How to Make Fruit Leather

How to Make Fruit Leather!

Remember that time I showed you how to make this lovely apple juice?

Well, after we made all that lovely juice we had a TON of pulp leftover. I couldn’t just throw it out, so I had a plan to turn it into fruit leather. I’ve seen recipes for making fruit leather that called for blending whatever fruit you want, adding a little sugar and lemon, and baking it for extended periods of time.

The problem was, my pulp was pretty dry since we JUICED it, go figure! So we used this cool food mill, an awesome tool from my friend’s mother-in-law. You just push your pulp through the top and it basically purees the pulp. If you don’t have one of these, you could use a high powered blender!

How to Make Fruit Leather

It basically looked like super chunky applesauce, but it hadn’t been cooked since we used an electric juicer.   So… I added water, sugar, lemon juice and cinnamon and let it simmer on the stove top until it was delicious!

It’s hard to give you the exact measurements because we juiced over 100 pounds of apples, and this was just a third of all the pulp that was left over! Really though, just keep tasting it and adding sugar and spices until it tastes right to you!

Now here comes the fun part. Get yourself some plastic wrap, the kind that is microwaveable! Like this…That’s my husbands hand, just in case you were thinking I had man hands…I don’t. Ha ha!

Stretch your plastic wrap over your cookie sheets, making sure that the whole sheet is completely covered There should be a few extra inches on the sides because the plastic wrap shrinks a little when it gets warm.

Then pour a little of your pureed fruit onto the cookie sheet. It should be pretty thin, smooth it out  and then bang the pan on the counter a few times to get any bubbles out and cover the pan evenly.

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees and bake the fruit leather for 4-6 hours, check it after 4 hours. It shouldn’t be soft or sticky in the middle.

Once its set up, pull it out and peel it off the plastic wrap! It’s not super beautiful, but it’s delicious! You can either wrap it up in parchment paper, or keep it in plastic bags.

Super easy to do and so fun for the kids. The possibilities are endless! We followed the same process after we made our grape juice and I really thought that the grape fruit leather was the absolute best! We didn’t add cinnamon of course! Give it a try and let me know how it works out for you!