Homemade Fruit Leather {Kids In The Kitchen}

I have been slacking on my kids cooking classes this school year. There never seems to be enough hours in my school week but the kids have requested we do them again because they love them so much. I went looking through my stack for some easy activities and lo and behold I found a great one!!

I saw this on a food preparedness show about 10 years ago and always thought it would be good to try and I am so glad I saved it all those years. The kids loved it and we will definitely be doing it again soon.

We made homemade fruit leather. Every time we go to Sprouts they ask to buy a fruit leather and they are 50 cents a piece. We’ll as you can imagine with 7 kids that isn’t the cheapest snack.

We tried making them at home and the kids said they tasted just like the ones from sprouts!! Mom win and I think I spent less than a dollar for a ton of them.

You only need a few simple things to make your own. First off you need a dehydrater. I have one in the garage that I have probably used a total of 3 times over the last 13 years. I am kinda excited I saved it all these years. We will be getting lots of use out of it now.

For the fruit leather you can do it one of two ways. You can purée any fresh seasonal fruit that you love like any berries but since none of those are in season right now we used apple sauce as our base. You could stop right there and just make apple fruit leather but on the show she used jello powder to flavor them so that is what we did. You could use any flavor to personalize them. We used strawberry because it is what I had on hand and they turned out great.

To make your own follow these simple steps…..

1. Trace your tray on to parchment paper and cut out to line the tray. (My dehydrater actually has a liner specifically for fruit roll ups so I used that plus two parchment paper lined ones.)

2. Pour 2 cups of apple sauce or purée onto each tray.

3. Spread the applesauce around into a nice even thing layer.

4. Sprinkle the jello powder over the applesauce. It really doesn’t take a lot and you don’t have to completely cover because it spreads out as it dehydrates. I had less than half of a package and it was plenty.

5. Dehydrate for 24-48 hours. Rotate trays every 6 hours. I would recommend the max amount you do at a time is 3 trays otherwise it is hard for them to dry evenly. Ours took almost exactly 24 hours but I found a couple spots on the tray from the dehydrater that weren’t all the way dry.

6. I cut them apart in wedges and placed them in a baggie. They stack up nice because of the parchment paper on the bottom of them. We ate the one on the tray from the dehydrater because they would have been really hard to store. I think for future I will stick with the parchment paper covered trays. I don’t know about your pantry but baggies get lost in a second so I placed the baggie in a glass jar.