Dehydrating food and fruit leathers, anyone do it?
October 8, 2009 - 5:01pm
I dehydrated plums this year in a small food dehydrator and now I am overrun with grapes. Has anyone had success dehydrating or doing fruit leathers in an oven? My oven is pretty good and goes as low as 100 f which is about 39c. I am also interested in what to do the leathers in? glass or the new silicone crap? Or will it be ok on metal. Fruit is acidic so i think not.
Thanks in advance for the replys.
I juice the grapes first and I will make wine or pressure can the juice.
Glass, lightly oiled, or lined with oiled parchment paper.
If you can get some of the citric acid crystals used in canning fruit, or use lemon juice, though juice distorts the flavour a bit, and add it when you are pureeing the fruit.
perhaps do not juice all of the fruit, and mix some whole fruit ewith the juiced, as it could be too dry to successfully dehydrate.
My recommendation is try out a small batch first, in both your dehydrator and oven, of a juiced then purred mash, and see if it become to brittle.
In the dehydrator you could use wax paper to spread the pureed fruit over, that is what we do with out dehydrated fruit leather, it had plastic thingy to do it on, but we did not want to use it and have the plastics leech into the leather, so we tried wax paper out and it works, though now we use oiled parchment paper. As wax is also a petroleum product.
Thank you for the quick reply. I will go with the glass. brian
Your welcome, good luck and let us know.
When we dehydrate our strawberries they always tend to stick to the wax paper. Have to be very careful to peel them off right away. Do you think it would be okay to spread a drop of oil on the paper before hand?
Yep, always, as long as it is olive oil xxx. ;)
Which is why we use parchment paper and oil it, then we are leaving aside ingesting petroleum products. It is just unnecessary to use it. Its like spreading plastic on something before you grease it.
It did not dry well in the oven. No airflow so no drying. I think opening the door a little is too hard to regulate so I will probably end up buying a good dehydrator with temp control. My current one is good for small amounts and for grapes, apple slices and for herbs but It did not do great with plums.
Your welcome, good luck and let us know.
Thanks Brian, was wondering.
A good dehydrator, is a good investment.