Homemade Fruit Leather

I bought a dehydrator last year on a whim. It’s a really good big one, “Excalibur”, with square easy to clean shelves and a door that comes right off the front to make checking on food simple.

I attempted to do homemade fruit leather last year, but it didn’t work so well, the parchment paper and the leather stuck together and ripped to shreds when I tried to pull it off. Plus I wasn’t sure about the thickness so all the pieces I made were too thin. And the blender I tried to puree my fruit in couldn’t really handle apples and pears so well, so they turned out lumpy. I tried one batch of kiwifruit, plums, apples, blueberries and other berries and other odd mixtures, like banana and mango – actually that one wasn’t too bad. The best one I made was strawberry and banana. It was bright pink (unlike some of them that browned over time – actually I don’t think that’s meant to happen) and delicious, and it disapppeared within a couple of minutes of me pulling it out of the machine.

So one year on, I finally decided to have another go at making homemade fruit leather. Especially since strawberries are so cheap. I love the asian supermarket in New Lynn, they have really cheap fruit, some even better prices than the Sandringham market, my other favourite fruit and veg place. I got 2.5kgs of strawberries for just under $15. Got up this morning, blended it all with a few bananas and a couple of green apples, and spread it out on baking paper in the dehydrator. It takes 5-8 hours to dry, approximately, but the wafting strawberry smell coming out of the machine when I left was so so good.

Can’t wait to try it tonight. Yum!