Dried fruit compote - vitamin salvation in months, meager for fresh fruits and vegetables. Much better and tastier than vitamin pharmacy complexes. However, to get the maximum benefit, you need to know how to properly cook dried fruits so as not to get tasty and fragrant, but useless water instead of a healthy drink.
Choose the basis
Before you cook dried fruits, you will first have to buy them, unless you have a grandmother in the village who supplies you properly. Yes, and some varieties of "drying" (figs, dried apricots, prunes or raisins) at home can not be done.
What you need to consider when buying dried fruits is their appearance. First of all, pay attention to the uniformity of color: whitish spots - this is most likely mold. Oily and dull sheen indicates the processing of fruits with some preservatives for longer storage or when trying to give a more salable appearance. Humidity and darkening - about violations of storage rules. Dryness up to the condition of the “sole” is about improper production or winding. Buying and using such a product is not worth it, since cooking dried fruits in this state means not only spoiling the drink, but also risking the health of your stomach.
Multi-component compote
First of all, we stipulate that it is not necessary to cram half a pan of "drying". It should be somewhere half a glass for every liter of water. And the main thing is how to cook an uzvar from dried fruits - this is their alternate tab. The most common recipe for a good compote involves initially making syrup. For him, sugar is added to a pot of boiling water, the amount of which depends solely on your preferences. After dissolution, first put the dried apples, apricots (not dried apricots, but homemade) and pears. If they are cut into large or thick slices - chopped finer. After ten minutes, rosehips, prunes and mountain ash are poured. Then comes the raisins, and after five minutes the fire turns off, the pan is covered with a lid, and the uzvar is left to insist for about half a day.
Dried apple compote
In this case, the process is somewhat easier, since preparing dried fruit apples is somewhat simpler - you do not need to calculate the time of reunion of the remaining ingredients. Again, first syrup is made in a ratio of slightly less than half a glass of sugar per liter of water. When it completely dissolves, after boiling the water, sorted out and washed apples are poured. A third of the hour they are boiled alone, then cloves with melissa are added; after about ten minutes you can turn it off, and after cooling down - flavor with lemon zest.
Vitamin compote without cooking
The question of questions - how much to cook dried fruits - is the subject of heated debate of those who have their own opinion on this matter. Long cooking destroys many of the "usefulness" in the original products, but "long" is how many minutes? The most radical housewives are generally advised to abandon cooking. Their advice: rinse the source material well, fill it with freshly boiled water, cover the container with a lid and wrap it tightly. The next morning you get a drink with the maximum content of vitamins. Sugar, if necessary, is added no earlier than a couple of hours after pouring. And it’s better to leave this action until morning.
Compote tincture
More “docile” cooks offer a different way of cooking dried fruits. They advise to soak the washed product in warm (by no means hot) water for several hours. For example, also at night. Calculation of the ratio: two glasses of the base per two liters of water. The meaning of this method of preparation is insisting. Swollen fruits are put on fire, added with two more liters of water, after boiling, flavored with sugar, covered with a lid and a couple of minutes after boiling, removed from the stove. The lid is required, as many vitamins decompose not so much due to heating, but because of interaction with air. After you have finished cooking dried fruits, leave them to infuse for two hours - all the necessary components will go into the compote finally.
Real uzvar
To be extremely precise in terms, an uzvar is not an ordinary decoction of dried apples and pears. Its composition should include in sufficient quantities “noble” ingredients like raisins and dried apricots. Before you cook the dried fruit Uzvar, apple and pear drying should be soaked for a quarter of an hour in warm water in order to equalize the time of their cooking with that required for more “tender” components. It is these components that are sent first to boiling water; after a quarter of an hour they are joined by dried apricots with prunes, and after five minutes - raisins or dried apricots. Almost immediately, the uzvar can be removed from the fire. It is worth noting that it will become most saturated after insisting on warmth (but without heating, just in a cold room) within a few hours.
Useful and pleasant supplements
It is important not only how to cook dried fruits correctly, but also how to supplement them in order to increase the usefulness of the obtained compote. Firstly, it is not necessary to use sugar for sweetening - you can add figs, dates or dried bananas to the fruit . Secondly, it would be nice to lay a handful of rose hips to the pattern: in addition to all its undoubted useful qualities, it brings some light astringency to the drink. Thirdly, to refresh and tone, you can drop linden and mint leaves in a hot drink for a quarter of an hour. It is better to do this in a tea strainer or gauze to make it easier to extract: overexposed herbs spoil the taste of compote.