Fruit Leather

I made my first batch of fruit leather the other weekend and it was super easy.  Here is what I did as well as what I will do differently next time.

First, I pureed 2 pints of strawberries in order to get 2 cups of fruit puree.

Then, I poured it onto my dehydrator tray.  Since most people don't own dehydrators, I can imagine that using your oven set to the "warm" setting will do just fine.  The two main benefits of using a dehydrator is that your oven isn't on for hours and hours at a time AND any enzymes in the food that is being dried remain intact and alive.

Next, I popped that tray into the dehydrator, set the temp at 135 degrees, and forgot about it for the next four hours.  If you want to use your oven on a warm setting, just check the fruit sooner.  Perhaps at the 2 hour mark.  Since most ovens have their warm setting calibrated to 170, I would imagine that the drying process is much faster.

Once the fruit was dry, I peeled it off of the tray.  It was VERY thin, which was what I expected.  Since I wanted to roll it up, this was perfect.  However, next time I might add more fruit puree just so that it is a little thicker.  Then I can cut it into strips and get A LOT more servings out of it.  Also, I read somewhere that adding bananas to the puree will thicken it up a bit and make it chewier.

I decided to roll it up in plastic wrap to make it easy for packing as a snack.  I didn't have any plastic wrap, so I used Glad Press and Seal.  BIG MISTAKE.  That stuff is SO sticky and the fact that the fruit leather was sticky made it VERY hard to get the fruit leather off of the Press and Seal.

After all was said and done I had five roll-ups.  Since the effort was VERY minimal, I didn't mind the low output.  Next time, slicing it into strips that are thicker leather, will make a lot more.

This was a great snack to make.  The boys LOVED them and were sad when they were gone.  The dehydrator makes making something like this really easy.  The only work was in prepping and rolling.  That took maybe 20 minutes total.  Also, I would imagine that using frozen fruit for the puree would be very economical.  I thought that the concentrated flavor of the strawberry was phenomenal and pretty much blew the store bought competition out of the water.  Especially on the nutritional level.  My advice: give it a go!  If you have some frozen fruit that you haven't used in a while, thaw it up and dry it out.  The kids will love it.