Peach Leather

We've had a plethora of wonderful peaches lately. Some of the ones that fell on the ground bruised a bit, so I decided to try something different with them--make fruit leather. I always called it fruit roll-ups, but I guess it's the same thing, except the homemade version is so much healthier. 

I found various recipes on the Internet and decided to incorporate a few to make my own. My ingredients: peaches, honey, lemon juice (and for one batch, cinnamon). I took the skins off the peaches and cut off the bad sections, putting the good parts into the blender. I added a couple squirts of lemon juice (maybe 2 teaspoons worth), and about 1/4 cup honey. Then I turned the blender onto puree.

I put Saran wrap down on the dehydrator sheets, and then poured the fruit leather mixture onto the plastic, using a spatula to spread it out into a somewhat uniform thickness.

Next it was into the dehydrator at 135 degrees. Some recipes said for 6-8 hours, but with the thickness I had, it was more like 10-12 hours. Other variations are to put the fruit leather into your oven at the lowest setting with the door open for a couple hours, or to put it onto big cookie sheets covered with cheesecloth and let dry outside in the sun for a couple days.

The end result is a firm fruit leather. 

If you're my husband and son, you just eat it straight from the plastic wrap, and suddenly it's all gone because it tastes so good! (They seriously ate one whole sheet in just one sitting.) 

The taste of the peaches is really concentrated, so it's almost like candy. 

You can also roll up the plastic, cut it into pieces, and put into Ziploc bags for storage. If you want to keep the fruit leather for awhile (say, because you're so tired of peaches), then you can put the Ziploc in the freezer and it will keep for a few months. 

Yum!