Fruit business is cut and dried
It would be safe to suppose Tim Steele is the only person in history who started out in rocket science and ended up in dried fruit. It seems an odd career path, to say the least, but there is a logic to it.
After emigrating from Britain in 1989 to take up a job as a rocket scientist in Adelaide, Steele was waylaid by other pursuits, among them building mass spectrometers and developing semiconductor devices with photovoltaic properties. As you do. The latter sparked his interest in renewable energy, and from there it was just a baby step to solar thermal technology which, as Steele explains, was "technology with good performance on paper but few working profitable applications".
That was his aha moment - and it is how Steele came to invent the Logisolar D76, the first commercial solar fruit dryer to combine solar heating with a heat pump for food drying, among other pioneering features designed to produce dried fruit without sulphur, sugar or other additives or preservatives.
Tim Steele makes dried fruit with his solar dryer at his home in Mt Pleasant in the Adelaide Hills. Picture: Kelly Barnes Source: The Australian
We are sitting in the front room of Steele's modest brick home and workplace in the Adelaide Hills town of Mount Pleasant, and Steele is explaining the tricky science behind the dryer's combination design. His delivery is rapid-fire, so I soon get lost in all the technical jargon. Or maybe I'm just too distracted by the uncomplicated goodness of what's in front of us - the finished product, packets of vivid mango, strawberry, pineapple, apple, apricot and kiwi.
Funny how science can, in the right hands, give nature a leg-up. The colour and taste of the fruit are extraordinarily intense. In appearance, texture and flavour, Steele's "press-free" dried fruit bears little resemblance to either conventional dried fruit or the standard sulphur-free product, due in part to a much lower moisture content. It tastes like sunshine, solidified.
Steele stepped back from his old job in 2003 to start research on the concept. "I was much richer then. Since I started losing money it's become a lot harder," he says cheerfully. Like many mavericks, Steele shows an enviable disregard for the notion of financial security. Invention, not investment, is the thing.
There was considerable innovation involved in the design, so it wasn't until 2006 that Steele started selling the product, first to farmers markets, then to health stores and other retail outlets across Australia. He also hires and sells the mobile dryers to farmers, does contract drying and undertakes emergency fruit rescue on behalf of growers facing the loss of crops destined for rejection by the supermarkets.
There are two dryers in the galvanised iron shed in Steele's backyard. On the way to see them we drop by a room that was once the laundry and is now a makeshift production line with steel bench, gutter and slicer. In the kitchen, a young Asian WWOOFer (a "willing worker on organic farms") is making soup for lunch.
The dryers have mirrors that focus sunshine on to panels, thus producing hot air that runs through the machine and dries the fruit. The whole process takes a day. The most crucial aspect is this drying speed, says Steele, fiddling with the dials that control humidity. Faster drying results in a better-tasting, better-looking product than traditional sun-drying, which Steele believes damages fruit in the same way it damages skin.
He claims various nutritional benefits for additive-free dried fruit, saying sun-drying with sulphur harms enzymes and vitamins, and that natural fruit sugars are digested more easily than refined sugar, though "I cannot scientifically prove that".
The superior, dry texture of Steele's "naturals", as he refers to them, is a happy side-effect of necessity: in the absence of sulphur, the fruit must have a moisture content low enough to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria.
In his commitment to minimal intervention, green production methods and abhorrence of sulphur, Steele's work echoes that of the natural wine movement. The price of purity for him, too, is a big investment of time and skill. It took him five years to achieve the desired russet colour for his dried apricots, a tricky fruit that when treated conventionally requires more sulphur than any other. Then, in 2011-12, rain hit the apricots at the wrong time, the grower lost all his crop and Steele lost half his annual income.
But things are looking up for the inventor, scientist and engineer. His production has doubled every year for the past three years and last year, for the first time, the business realised a small profit. His whole stock of dried tomatoes, virtually written off as a costly experiment - "there is huge shrinkage, you need 4kg of tomatoes to produce 200g of dried product" - found a buyer unfazed by the high price. And in the past few months, mail order sales have spiked.
Steele says he's bemused by this turnaround.
"All my marketing research pointed to this sulphur-free dried fruit as being a great growth sector, but I still find the situation surprising: when you do all the right things on paper then in real life the outcome follows expectation," he says. He was never in it for the money, and it shows, in rather endearing fashion. I don't need to ask him whether he misses rocket science.
"Scientists are just clever engineers and I'm not as clever as I used to be, so I'm more of an engineer these days," he says, munching on a piece of kiwi fruit.
CHECK IT OUT
LOGISOLAR DRIED FRUITS: Available at Barossa Farmers Market; Mount Pleasant Farmers Market; Wilsons Organics, Adelaide; and at www.pres-free.com.au
Further information on mobile dryers at www.pres-free.com.au
