Fruit Leather Recipe
I recently saw some Pumpkin Fruit Leather over on Google+ and thought yes! It is about time we made some! Especially since we also love to “want not waste not” – i.e. use everything we have and we also love to forage (we have a great Foraging Tips and Tricks video AND links for you). We also have a couple of friends with small apple orchards and when we are lucky we get whole bags full of apples! I also love how my husband totally poo-poo-ed these and then gobbled them all up. Ha.
The thing about fruit leather, is that it isn’t an exact science. You very much adjust your cooking times and sweetening according to the fruit you have and it is to personal taste. Which is great! As you don’t have to worry too much about exact quantities. I am looking forward to making Apricot Fruit Leather when we visit our friends in Austria next Summer. They always have plenty!
For our Fruit Leather we used:
- 12 Cups of Apple (we happened to find some GORGEOUS apples that had a RED flesh, giving our fruit leather a gorgeous red colour)
- 3 Cups of Water
- 6 Tbls sugar (you can replace it with honey, our apples were VERY tart)
- 1 Tbls cinnamon
- 1 Lemon
- 60C or 140F
- Baking Paper (or oven proof cling film)
This made 1.5 trays for us
1) First we peeled and chopped all our apples. And place them with the water in the pan (roughly one cup of water per 4 cups of fruit)
2) Keep your peelings, as you can make vinegar with them.
3) Cook until the fruit is soft and mash.
4) Add your spices and sugar to taste. The lemon helps preserve the COLOUR and bring out the taste.
5) Now puree it as smoothly as you can. I used a hand blender. Then I placed it in our baking tray with baking paper. I made it about 1/8 inch thick.
6) Bake at 50c – you may want to have you oven open a crack – to let the excess moisture escape – especially in the first our or two. I open it occasionally, wipe away any moisture and it works fine.
7) Bake some more.
8) Bake some more…… it took about 8 hours for ours to dry out! Then when I started cutting it into strips, the centre was still soft, so I placed those back in the oven for another hour.
Store in an air tight container and ENJOY!
How to Make Fruit Leather Collage! PIN ME!