Hot weather has finally arrived here in Sacramento. We’d been having an unusually cool summer up until yesterday, when the temperature in my backyard hit 101 degrees. Today should be the same, and temperatures higher than 90 should be the rule until September.

While Sacramento can be simmer in the summer — we had 114 degrees a few years ago — it is not a humid place, and most evenings we get a wind we call the Delta Breeze. This cools off the nights and moves the air around. Good for tomatoes and grapes. But the breeze also makes Sacramento a perfect place to dry food.

I do a lot of drying, and over the years I’ve settled on what works well and what doesn’t. Technically you can dry anything, but I remember those dried vegetables in the foil soup packets from my college years. Ick. In my climate I see no reason to dry veggies, with a few exceptions.

Mostly I dry herbs, fruits and mushrooms. Tomatoes are my mainstay, but it’s still June and they are not really ready yet; I’ll come back to sun-drying tomatoes in a few weeks.

What’s the big deal about drying? It’s easy, right? Put whatever it is you want to dry out in the sun and come back later. Not exactly. In reality, only a few things can be sun-dried. Sun bleaches and sun steals flavor in things that lack the acid or sugar to hold the rays at bay. Try drying oregano in the sun and you’ll be left with something closer to straw.

Most things I dry in my garage, which has several advantages: It’s hotter than hell, dark (ish), protected (for the most part) from insects and birds, and it has a ceiling fan to move air around. Not too shabby, eh?

Stop for a second. Why dry at all? To those of you who are deeply into food, the answer is obvious. But for many of you, it’s a legit question: Why bother to dry products when you can get them fresh at the store, or the farmer’s market, or even your own garden? The answer is flavor and cost.

Dried oregano, for example, has a very different flavor from fresh. Drying mushrooms concentrates their flavor, and, even when reconstituted for a stew or a sauce, are never quite the same — in a good way. Besides, you can’t make mushroom powder, a delicious element of a dry rub for meat, without dried mushrooms.

Other herbs have a season, even here in California. Lovage is a prime example. Lovage is a heady herb, tasting of celery, parsley and something bolder still. It’s a prima donna of an ingredient, but plays well with beets and beans. It is especially good in stews. But stewing season does not coincide with lovage’s whims. As an herbaceous perennial, it has died back for the winter by Thanksgiving. The solution? Dry it. I keep it fresher by vacuum sealing it in one of those special jars until winter.

Lemon verbena is another example. I have a verbena bush outside my window and it kicks out hundreds of those lovely serrated leaves that smell wonderfully lemony; incidentally, this is the smell that those bastards at Pledge stole to scent their wood polish. Now I can never, ever smell lemon verbena without feeling the urge to clean the table. Damn you Pledge, damn you! But I digress. Like lovage, lemon verbena drops its leaves right when I am thinking about verbena tea. Solution? Dry it.

Another reason for drying is cost. Spring porcini mushroms are in high season now, and the price has come down from that exorbitant $30 a pound I paid earlier this spring; I just got a bunch from Oregon for $14 a pound. It’s more than I could eat fresh, so I dried a lot of them. Why not just buy dried porcinis from the market? First, store-bought are of indeterminate age, and really old mushrooms have the texture of cardboard and the flavor of feet. And, ounce for ounce, they are more expensive than spending the money for fresh and then drying them.

Another cost issue comes in with ingredients that only live in certain places. Mushrooms fit in this category, but so are herbs such as California white sage or California bay laurel, which I just used in a wild boar salami. I am not often in Monterey, three hours away, so when I get those herbs I dry them. Saves me gas money.

One more reason to dry is if you are a gardener. I am more than a little obsessed with growing onions in all their forms, and I save seed from those that set it. Not all alliums do. But those that don’t always have bulbs that can be replanted later in the year. Shallots, potato onions and garlic are the prime examples. When you harvest, keep the small bulbs from heads that do not fully develop — sometimes you’ll get a garlic that’s one big clove, for example — and save them for fall planting.

But you need to “cure” these bulbs so they will store properly over summer. Curing is just drying, by the way. Once the outside layers and stalk are dry, you should then store the bulbs in a cool place.

For me, all this drying comes easily. I place whatever it is on a wire rack in the garage and let it dry. Mushrooms and herbs should be brittle, fruits leathery. My Mission figs are coming ripe now, and they are huge — so big I need to cut them in half to dry. Since bugs like sweet figs, I am drying these indoors. Uncut figs I dry in the sun.

But I know not everyone lives in a semi-desert. Moisture is the enemy of drying, and it makes the process trickier. When I lived in Virginia, I used a gardening shed for things like curing onions, and my oven for everything else. Oven-drying is pretty simple: Put the oven on its lowest setting and keep it ajar for air circulation. I still do this for venison jerky.

With the drying season just beginning here, I have many projects in mind. I have a Bartlett pear tree that bears more fruit then I know what to do with. I am thinking of drying them like apples in rings. Anyone ever do this?

I am also planning on drying some apricots and of course my endless fig supply. If we get a real heatwave, I may just dry some meat in the garage for machaca or carne seca. Never done this before. 

But what I am really waiting for is tomato season. Tomatoes, to my mind, are perfect for sun-drying. And of all the tomato products I am waiting to make, strattu is chief among them. Mmmm…strattu. It is a Sicilian type of tomato paste that makes store-bought seem like baby food. And the tomatoes are almost here, so it won’t be long now…

UPDATE: Looks like my friend Lang was drying porcini at the same time I was. He wrote about drying mushrooms here.