Semi-dried Vegetables

[helenjp]

I got hold of a Japanese book on cooking with "lightly dried" vegetables. I've only started to explore this area, but as temperatures drop, and we have sunny but cool and breezy days, nothing could be more topical, so here goes!

The idea is that you dry vegetables for 2-4 hours (or for a few days for more thoroughly dried products) before cooking. That translates into:

* hanging turnip greens upside down from a coathanger

* slicing or quartering mushrooms and scattering them on a tray

* not-too-thin slices of carrot, turnip, green or red peppers etc on a tray

* potatoes or apples etc soaked briefly in water to shed excess starch, cubed or quartered and laid on a tray

* Hearting greens halved or quartered, laid cut side up in the sun.

Cooking...in most cases, food was prepared as normal - the results were just a little different. For example, you can brush semi-dried potatoes with oil and roast them, or you can stirfry turnips and greens, add funghi to rice or toss it in an oily marinade with some pasta. Since there is less moisture to shed, these vegetables tend to cook faster.

The texture is not over chewy or crunchy, but has none of the sliminess that a bad stirfry can produce. The flavor of the turnips and greens was incredibly more apparent - more aromatic, sweeter, slightly peppery. Also, curiously enough, the greens remained a nice color. I swished the tufts of greenery under the tap after drying them, just to wash off any dirt, and this caused them to rehydrate quite considerably. However, they didn't behave like "raw" vegetables...they obviously had not regained all their moisture.

Semi-dried vegetables can also be dropped straight into a marinade to rehydrate. Again, the texture avoids any hint of sliminess, and the ability of the vegetables to absorb flavor is of course enhanced. They are not as aggressively chewy as fully dried vegetables.

Flavor...I was anticipating changes in flavor, as I knew that drying herbs "pyrolizes" certain flavor compounds, and I think this is the biggest single point of interest in making semi-dried vegetables - they retain a lot of fresh flavor, but with an added layer of new and interesting flavors and aromas.

There was a fad a couple of years back for drying enoki mushrooms and adding them to rice or pasta, as their flavor is dramatically enhanced by drying.

Some people have tried drying vegetables by a sunny window over the day (when out of the house), but in this case, it might be worth having an electric fan or dehumidifier running nearby.

OK then...see your local greengrocer and dry happy!

[Darienne]

I googled 'pyrolize vegetables' and got your morning post. Could you please explain a bit what this means.

Thanks.

[helenjp]

Hi Darienne, just racing to get 3 hours sleep before the day starts again...I think I probably meant that some of the chemical changes that happen in drying mimic pyrolysis (the more extreme heat of cooking/fire).

When I first found that out about herbs, I suddenly understood why certain items are dried in the sun rather than the shade....to encourage the development of certain flavor compounds (I suppose the ones that depend on thermal change rather than simple water loss).

As you can tell, I don't know enough about it...I wish I knew more about what happens chemically when a plant is dried. I know that I was expecting vegetables to start tasting like EITHER almost fresh OR almost dried...some mushrooms did seem that way, but turnips and their greens definitely had an in-between identity that was quite unexpected.