Fruit Rollups and/or Fruit Leathers

Do you guys call them rollups, or leathers? On the one hand, “rollups” has the earlier chronological lock in my brain. But on the other, saying “fruit leather” takes me back to the vocal warmups of my theatre days. Strawberry leather, peach leather, strawberry leather, peach leather… Ah, who can decide.

There are two distinct halves to the process of making these dehydrated fruit paste smears, and they don’t have to happen on the same day. Probably won’t, unless you’re making just a ton of these things all at once. First, we start with 1 lb. of granny smith apples, and 2 lbs. of pears. Yes, it’s a lot of fruit, but it’s going to shrink a lot when you take all the water out.

 

Peel, core, and chop all of the apples. I use this old school hand crank thing, because sometimes the classic mechanical solutions really are best. It goes ridiculously fast.

 

Then do the pears too! My kids think it’s fun to eat the skins when we’re done, like fruit spaghetti. Which might sound weird, but honestly no weirder than fruit leather, if you think about it.

 

Put it all in a wide saucepan with 1/2 cup of honey…

 

…and 2 Tablespoons of fresh lemon juice. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

 

You can go longer if your pears were a little underripe, the important thing is that they get soft enough to mush apart with the back of your spoon.

 

Blend everything up, and you have some really tasty apple-pear sauce. This makes 4 cups’ worth, and you need one cup per batch of fruit spirals, so you can divide it up however you want. Bake with some, eat some with a spoon, whatever. I freeze them into one-cup portions and dedicate them all to fruit roundabouts, myself.

 

Weedly-do, weedly-do, weedly-do… It’s the future! Here we are dumping one cup of thawed apple-pear sauce in with one cup of thawed frozen fruit. Mine are blueberries for this batch, but any fruit will do.

 

Blend it really thoroughly with your immersion blender, then spread it across the entire surface of a large baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

 

Bake in your oven at 170 degrees for somewhere between 3 and 6 hours. You can turn on the convection function to make it go faster, but don’t turn the heat up or it will cook instead of dehydrating. The length of time it takes will vary depending on the water content of the fruit you chose, as well as how thinly you spread it, but you can tell it’s done when the surface is only slightly sticky to the touch, like you would expect a whorled fruit vortex to be.

 

Leather the paper — wait, no, roll the paper lengthwise, then cut into 1-2 inch pieces. In theory these don’t have to be refrigerated, but I’m not that brave. I do know they last indefinitely in the refrigerator, though.

 

Happy Eating!

 

Fruit Rollups and/or Fruit Leathers

1 lb. granny smith apples
2 lb. pears
1/2 cup honey
2 TBS lemon juice
1 cup frozen fruit of choice, thawed