From a smokehouse to a vacuum dehydrator

Abstract

The tradition of fruit dehydration in Serbia has been long and anviable. It seems that Serbian machine-building in the area of fruit processing technology has given its greatest contribution in this field. It has been one 100 years since the smoking house of Mr Stokovic, PhD was announced to be the best and the most promising plum dehydrator at the open competition organized in Topčider by the Ministry of Agriculture. It was the first real almost continual fruit dehydrator where plums were moved at certain intervals closer and closer to the source of heat. Such a concept of plum dehydration from lower to higher temperatures was held on even later in perhaps our most famous dehydrator CER. Even the smoky smell was retained but liquid fuel was used for technical purposes. For a long time, it has been a well- known fact that vacuum dehydration has many advantages. In our country there have been many attempts to make fruit dehydrator of greater capacities in which vacuum would be used. Of course, there have been many problems, both technical and technological, but today a hundred years after accepting Stojkovic’s smokehouse, it is our great honor to present to you the results of plum dehydration in a home-made vacuum condensation dehydrator. We hope that now path is widely open to high quality dehydration, and not only for that plum, but for fruit susceptible to oxidation which is the reason our food industry has not produced it so far. This is probably a farewell to the most dangerous, but for the product quality, the most necessary operation - sulphuration.

Keywords

• fruit dehydration
• dehydrators
• vacuum dehydrators