So
canning the peaches last week didn't use up our entire 25 lb box (surprise surprise when you only have twelve lids on hand!), and all of our fruit was getting pretty overripe. So I did some Googling and came across an idea that I'd already wanted to try out:
making the fruit into fruit leather! (You know, like a homemade Fruit Roll Up.)
I used a
fruit leather recipe from Simply Recipes (
pinned here) and went to work:
Sad, dried out, overripe peach, sans pit
Cooking the chopped fruit (with 1/2 c water per 4 c fruit)
Into the blender
It
will blend. Now it's a puree!
All the purees, poured out on plastic-wrap covered cookie sheets in the convection oven. From top to bottom: 100% peach, peach apple banana, peach grape, peach apple banana.
The manual for my (fairly old) convection oven said to put a wooden spoon in the door like this to crack it open while using the dehydrating setting (140 degrees F with the fan on).
The recipe recommends using microwave-safe plastic wrap, but in the comments she admits she just used the regular kind. I did, too, and for the leather that didn't fill up the pan, I got kind of a shrink wrap effect on the corners.
But it all seems good.
And ten to fourteen hours later, yum:
My favorite was the peach grape, even though the grape skins didn't puree as well. (Plus the blender spit hot peach grape puree on my hand, so I stopped messing with it sooner.) I really want to make pear fruit leather next—and I do have three pears in the fridge now...
What kind of fruit leather would you make?
