Greetings from our dehydrated fruit test kitchen. We broke out the dehydrator this past week in an attempt to make dried pineapple. Kroger's 2 for $5 pineapple sale made me do it! I sliced and hacked the pineapples (I will never take freshly sliced pineapple for granted again btw) into pieces which filled the dehydrator perfectly. Aaron busied himself making sure the trays were super clean because this was his deer jerky dehydrator after all. It was a complete stranger to fruit.
And boom goes the dyn-o-mite! I only left it in for 14/15 hours, rotating the trays once, because I wanted it to be chewy. You can check it as you go. Ours is stored in the fridge.
Then we had to try bananas. You can pre-treat bananas with a citrus soak to prevent them from browning…which we didn't know. Silly, newbies. Aaron skipped down the stairs to get the trays Saturday morning, then came tromping up. "And?!" I say with only a giggling "wellll," response. Not good. The bananas were brown and kinda ugly. Poor bananas. But then I googled the topic and found that they are perfectly good to eat.
Ready to make your own? Check out Kitchen Stewardship (where I learned that bananas are perfectly ok brown after dehydrating).