Strawberry Leather Forever

If you or your parents watched a lot of infomercials in the early nineties, this will look awfully familiar to you:

My parents had a bunch of those products: the Snackmaster food dehydrator, the Jet-Stream Oven, the Bamix.... I can't really talk when I personally have spoken the words, "I would like to order a set of Miracle Blades," but you know how most of those purchases go. You use them a few times before you discover that you actually can live without them and after storing them for a decade or so you give them away, throw them away, or sell them for five bucks in a yard sale.

So it should come as no surprise that as soon as I mentioned that I was interested in purchasing a food dehydrator, both my parents and my in-laws offered me the Snackmaster collecting dust in their respective garages. With their offers I could hardly justify the $200+ price tag of the dehydrator I really wanted--the Excalibur--when my primary reason for choosing it over the Snackmaster was so that I could have square trays for fruit leather instead of those pesky donut-shaped ones.

Though I was certain that a fifteen-year-old piece of Ronco couldn't possibly be worth anything, I decided to try it out on some strawberry leather, just so I could say I tried it and insist on buying the Excalibur. And of course, it made really awesome, totally delicious, all-natural fruit leather. Shaped like a donut. Really, I was very pleasantly surprised by the result and since this dehydrator didn't cost me anything, I'm trying really hard not to let the shape bother me too much.

I really didn't mean for this post to be about the dehydrator; I really wanted to talk about what a great thing fruit leather is. It's so easy to make, it tastes great (we've also made peach leather which was good, but I liked the strawberry significantly better) and it doesn't contain all the artificial coloring and sweeteners of the Betty Crocker variety so you don't have to feel so guilty about feeding it to your kids (or eating it all yourself).

Here are some tips I picked up through internet research and through my own experimentation (and failures):

- You don't really need to add any sweeteners or anything; just puree the fruit and pour it onto your drying trays. That said, I followed this "recipe" for strawberry leather and I think it turned out pretty well:
2 cups pureed strawberries + 2 tablespoons honey + 1 tablespoon lemon juice

- If you do decide to sweeten your fruit, do it with honey or corn syrup, as sugar can sometimes crystallize in storage.

- After you've prepared your puree, all you have to do is pour it onto your dehydrator trays. You can either cover the regular trays with plastic wrap or use these nifty fruit roll sheets. Then just dry it until it's no longer sticky and it peels away easily. In the Snackmaster, this can take anywhere from about 6 to 9 hours.

- If you don't have a food dehydrator and don't want to buy one (though you could probably find a real cheap one at a thrift store) you can dry fruit leather in the sun on baking sheets lined with plastic wrap. Just make sure you cover them with cheesecloth or nylon netting to keep bugs out of the leather but without touching it. Pick a day when the sun is hot and the humidity low and allow 1 to 2 days to dry.

- When you pour your fruit puree onto whatever drying tray you're using, make sure you spread it to an even thickness!!! This is very important. If you don't, some areas will be brittle when some are still gooey and you will end up throwing it in the garbage or letting your kids scrape it off and lick it off their fingers. Seriously, do the best you can to get it nice and even and about 1/4" thick like this:


- I found that in the Snackmaster 2200 (I'm not sure if other Snackmaster models have different diameters) it took about 1-1/2 cups of puree for it to come out just right.

That's all I got. What fruit leathers have you tried?