Instructions

1. Dip the dates in a strainer into boiling water until the skins blister, then drop them straight into iced water until they are cold. A date skin is waxy and close to waterproof, and this is what cracks it — skip it and the fruit dries from the cut face only, which on a whole date means barely at all.
2. Drain, halve, pit, and then chop the halves into pieces about the size of a pea. Wet dates fight a knife — oiled kitchen scissors are faster and give more even pieces, and even pieces are the whole point of cutting first.
3. Spread the pieces one layer deep and shake the tray level rather than pressing them down. Pressed pieces fuse into a sheet, and a sheet is the thing this recipe exists to avoid.
4. Dehydrate at 52 °C for 10 hours, breaking the pieces apart with a fork at the halfway point. They will have started to stick to each other by then; separated once, they stay loose for the rest of the run.
5. They are ready when a cooled piece is firm and separate — squeeze a handful and it should fall apart rather than hold together as a clump.
6. Toss the cold pieces with a spoonful of rice flour or oat flour if you are storing them loose. It sits on the cut faces and stops the sugar welding them back together in the jar.
7. Airtight and cool, about a year. Chopped keeps less well than halved despite being drier, because every cut face is exposed sugar, so check the jar at a month before trusting it with the rest.