Making Dried Bananas using a Dehydrator

100 bananas ripening at once

This post describes how to make dried bananas using a dehydrator at home. I have previously posted about my success (finally) growing lady finger bananas at home. Up until now the bananas have ripened gradually (sometimes with some help by putting some in a paper bag with an apple) but recently I was faced with the challenge of having literally a hundred bananas all ripening at once! My freezer wasn’t going to be able to cope with all these bananas, although I did freeze one big bag of bananas for smoothies, banana cakes etc and another couple of bags of slices for making banana icecream.

So I decided to try drying some bananas in my dehydrator as they would make nice healthy snacks. I’ve learnt that what we usually refer to as bunches are actually ‘hands’ – the whole lot together are the bunch.

Bananas – I used a couple of hands of lady finger bananas but you can adjust depending on what you have and also the capacity of your dehydrator

Lemon juice – I used 2 lemons. You need enough to coat the banana slices so they don’t brown.

Put the lemon juice in a bowl. Then peel and slice the bananas and toss them in lemon juice as you go. How you slice them is up to you but aim for about 0.5cm thickness. I experimented with long diagonal slices and rounds.