Make Your Own Fruit Leather

DIY Fruit Treat Uses Up Soft Fruit - Makes a Great Travelling Snack

Jul 29, 2009 Naomi Szeben

Trying to get your kids to eat more fruit? Looking for a spill-free snack for car trips? Don't know what to do with softening fruit? The answer: Fruit Leather.

Packing food for car trips, hikes or day camp can be tough to figure out: Most snack foods are over-packaged in non-recyclable cellophane or plastic, and wind up in landfills. For those who are driving with their children, finding a snack that will not find its way onto the upholstery is another thing to consider.

Store bought snacks that can be expensive, could require refrigeration, or might require napkins for clean up. Since the summer is all about vacation, and being healthier, try your hand at making organic fruit snacks more readily available: It will reduce the amount of spoons to wash, keep your trash free of non-renewable resources and often cost less than pre-packaged sweets.

What to Do With Excess Summer Fruit

A pint of fresh summer fruit that looked ripe and appealing at the market but went gone soft and squishy at home will loose its appeal fast with kids. However, before turning it into a pudding or tossing it into a compost heap, consider making fruit leather.

Homemade fruit leather, an alternative to store bought “Fruit Roll-Ups” has several advantages: No preservatives, no artificial colouring and contains anti-oxidants, which boosts children’s immune systems. Since summer fruit is plentiful and less expensive than a box of factory made, HFCS-sweetened fruit snacks, now is the perfect time to make your own fruit leather.

How To Make Your Own Fruit Leather

If you have a blender or a food processor, and some mushy fruit you don’t have the heart to toss, you can consider your fruit snack as good as half done. Half the job is mashing the fruit to a pulp, and if it’s a berry that has lots of seeds (strawberries, raspberries or blackberries,) strain them out to keep the end product smooth.

Almost any fruit can be turned into fruit leather. The most recommended fruits to use for leather are apricots, peaches, plums, cherries and the above-mentioned berries. Generally, you can taste the pulp as it boils down, and add sugar to sweeten it to your taste, but keep in mind that it fruit gets sweeter as they dry – as juices evaporates, their natural fruit sugar gets more concentrated. When it comes to sugar, “less is more” is the rule when making fruit leather.

Fruit Leather Recipe

• 4½ cups of your choice of fruit
• ¾ cup sugar

1. Purée fruit with the sugar in a blender and strain the seeds out through a fine-mesh sieve into a large heavy saucepan.
2. Start boiling down the pulp by bringing it to a boil.
3. Once brought to a rolling boil, let it simmer over medium-low heat, and stir to prevent boiling
4. Let it simmer between 30 to 45 minutes, until it is thicker than most commercial jams, and can be heaped into a hill at the bottom of the pan.
5. Preheat oven to 200°F. Line a large baking sheet with nonstick liner, like Silpat, and pour the hot purée onto it as thinly and evenly as possible, using a spatula. Two baking sheets may be needed.
6. Place on middle rack in your oven, and bake for two or three hours, to make it as dry as possible.
7. Cool on liner on a rack until completely dry, at least 3 hours and up to a full day.
8. Place a sheet of parchment paper or plastic wrap over the leather, then peel leather off liner and roll up in parchment.

Epicurious.com has recipes for making apricot, and strawberry flavoured leathers. Another resource is EasyFunSchool.com for watermelon fruit leather.

The end product is easy to pack, requires no refrigeration, and doesn’t need utensils or several napkins when eating in a car.

The copyright of the article Make Your Own Fruit Leather in Green/Simple Living is owned by Naomi Szeben. Permission to republish Make Your Own Fruit Leather in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Almost any fruit or berry can make fruit leather