Needless to say, my garage now has the heady aroma of an apple orchard at harvest time. I've found that apples and squash both keep fairly well in the garage, where it is cooler than the house, but not as cold and humid as the fridge. And we don't park in the garage until we get a lot of snow on the ground, so it functions pretty well as a cool-storage area for such things.
But, those apples can't last forever...hence: cinnamon apple chips.
I may have mentioned this before, but to me, food dehydration is therapy. I can easily lose myself in it. It's a fun, meditative, and strangely addicting hobby. Something about taking fresh food, cutting, and arranging it on the trays, then coming back later and finding it transformed is just magical to me. I love that I can take things that are ripe, abundant, and in season and cause them to go "dormant" for a while...just waiting for a mid-winter day to be brought back to life; a little ray of summer sunshine in the dark months. I love that I can salvage fruit that is a bit too ripe for fresh eating. In fact, I think fruit that is a tad over-ripe is really all the better. It's sweeter and makes exceptional treats in the dehydrator. Apples that are juuuuust past that perfect crisp eating texture are phenomenal for dehydrating. Once dried into chips you'd never know. Same for bananas...when I find them in the store marked down for quick sale because they are getting "too ripe" I get excited, because that means sweet banana chips will be in the lunchboxes the following week.
If you want your apples to retain their beautiful golden color, they need to be pre-treated before going onto the dehydrator trays. You can dip them in various solutions, including: ascorbic acid, citric acid, a fruit juice solution such as lemon or lime, or pineapple, or a honey solution. The best books I have found on this topic are Preserve it Naturally, by Excalibur, and The Dehydrator Bible, by Jennifer MacKenzie, Jay Nutt, and Don Mercer.
In this round of apple dehydrating I chose to pre treat my apples with a pineapple juice solution: 1 c. of juice mixed with 1 qt. filtered water.
First wash and dry your apples, then the easiest thing to do is to use an apple peeler/corer/slicer to achieve nice even slices in just a couple of seconds and few turns of the crank. I find though, that mine tends to take too much apple along with the peel, so I usually peel them with a regular veggie peeler, then disable the peeler on my peeler/slicer/corer, so that it just slices and cores.
I cut the apple rings in 1/2, then into the dip they go. I just leave them for a minute or two, then remove to a strainer to drain.
Then they go onto the trays, and this time I sprinkled them with a mixture of pure maple sugar granules and cinnamon. These are a real treat, and should be considered dessert in my opinion. I also just left some plain, but they are still very sweet just from the natural sweetness of the apple and the pineapple juice. Personally, I like them best plain, with crispy (soaked and dehydrated) pecans or walnuts, and a cup of green tea in the afternoon for the perfect pick-me-up snack.
I dehydrate my apples at 125 degrees and they usually take about 6-7 hrs for a nice leathery apple snack, or if you want them crispy like chips, you would need to go an hour or so longer.
After things come off the trays it's good practice to "condition" them...that simply means to put them in a bowl with a lid, or a ziplock bag or whatever, and let them sit for a day. That give them a chance to all come to the same humidity level...so if you had some a tad thicker and more moist, and some thinner and more dry, they all kind of help each other come to the same dryness level before you package them up for storage. They never last long around here, so I just store them in glass jars with lids, or ziplocks. For long term storage you could dry them until crispy, add an oxygen absorber packet and/or vacuum seal them in jars or vacuum seal bags. For more info on that please see one of the two books I've listed above.
If you've never dehydrated before, can I just encourage you to give it a try? In a world of prepackaged "fruit snacks" and foil covered, refined sugar-filled, preservative-filled "treats", let us remind ourselves what real "fruit snacks" taste like, sans all the garbage.
Fruits of all kinds are simple and fun to dehydrate, and if you're feeling really adventurous, you can always give nuts and jerky a shot! Next time I make jerky I will blog it for you. I'm not the best jerky maker ever...I've had successes and I've had failures. And I don't mind revealing those failures here, so we can all learn from them.
I had a conversation with my cousin today regarding jerky. He makes his out of ground meat (wild game), with a thing called a "jerky gun", which presses the meat into perfect little strips. I have never tried that. I usually just go with steak strips, marinated and then dried. But he's got me intrigued! I may need to invest in a jerky gun, just for the sake of research, and in the name of good blogging. Stay tuned.
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