These past several days, a couple of my boys have been motivated to make fruit leather and dried fruit. Since we got the dehydrator, dehydrating has been the hobby of my oldest son, but this week, my 9.5 year old got involved as well. He was feeling like doing something one afternoon, and asked if I would mind if he dehydrated apple slices.
Mind?!? No, not at all. I love when my kids do the work and think that I’m such a nice mother for letting them do it. It’s a good strategy, don’t you think? 🙂 I actually needed bananas dried more than apples, but he wanted to do apples, so I agreed. These apples are such an amazing snack when they’re dried (they’re the Honey Crisps I told you about before) – they become apple chips, with a very concentrated flavor.
He also did a few trays of banana chips at the same time – they come out with a leathery consistency. Also very tasty, but hard to compete with the apple chips.
My ds15 is the fruit leather expert around here. This week I had about a case of bananas that I bought a couple of weeks ago that was getting very ripe. We discovered the first time he made fruit leather that bananas are an important ingredient. It adds a thickness to the texture, and a natural sweetness that goes well with other flavors. I suppose you could use other things, too, but when he made plain plum fruit leathers, the consistency wasn’t smooth and they cracked. So to use up the bananas before they went bad, he made plain banana, banana-orange, and banana-orange-apple fruit leathers. He’s found a nice way to package them – he puts them between two pieces of parchment paper, cuts them into equal size pieces with a scissor, and then stacks them together before bagging them.
Last night I asked him if he would be able to whip up another batch before he went to sleep, so we could get the last of the bananas out of the way before Shabbos (they need about 15 hours to dehydrate, so we turn the dehydrator on before we got to sleep). Even though it was late and he was planning to go to bed, he agreed – he’s such a good kid. He knows that he could say no to something like this. There are times I tell my kids to do things, and I expect it done without complaints or argument, but then there are times that I ask them, and that means that a yes or no is equally fine. He whizzed up a bunch of bananas and some apple in the food processor, so it was pretty quick, especially for him since he’s got the process down. We didn’t have this processor when he made the first batches a few weeks ago, so this definitely makes the mashing and preparing process faster and simpler.
Oh – to do this, we spread the fruit mixture on special paraflex sheets that we purchased when we bought the dehydrator. I think you could probably fit pieces of parchment paper over the regular dehydrator rack and it would work fine, but I haven’t tried it so I can’t vouch for how comparable the results are to the paraflex sheets.
Avivah
