Composition / ingredients
Step-by-step cooking
Step 1:
To make a pastille at home, we need only two ingredients: apricots and sugar. You can make it without sugar at all, but it will be sour. Honey can be used instead of sugar.
Step 2:
Apricots should be washed well, sorted, selecting spoiled and unripe fruits. Then remove the bone by breaking it into halves. It's fast and not difficult at all.
Step 3:
Then the fruits should be crushed. You can use a meat grinder, you can use a blender. It will turn out like this puree.
Step 4:
You may miss this step, but I advise you to do it. Grind the resulting puree through a sieve. It will take some time, but it will save your future pastille from hard inclusions of cake.
Step 5:
Add sugar or honey. Mix well. At the same stage, you can add chopped nuts or any other additives that you want.
Step 6:
The baking sheet or other dishes in which you plan to dry the pastille are lined with oiled parchment. Pour out the puree, level it with a spatula, the layer should be tried to make thin and uniform so that the pastille dries the same. If you have a silicone mat, you can use it instead of parchment.
Step 7:
Next, you need to put the pastille in the oven to dry, at a temperature of 60 degrees with the door ajar. It took me three times three hours of time. I dried it intermittently, only in the evening. It may take you less time. Focus on readiness by appearance, the pastille will become glossy and firm to the touch.
Step 8:
Cut the finished pastille into strips, I did it right with scissors, separate it from the paper and roll it up with tubes. You can leave it in a layer, it's a matter of taste. Such a live pastille should be stored in a closed glass container, preferably in a cold place.
I prepared a "live" pastille, that is, the fruits were not subjected to any heat treatment. You can also make a pastille from boiled mashed potatoes. Such a pastille has a longer shelf life. To do this, apricots are first boiled, and only then crushed into puree. This can be done in a saucepan on the stove, in a slow cooker or in the oven, where apricots are baked until soft. The resulting puree will need to be boiled to a thick state and then dried in any way.
Drying methods are also different. If you live in a hot climate, you can dry it directly in the sun by putting baking trays with pastilles outside under a canopy. You can dry it, like me, in the oven. You can use a special dryer.
Caloric content of the products possible in the composition of the dish
- Granulated sugar - 398 kcal/100g
- Sugar - 398 kcal/100g
- Apricots - 46 kcal/100g
- Canned apricots - 50 kcal/100g