Apricot

Apricot

Homeland apricot is Tien Shan. Apricot tree usually has a height of 5-8 m, but sometimes there are trees up to 17 meters high and with a thick trunk up to 60 cm. The leaves are heart-shaped apricot, egg-shaped, rounded, but with a sharp end.

Apricot flowers are solitary, large, up to 4 cm in diameter, with white and pink petals. Fruits - odnokostyanki rounded up to 3 cm in diameter, of different colors (from white to reddish-orange, mostly yellow), fleshy. Fruit weight from 3 to '18 apricot blossoms in March and April, the fruits ripen in July - August.

Apricot - heat-loving species. It grows in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine, Moldova and the southern regions of Russia. There are many excellent varieties: Komsomolets, red-cheeked, pineapple, Farmland, etc.

Apricots are eaten fresh and dried. In the confectionery industry particularly appreciated the fruits are high in pectin, without them it is difficult to get such popular goodies like jelly, candy, jam, jelly or a delicious filling for chocolates. Apricots contain a significant amount of pectin. And many other useful substances accumulate in the sun in the fetuses. They include starch, dextrin, inulin, organic acids - malic acid, citric acid, salicylic acid and tartaric.

Contain fruit and vitamin C, provitamin A, through which apricots are recommended for general use in food in fresh and processed form. In them, a set of mineral elements like potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, iron, phosphorus, sulfur, silicon. In garden apricots contains up to 28 % of sugar, dried in - 85%.

Apricots are consumed fresh, cooked jam, jam, candy, and cook juices, wine. In addition to the apricot trees growing in gardens, there apricot trees growing in the wild, the Caucasus, where they rise to a height of 1500 m of wild apricot fruits contain up to 12% of sugar, and dried in the sun, get even sweeter because the sugar content in them increased to 56%.

During the maturation of wild apricot for the local population of Central Asia and the Caucasus comes the busy season. Harvested fruit is dried, but in addition to conventional drying apricots and they prepare as a kind of pastilles - a test that spread a thin layer of flat hot stones.

After drying, these apricot cake rolled into a tube and transported to their places of permanent storage. Sometimes, after drying fruit ground into a powder. Flooded with boiling water, this will give a nice meal apricot sweet and sour jelly. Adding flour to such apricot jelly, to give a dark fragrant dough for tortillas. Fried cakes have high calorie content and a refreshing sour taste.

Jam made ​​from wild forest of apricot, very fragrant and delicious. Most local people it boils down to the mutton fat, getting dark pellets, referred to herein as Kaurma. Kaurma has a high -calorie and easy digestibility.

Often the fruits of wild apricot scald with boiling water before drying, ensuring that eliminate bitter taste and tenderness dresseth dried apricots. In other cases the boiling water steamed dried fruit, yielding a soft fragrant mass consumed in hot or baked, the dough.

Fruit tea made ​​from wild apricot, just extremely pleasant and helpful. For this fragmented dry fruits and fry, stirring constantly resulting powder, brewed with boiling water.

Advantages of wild apricot fruit is undoubtedly higher than the fruits of the garden and speak for themselves.

Therapeutic use of apricots

* Apricot juice contains a lot of calcium and iron, so it is very useful to young children and pregnant women. 150 g of juice satisfy the daily needs of people in carotene. The juice is absorbed by the body more easily than the benefits.

* When anemia apricots, contain large amounts of iron, it is very useful. 100 g apricot fruit have an effect on the process of hematopoiesis such as 250 g fresh liver.

* Dried apricots and apricot (100-150 g per day) is very beneficial for pregnant women, children and the elderly as a nourishing, fortifying agent.

* Apricots are rich in potassium salts - the fresh fruit contains 305 mg%, and dried - up to 1717 mg%, so they are extremely useful suffering from cardiovascular disease, particularly heart failure and arrhythmias.

* Fruits are rich in phosphorus and magnesium, which are required by the body to the active work of the brain.

* For normal neuromuscular excitability need calcium, this is so much in apricots.

* Due to the high magnesium apricots quickly and permanently relieve high blood pressure. When hypertension is a season for apricots recommend eating them as much as possible.

* When gastric diseases should prepare a decoction of the apricots, it serves as an emollient in inflammation of the mucous membranes of the gastrointestinal tract.

* The juice of apricots normalizes the acidity of the stomach and acts effectively with colitis, especially if the disease is accompanied by flatulence and dysbiosis.

* In ulcers and swelling hidden apricots - excellent diuretic. Fruits contain large amounts of potassium - 11 times higher than sodium. Apricot juice is recommended to take 70-80 g 6-7 times a day between meals. Instead of fresh juice, you can use an infusion of dried apricots: Pour 100 g chopped dried apricots 1 liter of boiling water and infused for 6 hours in a warm place.

* Apricot gum (sinters protruding from natural fractures trunks and dry up in the air) is used as an astringent, enveloping, and an emulsifying agent.

* Seed kernels well act as a sedative for coughs, tracheitis, bronchitis, laryngitis.

For the preparation of medicinal mixtures should be split 20 g apricot kernel, the core of the skin clean, dry and grind into a powder. Take 3-4 times a day for 1 teaspoon of milk or tea.

WARNING!!!

• If you have diabetes, liver disease and poor thyroid function apricots are contraindicated.

• Do not eat at one time more than 20 g of nucleoli apricots.