Dry it out!

Last week I posted on Instagram about how I was attempting to make dried fruit. I’ve been wanting to try to do this for quite some time, but always felt a bit unprepared. I googled instructions again and found that most of them had you turn your oven down to 200* or so. There’s no time like the present!

The kids and I were heading out for that road trip and I knew I needed some relatively clean snacks for in the car, so dried fruit it was. I had both apples and strawberries on hand and decided to give it a while. Of course I didn’t have an apple corer to make those fancy round slices that you can find in stores, so I just cut the apples into wedges the way you normally would, just made them thinner. I did the same with the strawberries.

I laid all of the fruit out on cooling rocks over cookie sheets lined with foil, I had no idea how messy this would get and didn’t want to be scrubbing baked on dried fruit juice.

I sprinkled the apples with a touch of cinnamon and in the oven it all went. I kept checking the oven, opening the door and making sure the temperature wasn’t too high {we keep a thermometer IN the oven, because I do not trust the little dial on the stove}. After about 3 hours, everything looked dry and slightly leathery, the way dried fruit usually looks.

I let everything sit for a few minutes, then gingerly peeled all of them off the cooling racks and in a container.

They were so good. What I did learn though is that my fruit didn’t have to be sliced so thin, and would’ve been a bit better if it hadn’t. I think a good 1/3” thick slices for the apples and just halving the berries would have been sufficient.

As for the kids, they loved the strawberries, but weren’t so crazy about the apples. The strawberries were super sweet, but the apples were a little tough to chew, because they were so thin they got a bit over-done, and I hadn’t peeled them. I have since ordered an apple corer from amazon.com and hopefully I’ll be able to dry some of the abundance of apples we have on our trees.

Easy peasy! The kids were able to have fruit without making a huge mess in the car and I was a happy Mama!