Fruit Leather and Fruit Chips

Mmmmm. Fruit leather.
Let's try to make some au naturale, shall we?

The ingredients and tools: peaches, honey (agave will also work), lemon juice, plastic wrap, a flat sheet of some sort, and an oven or several hours of hot sunshine.

Here's how we did it:

I peeled four peaches. Two of them were ripe, and two were still a bit under-ripe.

Maddie cut them up, and placed them into the blender.
We added a teaspoon or two of squeezed lemon juice (one wedge)

and a couple of tablespoons of honey.vvvrrrrrrrrr.....
tada!tis done.

We poured our mixture (taste it to make sure it's right, ours was perfect the first time) onto plastic wrap and onto your sheets or trays.
Instead of stirring it around, we just rotated our trays until the peach yumminess was even over our entire trays.

The lowest temp on our oven is 170f, so that's what we set it to (most suggest a temp of 140*), with our oven door open to it's "catch" place.
If your oven goes down to 140f, then set it there, and leave your door open about two inches.
If you're drying in the sunshine, set it out for twenty-four hours, and make sure to cover it up with screens so little critters don't get stuck in your treats.

We expected 4 hours or so in our oven, but watched it carefully.
The small batch of peach was done after about three hours (we like our leather thin).

You can tell it's done pretty easily - if it's wet, it's certainly not done, if it's too sticky give it a few more minutes. It will look consistent when it's ready.

For our peach leather, we left it on the saran wrap, and cut the whole thing with our pizza cutter.
We rolled 'em up, and stuck them into a sealed container to keep them fresh.

'Tis done!
Should you have extra (or make a lot at a time) then you can store these in the freezer for six months to a year!
Though they'd never last that long around here.....Each of these little strips is the equivalent of about 1/2 a large peach.

* * *
We tried the same with green apples. (Trevelyn's favorite.)

This time we used apples, saran wrap, the oven, sheet trays, lemon juice, the blender, and just a dash of water and apple sauce (you don't really need apple sauce, you can add extra water).We cut up four apples, after coring them. We left the peel on-- if you don't have organic apples, then I would recommend peeling them. (The peel is often waxed with paraffin, to preserve the fruit. That's what gives them that funny feel.)

We tossed our apples and the juice of half a lemon into our blender.
We didn't add honey to this one, as Trev likes sour flavors.

Our blender was having a bit of trouble grinding these up, so we added a dash of water and a maybe a 1/4 cup of applesauce.

Soon enough we had it whirring, grinding our apples into liquid.

We had this one on the the same temp -170f- and figured four hours.
We let it go a bit too long,
and upon taking the tray out of the oven our leather was crispy instead of a soft leather.

Well! No matter about that....
after tasting them, they are absolutely delicious.
A flavorful apple chip, friends!
Crispy and tart and so, so fine.
Two fabulous treats!
Next we're making some using strawberries, bananas, kiwi... and in a few weeks we'll use our raspberries and blackberries!
Mmmmmm....