Allison Turner
Dried fruit is a great and healthy snack. But if you buy it in the supermarket, it quickly becomes very expensive. It’s a good thing that you can easily make dried fruit yourself. We explain how it works.
The drying of food used to be used to preserve fruit and vegetables so that they were not only available seasonally, but all year round. Thanks to globalization, technology and supermarkets, this is no longer a problem. Nevertheless, we don’t want to do without the sweet but healthy snack today. We’ll show you how easy it is to make dried fruit yourself.
From fresh fruit to delicious dried fruit
It is important that the fruit you want to dry does not have any rotten or bruised areas. It doesn’t matter which fruit you choose. Apples, pears, berries or plums could be turned into dried fruit directly from the tree.
The fruit should be freshly picked and cleaned. Only use ripe fruit, because even if some types of fruit continue to ripen after harvesting, this process does not work when drying.
Step by step to dried fruit
- Line one or more baking sheets with parchment paper.
- Preheat your oven to max. 50 °C (top and bottom heat).
- Cut the cleaned and pitted fruit into slices. The following applies: the thinner the slices, the faster it is ready.
- Place the sliced fruit on the prepared trays and put them in the oven. Do not close the oven door all the way to allow the liquid that leaks out of the oven to escape. If the oven door doesn’t stay open a crack on its own, you can stick a cooking spoon in the door.
- The drying process takes several hours. The dried fruit is ready when no more moisture escapes from the fruit when you press it, but it can still be bent.
The healthy snack is particularly easy to store in glass jars, but the fruit should have cooled down well beforehand.
You like to mix your dried fruit with dried vegetables? No problem. It is made in the same way. Incidentally, onions, mushrooms, and tomatoes can be dried particularly well.
Drying fruit with a dehydrator
You can produce fresh fruit particularly easily with a dehydrator. A dehydrator is comparable to a mini oven. Instead of using great heat, however, it works with warm to hot air. This removes the moisture from the ingredients that have been cut into thin slices or small pieces over a long period of time (often several hours).
