Urban Self Sufficiency NZ

Fruit leather is a great way to preserve both homegrown and store-bought fruit. Kids love it so it’s a great snack to keep on hand for them too.

For ages I would end up with solid fruit leather though. It wasn’t the nice soft ‘roll-up’ style stuff of the shops. It was solid, cracked when you tried to roll it, and sometimes even looked a little burnt.

Till one day I accidentally discovered the trick to perfect fruit leather.

It’s actually the sugars in the fruit leather that make that perfect fruit leather stickiness.

This means, if you want to avoid adding extra sugar, and using only the natural fruit sugars, you need to release these from the fruit before you start dehydrating.

For fresh fruit from the garden

I’ve found roasting in the oven first to be the best option.

The fruit just needs roasting without anything added till it’s soft right through, and the juices are releasing.

Then pop everything into a blender or food processor once cooled down enough. Make sure you include the juices as these have a lot of the sugars in them.

Blend everything together. And then spread onto dehydrator trays.

For frozen fruit

Frozen fruit is sometimes fine not roasting first, depending on the fruit. Smaller fruits like berries are sometimes fine just defrosted and then blended.

However for best results I would still roast.

If you want to avoid using the oven

You could also steam the fruit, but then you need to ensure you blend with the juices from the pot under the steamer as otherwise some of your sugars will escape here.

Boiling is another option, however you’ll also end up with extra water as you’ll need to add this to avoid burning the fruit in the pot.

Hence why I find dry roasting the easiest.

For dehydrating

I use a basic round sunbeam dehydrator. These have extra fruit leather trays you can buy which is handier than the square ones where you need to cut some baking paper to size. The fruit leather trays have a lip on them which helps avoid spilling the fruit leather while loading the trays.

Another trick on these sunbeam circle dehydrators is to use the bottom as a tray. This is actually the most efficient tray, and everything dries the fastest on it.

Once in the dehydrator spread on the trays, keep an eye on how it’s doing. Once it’s fully dry on the top, and about 90%+ dry overall, flip the leather over to dry out the bottom too.

You can actually take it off the plastic fruit leather trays at this point, returning it with no fruit leather trays. This helps finish the last little bit off faster. It isn’t necessary, but does help speed the process up.

Once done I normally store in 10-20 litre buckets and throw some silica gel sachets in for good measure.

Hopefully these tips will help you have the best fruit leather ever!