@brennen I was thinking of playing with pickling recipes, reducing salt and adding citric or malic acid

@kara definitely seems worth a go. might help with the crispness, which is the main thing i want out of any pickle.

(i also haven't tried a fridge pickle recipe with fruit, yet, just water bath canning. i guess apples are in the category of "acidic enough that you don't have to have a pressure canner".)

@brennen did you ever try adding a dash of calcium chloride, calcium hydroxide, or alum to a pickling brine? supposedly helps to keep the pectin from losing its integrity

@kara alum yes, i think. i'm going to have to go dig out the notes on which jars are which and do some evaluation before we preserve anything this season.

oh, one other thought about dried stuff: my mom (who is the person in my life who _actually_ knows about preserving food) makes homemade fruit leather - like a Fruit Roll-Up™, but actually good.

@kara we also put a ton of apple slices through a dehydrator (one of those ones with the stacked plastic trays), and of everything we did that might actually have been my favorite. great for snacking, great for taking on hikes / camping trips, good fiber, lots of flavor, etc.

@brennen I've not much liked commercial dried apples but I bet the homemade product can easily be made better and less insipid

@kara yeah, for sure. i'm often surprised by how good home-dried stuff is.

along those lines, we got one of those vacuum sealer gadgets, and it's very worth the money.