A reader responded to my last post about the perennial prepper garden with this comment:
"Morning!
Thank you for today's post. Don't forget, when you have both a dehydrator and an over abundance of fruit, you can make fruit leather.
Have a great day,David"
What an awesome idea! It might be especially good for hard-to-dehydrate fruits like raspberries. Don't get me wrong, it's not hard to actually dehydrate raspberries but I haven't had success with rehydrating them and using them. They have turned into hard little balls that stayed somewhat hard and chewy when I re-hydrated/reconstituted them.
But fruit leather might be an excellent way to dehydrate raspberries and other fruits. I'm going to get right on that over the weekend, and expand this post to include directions and pictures for making fruit leather, for those who have never done it, or who just want to see how I do it. I only have one fruit leather tray so I often use wax paper to line my dehydrator trays to make more at a time.
Please drop back by this post after the weekend and see what I've added.
UPDATE: The raspberry fruit leather is delicious. It took three days for it to dry in my oven with just the pilot light for heat, but it came out great. It's tasty and it's a beautiful red color.
I decided to make a small batch for the trial, so I used 2 cups of raspberries, half a cup of sugar, and a quarter cup of water. I heated them in a pan and simmered them until they thickened a little.
Then I lined a cake pan with parchment paper and poured the raspberry goo into the pan
I put it on the bottom shelf of our oven. Our oven uses propane and has a pilot light, which
keeps the oven around 95 degrees. I put the pan on the bottom shelf so that it was closer
to the heat from the pilot light.
It took three days before the top wasn't sticky any more, so I carefully peeled it up from
the parchment paper. The underside was still sticky but there was no
sign of mold, which was a concern since the raspberry goo was at
a low-ish temperature for so many days.
I put it on a dryer screen with the sticky side up to finish drying it.
I'm sure this would have dried faster in an electric dehydrator. If you don't have fruit leather trays for your dehydrator racks you can use parchment paper or wax paper to line your racks/trays.
The taste of the raspberry fruit leather is mouth-wateringly flavorful!
Please leave comments and questions below, or email them to me at:
Susan
Try using apple sauce as a sweetener. Especially home made. i have found that adding sugar can leave fruit leather sticky, as does adding anything w/ High fructose corn syrup. Bannanas or grape juce are also good sweeteners.
ReplyDeleteMark
Can you expand on that a bit? What would I do, just add apple sauce to the raspberries? How much would you add, using a figure of 2 cups raspberries, or 4 cups or ???
DeleteSame with bananas or grape juice, how would you use them with something like raspberries?
I know there are a lot of fruits that can be made into 'leather', it's just that I'm deal with an abundance of red raspberries right now.
Thanks for the ideas!
Susan
I usually throw the fruit in a blender and only add enough liquid to make it pourable. Maybe a cup of apple sauce to 4 cups of fruit. Taste it to see if it is sweet enough. One large, very ripe banana to 2-3 cups of fruit is about right. I use grape juice to replace the liquid if needed. I have used bananas with black berries and blue berries as above and found that I did not need to add any liquid to it. Personal choice is to use just fruit and not to add anything but a little vitamin c powder to fruits that brown. Try different recipies a small batch at a time for taste. Hope this helps.
DeleteMark
Thank you for elaborating on that. It's helpful to know these things.
DeleteSusan
Hi Susan I make my own raspberry tea by drying the leaves and berries then once dried I crush the leaves grind the berries mix together and you will have the best tasting raspberry tea ever! Most raspberry teas in stores are just the leaves very bland! You could also use the dried berry in a trail mix, muffins, yogurt and so on! I love my rasberrys!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Myra! That's an awesome idea! I never thought about putting dried raspberries in with the raspberry leaves to make a more tasty tea. I've dried the leaves before tea, but you're right, they're bland. Thanks for the idea!
DeleteSusan