Mushroom pickers, going to the forest, do not think about what they will do with two buckets of selected boletus, boletuses with boletus. Collected agaric mushrooms, saffron mushrooms, chanterelles, mushrooms and honey mushrooms will go to salting - everything is clear with them. But tubular mushrooms will require drying, and not just drying, but a skilled approach, a thoughtful leisurely implementation of the whole process, the result of which will be several kilograms of high-quality dried mushrooms. To do this, you need a mushroom dryer - a fairly simple device.
Of course, few people at home will find equipment for
drying mushrooms by the method of sublimation, and besides, this technique is far from perfect and does not give a smelling, wonderful in its natural elasticity mushroom. Sublimated mushrooms are hard, hard, brittle and, of course, tasteless. The same is obtained using factory-made mushroom dryers. Shops are littered with all kinds of "Squirrels", "Dry winds", "Miracles" and "Breezes." The price of these sophisticated devices is 2-4 thousand rubles, and the mushrooms from them are such that it is just right to throw them away and go back into the forest. It's all about the haste of the "Squirrels" and "Wonders", which are equipped with powerful heaters. The passport loudly announces: "our mushroom dryer will dry your mushrooms in a few minutes." Drying speed is an undeniable advantage, but mushrooms and berries do not tolerate quick drying, they shrink, hide from the heat and eventually die. Therefore, mushrooms should be dried by the old-fashioned method, when mushrooms with berries were laid out on a wide Russian stove and dried there for two weeks and one day. Or a dryer for mushrooms and berries should be based on natural drying in the sun and under the breeze.
But not everyone has a
Russian stove ; now there are more and more gas stoves in summer cottages. And so, you need to make such a device that will be your faithful assistant year after year in the drying of mushrooms collected in the forest. For effective, uniform drying, four rules must be observed. Mushrooms are cut into pieces-cubes measuring 2.5 by 2.5 centimeters. Sliced mushrooms are laid out in an even layer so that the pieces do not climb on top of each other. A mushroom dryer, the design of which we will discuss later, should be located under the wall of the house, on the side where the breeze always blows. You need to install the dryer at a height of 80 cm from the ground, under a high canopy. And the last one is a gauze curtain that will cover the mushrooms from flies.
The mushroom dryer is quite simple, you can do it yourself. You will need two skeins of fishing line 0.8 mm, four
wooden bars with a cross section of 40 mm, a length of 1200 mm, as well as four bars 50 mm thick, 800 mm long. In addition, you need to stock up on 30 mm galvanized stainless nails for tensioning the fishing line and 110 mm nails for connecting horizontal bars to vertical posts. Along the entire length of horizontal bars, we carefully drive in cloves in such a way that the hat does not reach the wood by 10 mm, and there is a distance of 15 mm between the cloves. After the straight rows of columns stand on all four bars, you can connect the bars to the uprights. We put the end of the bar (with carnations up) to the rack, at a distance of 80 cm from the edge, and drive in several long nails. So do the rest of the bars. The result should be a square frame on the legs.
A do-it-yourself mushroom dryer will work out well if, at the next stage of manufacture, the fishing line is correctly pulled between two opposite sides of the frame - so that parallel rows of stretched fishing line are obtained. Then we pull the fishing line between the other sides of the frame. You can at the same time pass the end of the fishing line through the perpendicular rows, "one through one." In this case, weave. But you can pull over the existing rows. Then it remains to set the finished drying under the wall of the house, fill it with chopped mushrooms and cover them with a gauze curtain. The whole structure will be blown by the breeze, warmed up by the sun and in a few days you will receive magnificent dried mushrooms.