fruits will not do. They usually have a very thin skin that can burst when cut. Also in them there is a lot of juice, from it they will dry longer.

Like lemon, citrus fruits include kumquat, calamondin, orange, mandarin, citron.

The lemon that is most suitable should be of medium size, with a thick skin and a dry middle. When cutting it should not pour juice. But such fruits are usually very large, and they are hard to find on sale.

Important! If a lemon has a good skin color, but it is soft, you should not take it. Perhaps the process of rotting the flesh has already begun inside. It will be bitter in taste and with an unpleasant smell.

Therefore, the usual beautiful, ripe fruit is also suitable. If you meet lemon lemon-orange color, you can safely take. Get a great mix.

Citrus preparation

Before drying, the fruit must be prepared. The first thing they need to wash and allow to dry. Next, citrus wide cut with a knife. The thickness of the cut depends on what you want to get in the end.

If you cut it very thin, then when drying a slice can break and bend. If the slices are thick, they will dry much longer, and after drying, they may not have a very aesthetic look with a concave center.

The optimal thickness of the lobules should be no less than 5 mm, and no more than 1.5 cm. In this case, you can use the golden mean. You can try to dry and a whole lemon. To do this, its skin vertically incised strips up to a centimeter wide.

Did you know? In order to prepare a liter of essential oil, you need the skin of three thousand lemons.

When the slices are ready, they need to remove excess moisture. This can be done with napkins or towels. The flesh of each circle is squeezed by fingers and juice is gently squeezed. At the same time it is necessary not to damage the integrity of the walls, otherwise the finished product will have an unattractive presentation.

Drying methods

There are several ways to dry citrus. Therefore, before you dry the lemon for decoration, you need to understand how quickly you need to do it.

The quickest way to do this is in the oven or electric drier; drying in a natural way will take longer. Therefore, we consider in more detail each of them.

You will also be interested to learn about the drying of apples, plums, currants, pears, apricots, dill, butter, greens, rosehips, garlic, spinach, walnuts, hawthorn, pumpkin seeds, mushrooms, raspberries and blueberries, cherries, oranges, oyster mushrooms, Thyme

In the oven

In the oven, the fruit can be dried the fastest. The process itself will require a baking sheet or grill, parchment paper or foil.

Before you dry the lemon for the decor in the oven, you need to determine the number of slices that will be needed.

Those who have done this before are advised to put in the oven only one pan with the product. But, if desired, you can place the baking sheet and the grid.

Wash the baking tray well. It should not be left with other products that can later give the lemon unpleasant odors. Then completely dry it or wipe. It should not be water residue. The baking sheet is covered with parchment or foil, this is done so that no slices stick to it.
Both with a baking sheet, and separately, it is possible to use a lattice. According to experts, the process is faster there. It is also cleared of dirt and covered with parchment paper.
Lemon slices are stacked on a baking sheet or wire rack in the order you like. The main condition - they should not touch each other.
The oven is heated to 50 ° C and a baking tray is placed there. It should be located in the middle of the device. You can put up to two trays, but this is not recommended.
The temperature of the oven can be from 60 ° C to 180 ° C. At low temperatures, the lemon seems to wither, the shape of the slices will be unchanged, but the process will be very slow in time. At high temperatures, it is likely that the slices will burn, may be bent, but it will take much less time.
The drying time in the oven, depending on its type, the selected temperature and the width of a slice, can be from 2 to 8 hours.
While drying, lemon circles should be turned over periodically. This will allow them to dry at the same time and will not let them burn.
It can only be removed when the pulp and skin is completely dry. If during drying all moisture doesn’t go away, the decor items may later become moldy.

In the electric dryer

Now it is very popular to decorate a room using only environmentally friendly materials.

Dried citrus fruits, including lemons, may well serve as such decoration material.

We learn how to dry them properly, what ways for this are invented.

If you have an electric dryer for vegetables and fruits, it is quite suitable for drying lemon.

The prepared circles, namely without excess moisture, are placed on its grids. In this case, the number of grids does not matter, since the process proceeds evenly due to air circulation.
It is important that the lobules do not touch each other.
After that, according to the instruction manual of the device, the appropriate mode is selected and the process of making decor from lemon begins. Depending on the drying capacity, the lemons are dried after 6-8 hours.

Behind the battery

Drying citrus for decoration in the battery is the most cost-effective way. There is an economy of gas and electricity, and the fruit dries naturally. Better if you have old batteries, not modern radiators.

Important! If you have forgotten or insufficiently removed excess moisture from the slices, they can become moldy.

In them, the process will go faster and with better quality, and the slices can be prepared more.

For drying, you will need two pieces of corrugated cardboard. In size, they should be such that they fit between its sections, namely, about 30 cm in length and a third smaller in width.
In pieces with any tool you need to make a lot of through holes at a distance of one from one to a centimeter. Air will circulate through them.
Next on one sheet stacked slices of citrus and tightly covered with another. It is necessary that the lemon was tightly pressed to the cardboard from both sides, so the sheets can be fastened with clips or reeled up with a rope. Slices inside should not "fidget".
After that, the "lemon sandwich" is placed between the battery compartments. If they are narrow, it is possible to dry the bundle and at the top, but at the same time it must be turned over periodically. Depending on the temperature of the radiators and the humidity of the air, drying the lemon for decoration in the battery lasts from three days to a week.

Useful tips

The process of drying lemon for decoration is quite simple, but some useful tips will not be superfluous.

In order lemons do not lose color when drying, they need to be held in water with the addition of their own juice.
To quickly remove excess liquid from the lobules, they can be folded one by one and gently squeezed from all sides.
If, when drying in a battery, lemons are stuck to the cardboard, in order to separate them you need to take something thin, for example, a paper-cutting knife.
If during the drying in the battery it is warm, not hot, the slices may become moldy.
To speed up the drying process in the oven, its door should be ajar.
If the baking sheet every two hours out of the oven and let the slices cool completely, they dry out faster.
To save gas or electricity, you can use a combined method of drying lemons: first dry them a little in the battery, and then dry them in the oven.
You can dry citrus in aerogrill. Those who used this device for drying say that the slices dry there in an hour at a temperature of 100 ° C.

Drying lemon for decoration is quite simple. You can use any method you like. In the process of drying the house will be saturated with a pleasant and healthy citrus scent.

Did you know? Lemon tree bears fruit all year round and produces more than six hundred fruits.

Dried slices can be simply laid out around the house, can be put in a vase together with other decorative objects, or original compositions can be made.