Homemade Fruit Roll-ups

Recipe Redux is here again, and this month we are focusing on our favorite portable snacks. We've done a lot of these in the past, such as our Raw Granola, our Healthy Nut and Seed Bites from last month, or these 6-Grain Granola Bars. (We like our grains. Can you tell? :) So this month we decided to do something a little more kid friendly.

My apricot tree is full of ripe apricots, and my next door neighbor has about 3 trees worth that she tries to freely share. As much as I love apricots, it's hard to deal with that much of crop all at once. One of my favorite ways to preserve them each year is to make fruit leather. It's a form of dried fruit that my family loves.

Fruit leather, or fruit roll-ups, are actually very easy to make. I have a dehydrator that I bought expressly for this purpose, but you can actually make it in your oven. And you don't have to use apricots! Almost any kind of fruit will work (although citrus have a little too much liquid, so they can only be used when they are added to other types of fruit).

This is my dehydrator. It's a Nesco with an adjustable thermostat. I love it.

 

1. Blend the fruit. With apricots, I remove the pit and place the rest of the apricot, skin and all, into my blender. Blend until it is the same texture throughout.

2. Add 1 Tablespoon of lemon juice per cup of fruit. This will prevent the fruit from turning brown. You could also use a fruit preserving powder, such as Fruit Fresh.

3. Pour 2 cups of fruit onto a dehydrator tray. Repeat with any other trays you have. If you are using an oven, line a cookie sheet with wax paper and pour on fruit until it is about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. (As it dries, it will thin out.)

These are the fruit roll-up trays that came with my dehydrator. You can buy them separately if yours doesn't have them, or just use wax paper to line the trays or your cookie sheet.

4. Turn the dehydrator or oven to 135 degrees Fahrenheit. If your oven doesn't go that low, I have even heard of people propping open the oven door (just make sure you do it safely!) or moving their car into a sunny spot and simply putting the cookie trays in the hot car! It really is that fool-proof!

5. Now you get to wait. It takes my fruit about 12 hours to dry, but you should keep an eye on your fruit leather to make sure that it isn't getting too brittle. You want it to still have some give to it to be really yummy.

 

6. Pull the completed fruit leather off of the tray and cut into desired sizes. I use my kitchen shears to make this go especially easy.

 

 7. Roll up in plastic wrap or wax paper. Store in air-tight container in the refrigerator (remember, yours aren't sealed like the kind you get at the store, so more precaution has to be taken with storing). I've had them last a year in the fridge.

 



 There you have it! Completed cute roll-ups! Easy as can be.