Leftover fruit leather experiments
Our dehydrator came in the
mail Tuesday, and I barely had it out of the
box before filling it up with food. I wanted to pull overripe
bananas and last fall's applesauce out of the freezer to make room for
the produce that's starting to pour in, and also wanted to give the
dehydrator a good test run. So I mixed up four types of
experimental fruit leather:
- Apple: 2 cups of applesauce, 1 tablespoon of lemon juice, 2 tablespoons of honey
- Apple/strawberry: 0.5 cups of strawberry puree, 1 cup of applesauce, 0.75 tablespoons of lemon juice, 1.5 tablespoons of honey
- "Banana bread": 1.75 cups of mashed banana, 1 teaspoon of lemon zest
- Banana/strawberry: 0.5
cups of strawberry puree, 1 cup of mashed banana, 1 teaspoon of lemon
juice, 1 teaspoon of honey
(All measurements are
enough to make one trayful.)
Four and a half hours later,
I
was peeling the first leather off the nonstick tray inserts. My
primary objective was to make the old fruit disappear into our bellies
quickly, and I'm very happy with the experiment in that respect ---
Mark
happily nibbled on the leather without any prompting.
In terms of flavor, I
don't think any of these recipes are nearly as
good as pure strawberry or peach leather, but the apple/strawberry came
close. If I only had a few strawberries and plenty of apples, I
might be tempted to eke out of my strawberries this way to make them go
three times as far. In general, I've read that apple is a good
addition to other types of leather since it helps the consistency and
stretches the fruit without adding too much flavor.
The banana and
banana/strawberry leathers were the least appealing to
both me and Mark. Banana has such a strong flavor that it
overpowered the strawberry, and it lacks the sweet/tart combo we
enjoy. We concluded that even without adding honey, the dried
banana was just too sweet. That said, Mark hasn't turned up his
nose at any of the leathers --- I think I may have found a new, healthy
snack to have on hand.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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