My Leather Fetish

[dcarch]

Mangos, ---- pineapples, strawberries, cantaloupes, peaches ---everything is in season, soon you will be overwhelmed with tomatoes.

Yes! Make leather!

Let me share with you my way of making fruit leather.

1. From a craft store you can buy ¼” x ¼” wood sticks.
   
2. Miter the corners and glue into a wood frame.
   
3. Using Scotch Tape to stretch supermarket veggie plastic bags on the frame.
   
4. Use your blender to make fruit puree. Pour fruit puree on the plastic and dehydrate.
   
5. There is no need for oil on the plastic, Fruit leather will not stick to the plastic. It peels off very easily. The plastic is reuseable for many times.
   
6. If you set your dehydrator at the highest temperature and run it longer, you will get crispy fruit chips, crispy just like potato chips.
   

Crispy fruit chips are my snack addiction. Very healthy

Fruit leather and crispy fruit chips are popular with children.

You can get fancy and box them for wonderful gifts.

Do you make leather? What is your method?

dcarch

[Jenni]

Very interesting, and beautiful pics as always. Sadly for me I don't own a dehydrator, but it's good to see someone else having fun with one. Do you reckon I could have a go at sun drying instead? It's 44°C degree today so it seems possible - and it's gone up to 47°C on some days.

In your opinion, are there any fruits that don't work very well as fruit leather? Which ones are particularly good? Mangoes are cheap and luscious at the moment so they seem an obvious choice. The only problem would be preventing myself from eating most of them whilst preparing them to be dried.

Have you ever tried veggie "leather", or is that weird? Ok, it sounds weird, but I am curious about it!

[MollyB]

Are there any fruit combinations that you have particularly liked? The best I've tried has been persimmon and pineapple, made with really ripe persimmons. My go-to combination when I there isn't really fresh fruit around is very ripe bananas and applesauce. (This last is very popular with both my 1-yr-old and my dog.)

[Lisa Shock]

As a teenager in Maryland, where it can be very humid, I managed to make some in the summer by sun drying. It only took one day because it's so thin. IIRC I made it on wax paper. -The peaches I tried to dry got moldy, the slices I made were too thick.

[Blether]

Nice. That relief one, in the two colour layers, is particularly pretty.

[Emily_R]

We make a huge amount of fruit leather each year, mostly to help use up the huge amount of apples we get from our apple tree. I like fruit leathers best when they the pureed fruit is mixed with an applesauce base -- otherwise I find berry leathers too tart. One of our favorite is a concord grape leather. We cook the apples down into apple sauce, and towards the end of their cooking add concord grapes in until they melt into the sauce. then the whole thing gets run through the food mill. I also find that a little bit of corn syrup in the fruit puree helps keep them more pliable when dried, rather than tough / crunchy...

[Darienne]

We make a huge amount of fruit leather each year, mostly to help use up the huge amount of apples we get from our apple tree. I like fruit leathers best when they the pureed fruit is mixed with an applesauce base -- otherwise I find berry leathers too tart. One of our favorite is a concord grape leather. We cook the apples down into apple sauce, and towards the end of their cooking add concord grapes in until they melt into the sauce. then the whole thing gets run through the food mill. I also find that a little bit of corn syrup in the fruit puree helps keep them more pliable when dried, rather than tough / crunchy...

Am I to assume that one can make straight apple leather? I've never made any fruit leather at all. We had such a huge crop of apples last year, we finally gave up processing them. Fruit leather sounds like an excellent idea.

Of course, our apple production is purely in the hands of Mother Nature so this year may be a sparse one.

[Emily_R]

Yup, no reason why you couldn't make straight apple leather. Agreed that this year's apple crop may be slim though! :-(

[OliverB]

makes me want to buy that dehydrator I've always wanted.... Gorgeous stuff up thread! I don't have any fruit trees aside of oranges that aren't very good. But I'm gonna get that machine one of these days :-)