[Edited 20 Jan 2568 to correct typos and add more info.]
[I coined up this Spanish-like ‘mango plato’ มะม่วงแผ่น as I feel that มะม่วนกวน is not truthful description. We ought to label our product without misleading our customers. Marketing is not about ‘selling in any which way’ (as people are doing at the moment). Marketing is also about ‘improving’ our products and our relations with customers. (In my opinion, honest marketing is the best policy.)]
We have a glut of mangoes this summer. Thousands of mangoes hanging on trees. Bats, birds, possums, kangaroos and wallabies, lizards and insects have their feed. And thousands are littering the ground. These are not high-value mangoes, and there is no local market for them. They have rusts and blemishes on outer skins because we do not spray those ‘crop protection chemicals’ (a misnomer those chemicals can kill plants and people, they protect ‘money’ before harvest). OK, let's get back to our simple story. So, we try to preserve the mangoes for other times. But our method is to focus on a natural preservation. This is our recipe.
As you can guess from the pictures, we peeled and cut 4 litres of mangoes (we only got about 50% of mango meat, and 50% are peels and seeds). Then we add 2 teaspoons of salt and 8 teaspoons of lemon juice (salt improves tastes and acts as a preservative; lemon juice enhances and preserves the colour). Then we used a stick blender (and ‘el cheapo’ kitchen appliance) to puree the mango, picking out fibers and bits of peels in the process.
We had to do this early in the morning (of a sunny day), so we used the sun to dry up the mango (the sun is a very good dryer, it heats, kills pathogens, dries and saves the world from more CO2). We made use of a trailer to make our dryer mobile and to catch the sun at various hours. We put 2 tablespoons of mango puree into each barbecue plate (4 L of mango puree need some 72 plates). We rolled the plates around to spread the puree out and put them ‘on drying deck’. We put wire racks on top of the plates to prevent them getting blown away in strong winds. On a summer day (downunder) it'd take about 7 hours of sun to dry the mango platos .
Next we peeled the mango platos off the barbecue plates and rolled each on up (dryer side on the outside) before we packed them into coffee jars, sealed the lid by putting sticky tapes on the lid's rim and the bottle, put label and date on the bottle for good practice.
Past experiences, show that the mango platos prepared in this way, keep 5 years and still look and taste nice. We have enjoyed doing mango platos for some years now. We can describe them ‘natural’, organic, no added sugar, no chemicals, energy-saving, eco-friendly, and so on. They seem to be (online) marketable for families and SMEs.
So, what do you think? Try making some for yourselves first, eh?
Notes: There are still challenges in making mango platos: the taste that you and other people like, the varieties of mangoes and/or the mix of varieties, how to avoid dust (PMs) landing on your mango plates, would banana leaves be good substitutes for (higher price) barbecue plates, can mango platos be stored in (lower cost) sealed (plastic) bags, (and if you have plan to sell them) what would be good pricing and packaging (there you would have to consider all your costs (mangoes, labour, other ingredients and utensils, costs of packaging, delivering and sales, then the profit margin,… ;-)
I would appreciate hearing feedback from you.