Fruit

Strawberries

Six to eight hours at 60°C, and the result is intense in a way the fresh fruit is not.

What it does in fast-moving hot air

A strawberry is around ninety per cent water in a very soft structure, so the mass loss during dehydrating is enormous and the slices shrink to a fraction of their size. What is left behind is concentrated sugar and acid, which is why dried strawberry tastes so much stronger than fresh. The low temperature matters more here than for most fruit: the colour pigments break down with heat, and a strawberry dried too hot goes brown instead of red.

Why the cut matters

Strawberries dehydrate well and are one of the few fruits where the dried version is arguably better than the fresh one. The published figure is the same 60°C and six-to-eight-hour window as the rest of the fruit chart.

Cooking pages

Dried strawberries — Six to eight hours at 60°C, halved or in 1.25cm slices.

There is deliberately no cooking time on this page. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. That is what the pages above are for.