I have always been a big fan of Annie’s Fruit Leathers as a snack and part of my motivation in buying a Dehydrator was so that I could make my own fruit leathers from all the fruit I will one day have growing in my garden. I was given a bag of apples and had some blackberries in the freezer so thought I’d try out the method.
My dehydrator came supplied with one fruit leather tray and I purchased another set of 3 – I had to ask for these to be ordered in for me.
Recipe
Peel apples and cook with blackberries until tender and then puree in a blender to a spoonable consistency (not too runny). I was happy to leave the blackberry seeds, but you may wish to strain these out.
Spread the pureed fruit over fruit leather trays to a thickness of about 5mm using a spatula. I followed the instructions that actually said to spread it to a thickness of 0.5mm!! – this was virtually impossible but given the difficulty I’d had in previous attempts to get anything to dry I decided that I would go with very thin to start with even though it seemed a bit odd.
Put the fruit leather trays over the main trays in the dehydrator and according to the instructions: dry on Setting 2 for 5-7 hours or until pliable and without any soft or sticky patches on top or underneath. I used Setting 3 and it took about 14 hours to dry. Because I had spread the puree very thinly the resulting ‘leather’ was more like a shiny brittle sheet that certainly didn’t roll nicely into the rolls I was expecting to have – but it was very tasty.
Leave a Reply