We’ve been enjoying our bananas this week – with a Roasted Coconut Banana Bread, banana smoothies, banana chocolate chip cookies and dried banana chips! The first batch my son helped me make – it was a super kid-friendly project. It took about 13 hours in the dehydrator – as we wanted them extra crisp and let me tell you, they didn’t even last that long!
I borrowed a food dehydrator from another preschool mom and I’m not sure I want to give it back.
Basically we just sliced bananas thin (and as uniform as possible) and dropped them into a mixing bowl with lemon juice. This helps keep them from turning dark brown. We started the dehydrator around 8 p.m. at night and let it do it’s thing until around 11 a.m. the next day. Every other recipe I read said 8-10 hours, but I wanted extra crisp banana chips, so we left them on longer.
We stored them in an air tight container – although that didn’t matter much since they were devoured in day.
A couple things I learned from this process:
- The super duper crunchy ones you find at the grocery stores, the ones in trail mix and fancy packaging. Um yea, they are probably not dried, but rather fried. Sad, but true.
- On the second batch I tried a tray without lemon juice – and they looked exactly the same. Doh! AND they seemed to stick to the tray less.
- They did stick to the dehydrator tray. I popped them off with a knife. Only lost one finger in the process.
- For the person who eats the most in the house (ahem, my handsome husband) – have him pull the banana chips off the trays on the second batch. He’ll see how much work they are and think twice before eating the entire container in one day. Haha.
- Your entire house will smell like bananas.
If you’re in the market for a dehydrator I recommend watching Craigslist, garage sales and thrift stores – they seem to be fairly common. If you prefer to go the new route, Amazon has some great dehydrator deals.
What is your favorite thing to dehydrate?
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