I would like to take a moment to criticize something I like very much. Pinterest. It's a useful tool that has way better imagery than say ... Google images. If I want to take a look at a few examples of rustic modern pergolas, Pinterest is the place I go. If I want to get examples of really great Brooklyn-style flower arrangements - Pinterest.
What I do not go to Pinterest for are recipes. I say this as someone who has many of her own recipes and DIYs on Pinterest. My Crispy Sweet Potato Fries recipe has been pinned over a million times. Over. A. Million. That's insane. BUT I'm not a food blogger specifically so I really only publish recipes that I know are fantastic.
Food bloggers on the other hand, have the pressure to publish 3 new recipes a week. That's 156 new recipes a year. They can't all be lip smacking slam dunks, but if the pictures are pretty enough they'll make the rounds on Pinterest until they make their way into some unsuspecting cook's kitchen and eventually their garbage can. I'm not blaming food bloggers or judging them. It's their job to put up content and that's what they do.
I know I have a lot of content that isn't exactly award winning. It's the life of the blogger. The no-boast post. They happen.
All of this means that Pinterest is GREAT for images, not always so great for actual content like recipes or instructions.
So it was with much cynicism I took a Pinterest recipe I've been eyeing for a few years and made it myself. It's not even a recipe so much as a technique. Drying strawberries. According to Pinterest they taste JUST LIKE TWIZZLERS when they're dried.
C'mon.
These are the same people who claim cauliflower can be substituted for virtually anything in a recipe. Need a no carb pizza crust? Cauliflower! Mashed potato substitute? Cauliflower! Want low calorie pancakes? Cauliflower! Need chocolate syrup? USE CAULIFLOWER!
If you were to believe Pinterest, cauliflower is basically the only ingredient you need to make a 3 Michelin star meal as long as you own a food processor and really good camera.
Yet I couldn't stop thinking about the Pinterest strawberry candies.
So I did what they said. Mainly because I have so many strawberries growing right now that my thighs are looking very much like sponge cake.
I cut the tops off all my strawberries, cut the bigger strawberries in half, stuck them on a baking sheet lined with parchment and dried them in the oven for 4 hours. I flipped them after 2 hours.
In the first hour my chickens feasted on the strawberry tops, and my house smelled like strawberry jello.
Things were looking positive.
After what ended up being around 3.5 hours in the oven they seemed done. So I took a photo.
Because it had just rained, and they looked pretty and who doesn't want a Pinterest worthy recipe that could be pinned 1,000,000 times?
Also as a blogger it's my job to take before and after photos.
But were they good or gross? They were neither. They 100% did NOT taste like Twizzlers.
I can't see wanting to eat a big handful of them. For one thing a quart of strawberries got me around ½ a cup of dried berries.
That's a lot of work and time for a few big handfuls of dried berries. Also these berries aren't truly "dried". They're kind of cooked because most ovens don't go to a low enough temperature to truly dehydrate. So you couldn't make these and store them long term. For that you'd need a real dehydrator.
They'd probably be good in scones, oatmeal, pancakes or chocolate bark. But I'm not making any of those things in the immediate future. At least not until I stock up on cauliflower.
THIS is what dried strawberries look like in a real home in real life. Pinterest worthy? Nope. Worth the time and effort (even though the effort is minimal)? Probably not.
Worth it to get a post that's a little better than bad post but not quite a boast post? Absolutely.
Have a good weekend!
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How is your stove/new kitchen stuff holding up!
I show people your stove and fridge probably too much to appear sane…
Don't be ridiculous. NOT showing my stove and fridge to a multitude of people over and over again would seem insane. Not the opposite. I still just stand in my kitchen and look at them with my mouth open and eyes wide. 'Specially the fridge. ~ karen!
I use this technique every summer when I end up with an abundance of grape tomatoes. I cut them in half, sprinkle with salt and pepper and sometimes a bit of olive oil but not always. They are wonderful sprinkled on mac&cheese or a pizza. It is amazing how a big bowl of tomatoes shrinks down to a handful just like the berries did. Thanks for strawberry trial and saving me from another pintrest fail.
"Instead of mashed potatoes, mash cauliflower! They'll never know the difference!" Except that it tastes like CAULIFLOWER, not potatoes and makes everybody burp. Nope
I save the 'berries' in a cereal and berry dry cereal. The cereal tastes fine when I need a late night snack with milk. The berries taste like strawberries and look like them, but in Florida I've never opened a box and eaten one that wasn't more like leather - maybe that is what they are suppose to be. Anyway, I prefer the taste of the cereal to taste like cereal and I save the 'berries' for the grands in a plastic snack bag. When they are toddlers, they ate them, now, not so much. So I have a bag of them, about 23 tiny hog plums and wanted to make plum jelly. I've made it before when I had plenty of plums but a late frost got mine again this year. So, I cut the 'berries' into tiny pieces and cooked them with the plums and sugar - according to Pinterest the sugar was all I needed to get it to jell as long as I had some unripe hog plums in the mix. Well, the 'berries' added nothing to the taste (evidently cooking destroys the additive that was used to make them tastes like strawberries) and I now have two pints of kinda thickened plum syrup. Great on pancakes! I'm not buying berry cereal anymore, either. I also deeply admire the small, red berries you have which I know must be delicious. The humongous ones in the stores are nasty and don't even taste sweet. They seem to rot from the inside so that they can have a longer shelf life (money again) and they are not good to eat anymore.
Couldn't agree more about the instantaneous rot. I stopped buying them cause I swear I dump them out onto the counter to find any bad ones and the whole bottom has a"cotton rot?" on them so the whole thing went in the trash. Waste of money and big disappointment.
What if you coated the cut strawberries in sugar before drying? That would make them more like candy. Also put a rack under the parchment or put the parchment directly on the oven rack for better circulation. But I would use my cheapo dehydrator (under $20) that we've been using for years to dry our figs and lots of other things.