How To Cut Up Mango For Dehydration and Freezing

I got a suburban FULL of ripe beautiful mangos from the food bank this past week. You can see by my last few days post, I have been running and haven't had time for sleep and haven't posted much. 

With the internet problem, with a reunion last weekend, with distributing the mangos in the suburban with the air conditioner broken, sitting lots and in and out of a hot car it sever hot weather, I am SO tired.

I ended up going on the girls camp hike today all the way to the end. I wore my Birkenstocks the entire way. They aren't made for hiking and while on the hike, I fantisized about Berkenstock merging with Ugg boots again and went as far as to imagine them merging with Nike or another big shoe maker to get the support and cork arch support in other types of shoes. Click here for a post on Birks. Here is another post about how I customize them.

I (I should say "We" finished as Princess Four was a trooper helping for days and Princess Five did what she could)  finally finished dehydrating and freezing all the mango's we had. I wanted to dehydrate a ton of them but only got the big dehydrator filled two times and the little dehydrator once. They take longer to dry than some other fruits but they are SO good dehydrated. 
 
I spent Monday distributing mangos. As you can see, I kept a ton to dry myself as I usually get carried away distributing items and sometimes forget to keep some for myself. I had the girls help me from the start as I have been so busy getting ready for camp and not feeling well with the swollen feet.

I made a video of how I cut the mango for dehydrating and how to cut it for freezing. I thought this would be a dumb thing to post but I had several people who I gave some mangoes to calling asking how to get more fruit off. 

For dehydration: Start at the outer edge cutting thin slices until you get to the pit in the center, then slice off as much as you can on the bottom of that side and top as the pit is fat in the middle which leaves lots of fruit on the top and bottom unless you curve around and cut it off. You can dehydrate all the pieces. 

Once you have the sides done, turn and do the same with the edges cutting it thin and curving the knife around the edges of the pit to get all the fruit off. I enjoy eating the smaller pieces as much as the bigger ones. 
 
To cut them up for salads or for yogurt or just to eat, start at the top center and curve your knife down the pit at the center. Do both sides and this will give you two large pieces of mango. Then I slice them once or twice length wise and then two or three across the center about the size of potatos for potato salad. I then cut the edges the same way getting two longer pieces that will chunk by cutting a few cross cuts. 

You can then cut off all the smaller pieces off the corners etc. You can either dehydrate them or freeze them in a different container for smoothies or shakes if you don't want the odd sized mango in with the square cut ones.
 

I gave the tutorials on how I cut it for use for dehydration vs freezing... We froze $150 worth of mangos this week. They are $0.88 at Walmart. What a BLESSING the food bank has been in my life!

I hope you can read this. I have fallen asleep 20 times in the past hour as I try to finish this post. The hike and heat today really took it out of me. Hope the videos give enough details. I am too tired to do much else.